All Governments Lie!:
The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone
by Myra MacPherson

I. F. Stone is the patron saint of bloggers. I came across I. F. Stone late. I didn't turn against the war in Vietnam until 1968 and I. F. Stone folded his I. F. Stone Weekly in 1971. I wasn't aware of anything but mainstream press. I had heard of the I. F. Stone Weekly but had not read it. In 1974 a documentary on I. F. Stone was released and I saw that. That was when I became a big fan of I. F. Stone. Not only was he a lefty but he was an outsider. He read everything and found the government's lies in plain site. He was the original blogger. He was also a big influence on much of the left wing of journalism today. Not only is this book I. F. Stone's story but it's also the story of the left wing in this country. From Amazon:

With painstaking research, MacPherson offers a penetrating look at one of the nation's most respected journalists and a tour de force of five decades of challenge to the principles of press freedom in a democracy. A man of astonishing energy and intelligence, Stone began his career at 15 as editorial writer in 1923 for the Philadelphia Record and later the New York Evening Post. He went on to write for the Nation, PM, and his own I. F. Stone's Weekly. Suffering poor vision and eventual deafness, Stone eschewed coziness with high-placed sources, relying instead on meticulous research and low-level government workers who had a better feel for what was actually happening. A descendent of Russian Jews, Stone was born too late for the height of the radical socialist era but maintained progressive ideals and was highly skeptical of government policies. He opposed Joseph McCarthy's Red-baiting, the Vietnam War, and FBI surveillance of citizens. He himself was a lifelong target of the FBI. MacPherson chronicles the internecine strife on the Left during and since the cold war era, with Stone battling away at the excesses of capitalism. Interviews with friends, family, and colleagues offer a personal look at a complex man: demanding, prickly, passionate, and iconoclastic.

Here is Myra MacPherson's forward to All Governments Lie!:

FOREWORD:
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IZZY AND THE DEATH OF DISSENT IN JOURNALISM

In writing this book it has not been easy keeping up with the fast-breaking news about a man who has been dead for seventeen years. Lest you think I jest, reflect on this. In 2004, Philip Roth gave I. F. Stone a walk-on part in his masterful work of fact and fiction The Plot Against America. In Roth's mesmerizing "it can happen here" tale of fascism triumphant, Charles A. Lindbergh, in real life the international aviation ace and Hitler admirer, has defeated FDR. On page 316 of the novel, I. F. Stone is carted off with FDR New Dealers Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, and other real famous men by President Lindbergh's gestapo-style FBI as pogroms begin in America. Roth's novel vividly relates the fear among American Jews in 1942 when fascism was a real threat. Back then, journalist I. F. Stone was among the alarmed who excoriated isolationist Lindbergh's coziness with the Third Reich. Uncanny echoes of Stone are heard in concert halls, on radio, or on CDs of the Kronos Quartet as his distinctive voice dips in and out of the music. With a continued war in Iraq, the Kronos Quartet and composer Scott Johnson found new poignancy and symbolism in Stone's antiwar lectures for peace taped decades ago and incorporated into "How It Happens," Johnson's 1993 work for amplified string quartet. Stone's twenty-two-year-old words punctuate a world that remains as frightening as when he spoke them -- a combustible Middle East, North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats, and a messy, unnecessary war in Iraq -- "How much bloodshed, cruelty, suffering? How many survivors to wonder? Was it a Canadian goose, or a real ICBM heading one way or the other, that set off the great conflagration? Think what would have happened if -- " Stone's voice is deliberately and dramatically ended in midsentence. What appears to be a fleeting apparition of owl-eyed Izzy rushes by in the background of real footage of a McCarthy hearing in George Clooney's award-winning 2005 movie on Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck. The twentieth century's premier independent journalist, known to everyone from the corner grocer to Einstein as Izzy, is honored on campuses that award I. F. Stone chairs, fellowships, and scholarships. Institutions rank his tiny one-man Weekly in the Greatest Hits of twentieth-century journalism. In one major study, Stone's Weekly placed number 16 in the top 100, behind coverage of Hiroshima, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, and the work of early-century muckrakers. As an individual voice, he placed ahead of Harrison Salisbury, Dorothy Thompson, Neil Sheehan, William Shirer, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Murray Kempton, and other worthies. Some who once ruled Georgetown and political society, such as columnist Joe Alsop and the acerbic H. L. Mencken, did not make the cut. Walter Lippmann placed 64. Such are the vicissitudes of life for journalists who once stood so high. "This kind of list is needed in journalism,'' said Mitchell Stephens, of NYU. "Nobody thinks of journalism in terms of decades or centuries.'' It is important to examine why some endure.

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"All Governments Lie"
Radical journalist I.F. Stone spent his career challenging government deception and press complicity. This new biography shows why his legacy matters.

I.F. Stone, the great radical journalist who died in 1989, no doubt would have objected just as vociferously to comparisons between his small but influential weekly newsletter and today's buzzing blogs as does Myra MacPherson, author of the wonderful new biography "All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone." Yet he surely would have sympathized with the wired idealists whose self-appointed mission is to correct the mainstream media, chastise the right-wing propagandists and excavate the critical information that officialdom prefers to keep buried.

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I.F. Stone

It was, then, part of Izzy's charm that he never accepted the idea that in order to be a heretic, a maverick, a solo practitioner, it was necessary to be a martyr or a monk. As Peter Osnos, who had worked briefly for Izzy at the start of his own distinguished journalistic and publishing career, pointed out, it was not only on The Nation's ticket that he danced his way across the Atlantic. He and Esther used to go out dancing twice a week. More significantly, his insistence on his perks had less to do with hedonism than a sense of dignity, of self-confidence, of earned entitlement. He wasn't about to allow a priggish journalistic establishment to marginalize him. He once said, "You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." He embodied the romantic idea of one man pitted against the system.

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The Vital Troublemaker