Kill the Messenger

Back in 1996, Gary Webb, an investigative journalist with the San Jose Mercury News, managed to uncover a bombshell of a story: Through his connections with the drug trade, he caught wind of a massive, wholly illegal 1980s operation performed by the CIA, essentially using the enormous profits from the sale and distribution of crack cocaine throughout the United States in order to continue financial support for the Nicaraguan Contras in their attempt to overthrow their government, a war that Congress had voted against funding.

Webb asserted that the CIA used existing drug barons to sell and distribute the drug while giving them immunity from prosecution and allowing them to move massive amounts of drugs across the border and to their distribution sites throughout the United States.

The piece he eventually wrote -- a 20,000 word, three-part series called "Dark Alliance" -- sent shock waves through the entire country, but especially among blacks, who saw their government as purposefully selling the drugs in their neighborhoods to create the crack plague.

What was truly amazing about the aftermath, though, was ultimately how little follow-up and change it sparked. To a large degree, this was because the CIA successfully managed to shift the focus off itself and onto Gary Webb himself, discrediting him at every opportunity and using many seasoned journalists to do much of their muckraking for them.

By the time, two years later, the CIA inspector general finally admitted to much of Webb's original reporting, the damage was already done: Webb, who had won a national award for his reporting of the story, had been forced to resign his position amid the growing scandal questioning him, and the government's final mea culpa was thoroughly overshadowed by the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal that had recently broken and was utterly dominating the headlines.

It's a tragic story in many ways, suggesting the national media was far more invested in protecting its place in the pecking order than actually breaking hard truths, and one certainly worthy of a film. Michael Cuesta's feature, based on the book of the same title by Nick Schou, hits more than it misses but still leaves many questions unanswered, burying its own lede, as it were, in a way that makes it feel somewhat less than fully realized.

As played by Jeremy Renner -- with his doughy features and simmering aspect, perhaps this generation's answer to Charles Bronson -- Webb is a bit of a hothead, prone to fly off the handle if pressed, but deeply invested in being a journalist and digging up what he believes to be the truth. With a loving, loyal wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), and a passel of kids, Webb has everything else to live for, but when this story gets twisted back on him, he is ultimately powerless to stop it.

Where the film treads a bit too tremulously is just exactly how it was that the CIA was able to switch the story from being about it to being about the author behind the piece. There are strong hints proffered that a lot of the questioning of Webb and his sources was little more than professional jealousy, investigative reporters from major outlets -- bitter that they were scooped by a comparatively small-town paper -- spending their time dismantling Webb's piece rather than investigating his allegations against the CIA itself. It's a shameful display, as Cuesta notes, but the film doesn't quite answer how it was that potentially one of the biggest government scandals of the '90s never took hold with the news media.

What the film does cover is the growing pressure put on Webb by the CIA, who began following him, and the murky nature of many of Webb's original sources. One night, while ensconced in a hotel room in Cupertino after being reassigned, Webb is woken by yet another shadowy agency figure, John Cullen (Ray Liotta), who begins his "confession" to the groggy reporter while sitting in the half-darkness of the room. Had Webb been able to convince Cullen to go on the record corroborating Webb's original account, he might have been able to prove his story, but, just as with the rest of the CIA, the agent was never willing to give Webb a formal interview, leaving him very much in the journalistic netherworld of unnamed sources.

It doesn't get much better for Webb staying closer to home, as when his own editors, (played by Oliver Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) slowly hang him out to dry out of professional cowardice, afraid to rock the establishment boat to the point that it might affect their own careers. What is left frustratingly unexplained is why it was, even after the release of the government's admission of guilt a couple of years later, which more or less verified much in Webb's original reporting, the journalist who only ever wanted to be an investigative reporter for a daily paper, was never reinstated on any masthead.