All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I. F. Stone

The verbose title of this 2016 documentary, All Governments Lie:  Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I. F. Stone (Fred Peabody) is emblematic of the structural problems existing in this film.  Is the movie about lying as an instrument of government policy or I. F. Stone or something else?  In fact, the film is a miscellany consisting of many of the ordinary suspects: corporate misconduct, government deception with respect to the Vietnam war and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, targeted assassination by drone under President Obama (a policy that has been acknowledged and doesn't, in fact, seem the subject of much official deceit), manufacturing consent through the mainstream media with Noam Chomsky expounding his view as a "talking head", and some very interesting sequences about hundreds of illegal immigrants found dead in south Texas and unceremoniously buried in mass graves by the local authorities.  This latter subject, a grisly cover-up of scores, if not hundreds of deaths caused by the tropical heat and humidity prevailing in an area where Latin Americans cross the border, was fascinating and seems to contain the germ of another more complete documentary film -- but this part of the documentary, comprising about a third of the movie, isn't really about lying:  it concerns other, perhaps more lethal, high crimes and misdemeanors.  The radical journalist, Izzy Stone, appears from time-to-time talking to Dick Cavett -- he is purported to be the grandfather and progenitor of this kind of reporting and acclaimed in those terms by Matt Taibbi, the political correspondent for Rolling Stone.  But we don't really learn that much about him -- a shame, since he is also an interesting figure.  The various strands in the documentary are not convincingly connected and the film doesn't hang together -- it has an improvised, stream-of-consciousness feeling.  There are also abundant conceptual errors:  a mistake is not the same as a lie and it doesn't help to conflate the two categories:  Was Colin Powell lying when he told the UN about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, armaments about which Hussein had boasted, or was he here merely mistaken as to the information conveyed in that address?  There are numerous incongruities:  people who have hosted network cable news shows complain about lack of access to the public; Chomsky, who claims mass media manufactures consent, has published a number of best-sellers and seems pretty ubiquitous in the media.  Someone says that the best way of skewering opponents is to use humor and commends Stone for his witty writing -- is this correspondent unaware of Jon Stewart and John Oliver?  And, ultimately, how do you distinguish between a curmudgeonly, and witty, far-Left reporter, like Stone, and the reporters who work for Matt Drudge or Breitbart on the Right?  Everything said about Stone could be said with equal force about the Drudge report and Breitbart.  What is the status of these right-wing reporters?  Ultimately, much of the film is consistent with Donald Trump's critique of the fake news provided by the mass media -- the major networks, the show claims, promulgate manipulated or fake news, exactly as maintained by the President and his surrogates.