“Kill The Messenger” is a movie telling two stories. First it is the story of how the Central Intelligence Agency facilitated cocaine sales in our country in the 1980’s so that the proceeds from those sales, at one point reaching a total of $3 million per day, could be used to illegally fund rebel fighters in Nicaragua, all done with the complicity of the Reagan administration, a presidency which double downed on Nixon’s War on Drugs. And secondly, this movie tells the story of the reporter who did the most work in uncovering these ties, and who was subsequently discredited by the mainstream media, apparently acting on behalf of the government. So basically this is the feel good movie of the year.

In “Kill The Messenger,” Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) is working at the San Jose Mercury News, and coming off the success of his most recent published story regarding civil forfeiture, someone contacted him out of the blue with a tall tale so tall it just had to be true, and this was a story involving drug dealers in cahoots with the US government. Webb meets this person, who gives him a name and sends him down a rabbit hole that went so deep there was no hope of ever coming back out. Webb goes around asking questions, dropping names, and before long, he is visiting a jailed drug kingpin in South America and he’s finding out way more information than he ever hoped to find, information that tied the US government to the crack cocaine epidemic of the inner cities of America, with Los Angeles being ground zero.Continue Reading …