The following is a guest post by Monique Mercer.

Kill the Messenger is a true story about a reporter, Gary Webb, who wanted that highly coveted big story that would rocket his small time local career to the big time. He got what he asked for. While working at the San Jose Mercury News, he receives a call from a woman Coral Bacca who asked him to meet her. She gave him classified documents that showed the US government was involved in bringing cocaine to our shores.

Her boyfriend Rafael Conejo, Ricky Ross, Donilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses were key players in trafficking cocaine in Los Angeles and other urban areas. While the government of the United States was publicly denouncing drugs and giving harsh jail sentences to offenders, they were secretly participating in the cover up of the massive crack cocaine epidemic and using this money to support the Nicaraguan Contra war.

Some stories are too true to tell especially when it involves the US Government, The CIA and National Security. Gary Webb didn’t see it that way. He was a thorough, insightful reporter who thought the American public should know the truth. He lined up all the key players; interviewed, documented and copied all the evidence he was presented. However, the government of the United States thinks its citizens can’t handle the truth. When our secrets are made public those people who expose the truth
are often scrutinized, badgered, publicly humiliated, discredited, and often times prosecuted as the scapegoat of government’s misdeeds.

This very thing happened to Gary Webb soon after his 1996 series expose, “Dark Alliance,” was published. Witnesses recanted their stories, news agencies that were first in his corner backed out of their support. His family was investigated and followed, his car was tampered with, unknown government agents showed up at his house and started going through his things, and some witnesses disappeared. Under pressure from sources undisclosed, the owners at the San Jose Mercury News demoted then transferred Webb even as they sat with him while he was being honored as the “Journalist of the Year.” They broke him down and hung him out to dry. In order to keep his job they transferred him out of town to an even smaller newspaper. When Jerry Ceppos, Executive Editor of the San Jose Mercury News, refused to publish Webb’s follow-up story to “Dark Alliance,” he quit his job and was never able to find work as a mainstream journalist again.

I liked the way the way the movie was paced. It wasn’t too slow or too fast so I didn’t get bored by the historical propaganda flashing across the screen: three presidents —  Nixon, Ford and Carter — saying that drugs were bad and that drug smugglers were paramount to domestic terrorists that should be hunted down. What I liked most about the movie was how Gary Webb was portrayed as an Average Joe. He was a down to earth thorough investigative reporter, digging and digging some more until he found the
truth. He was a man, a family man with a wife and three children. He wasn’t perfect. He had an affair in Ohio; and after the woman he was involved with committed suicide; the family moved to California for a fresh start.

His three children were well behaved, well mannered kids. Webb wasn’t just a workaholic, he shared a special moment with his oldest son Lucas when he bought him a motorcycle to restore. The movie showed how ordinary this man’s life was, the good, the bad and the mundane, and how it was turned upside down as soon he pursued the story many people in our country didn’t want him to tell. Jeremy Renner executed a solid performance as the loving family man and dedicated reporter in this political thriller.

On December 10th, 2004, Gary Webb was found dead with two gun shots to the head. The coroner ruled it an apparent suicide. How does one shoot himself two times in the head? Why hasn’t anyone properly investigated this man’s death? Why would someone who was finally getting himself back in the game of reporting spend all that time getting a new job if he wasn’t going to follow through with it?

They say this movie somehow helps vindicate Webb, the reporter who shared the truth with the American public on the misdeeds and subterfuge of the CIA and other members of our government. Mr. Webb will not be vindicated until they prove the cause of his death. The Title, Kill the Messenger, seems to suggest this very thought.

See it now and let me know what you think: suicide or murder? I say murder.