Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone 2016

Directed by Fred Peabody

This beginner’s guide to free press vs fake news takes its cues from maverick US journalist I.F. Stone whose crusade against government deception lives on in a new generation of filmmakers and journalists.

Canada In English
92 minutes DCP

Director

Producers

Peter Raymont
,
Andrew Munger
,
Steve Ord

Photography

John Westheuser

Editors

Jim Munro
,
James Yates

With

Jeremy Scahill
,
Matt Taibbi
,
Glenn Greenwald
,
Amy Goodman
,
Noam Chomsky
,
John Carlos Frey
,
Cenk Uygur

Festivals

Toronto
,
Amsterdam Documentary 2016

Completed before the Trump ascendancy, this juxtaposition of interviews with contemporary journalists with historical film now reminds us that there’s nothing new about fake news.

“Director Fred Peabody brings on big-name investigative journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman and others to create a damning indictment of mainstream media. All Governments Lie weaves together the efforts of these contemporary figures with the impact of Stone, who covered Lyndon B. Johnson, the Vietnam War and more, largely through his newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly...

All Governments Lie is a timely, convincing documentary that will cause audiences to question what they see and read. It offers insight into Democracy Now’s 2015 coverage of the Yemeni Civil War, as well as the 2016 presidential election. It’s remarkably nonpartisan, revealing that the title does indeed refer to every government and politician, even those that we admire and align our ideals with.” — Kimber Myers, LA Times

“To read the headlines over the past month, you’d think the toxic phenomenon of fake news was created from whole cloth during the recent U.S. presidential cycle. But while the new Canadian documentary All Governments Lie isn’t directly about, say, a secret child sex-trafficking ring operated by Hillary Clinton out of the back room of a Washington pizza shop, it lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests.” — Simon Houpt, The Globe & Mail

“The establishment reporters, without a doubt, know a lot of things I don’t know. But a lot of what they know isn’t true.” — I.F. Stone