It's hard and heartbreaking to watch even the sweetest, most celebratory parts of Kill the Messenger. Because, by now, we know for certain what many of the players in this true tale of mid-1990s journalism and skullduggery did not know: Namely that Gary Webb, a prize-winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, was dead fucking on when he nailed the CIA for doing business, back in the 1980s, with the Central American drug traffickers who helped wreck America's inner cities with crack cocaine. And the CIA knew it, too—even as it goaded ego-pricked national journalists, from the likes of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, into savaging the reputation and minimizing the work of an upstart who'd unflinchingly plumbed America's darkness and somehow scooped all of them in their own backyards. by Denis C. Theriault