Seekers after truth everywhere will thrill to the message of a new short film that draws a line from one of the 20th century’s most respected independent journalists to the dogged investigators of our day.

Jeff Cohen, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, called Stone the “Patron Saint of Bloggers.” Stone founded his I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 after losing his job as a mainstream journalist at the height of the McCarthy era and finding no place for his radical, skeptical, liberal reporting through which he sought to present an unvarnished view of the abuse of power by U.S. officials.

Jeremy Scahill says of Stone in the video above, “There are few people I can think of in American history that better represented the best journalism in a democratic society than I.F. Stone.”

Also in the video, Stone describes what he sought to do with his Weekly:

I made no claim to inside stuff … I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor, to add humor, wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news … the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation. I tried in every issue to provide fact and opinion not available elsewhere in the press.

The second part of the two-part video is below.

“The Legacy of I.F. Stone” was funded by the Knight Foundation and produced by White Pine Pictures in Toronto. It was released by Catalytic Diplomacy, which is run by I.F. Stone’s son, Jeremy.

Readers interested in digging into I.F. Stone’s work, including all issues of his weekly published from January 17, 1953 to December 1, 1971, can do so at ifstone.org.

Hat tip to The Intercept’s Unofficial Sources blog.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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