But, despite his writing about the controversies of the 1950s, notably the investigations into alleged Communist activity in the US, the Korean war, and racial discrimination in the US, it wasn’t until the 1960s and his coverage of the US’s role in the Vietnam war that America caught up with him.

He died in 1989 and several films have been made about him: the best is probably Jerry Bruck Jr.’s I. F. Stone’s Weekly (1973, YouTube). And the ways in which he has also served as the inspiration for several generations of newsmakers is the subject of Peabody’s documentary.

Borrowing its primary title from a Stone doctrine, the film begins by detailing a series of public duplicities by US governments, such as then-president Richard Nixon declaring his innocence in 1973: “People have gotta know whether or not their president’s a crook.“

Or Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the UN Security Council in 2003 that there was clear evidence that Iraq was building a stockpile of chemical weapons: “What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid evidence,” he asserted in what he later confessed to be “a blot on my record”.

Or there was Lyndon Johnson fabricating a 1964 confrontation between US and North Vietnamese naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify an escalation of the US’s involvement in Vietnam, and George W. Bush delivering a barrage of lies in his national address in order to legitimise the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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That these examples aren’t exceptions can be seen in the ways democratically elected governments around the world regularly lie in order to achieve their ends.

Documentary filmmaker and notorious loudmouth Michael Moore declares his debt to Stone while discussing his own modus operandi. “You must start as a journalist with the assumption that everyone is lying to you,” he proposes, going on to explain that it’s their job then to prove that they’re not. Famed academic and political commentator Noam Chomsky describes the process whereby the lies told by powerful figures and circulated in the name of news become a key factor in “manufacturing consent” (the title of one of his many books).

Chomsky argues that journalism school is where it all begins to go wrong. It’s there, he insists, that the elusive quality of “objectivity” is interpreted to mean that you have to wear blinkers. “If you report accurately what’s going on in the beltway, inside the system of power, you’re being objective. If you go outside that, you’re biased.“

Lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald, a co-founding editor of The Intercept, an online US news organisation inspired by Stone’s example makes a persuasive case that “good journalism today has the state in its crosshairs”.

By way of challenging then-incoming President Barack Obama’s pledge of “no more secrecy”, he points to The Intercept’s coverage of the secret cache of documents known as “the drone papers”. Drawing attention to an unacknowledged drone base in Germany, he outlines its role in the US military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Carl Bernstein also acknowledges the importance of Stone’s refusal to take the conventional route. Co-author with Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men, which recounts how their investigative work for The Washington Post led to the downfall of the Nixon administration, he recalls how common sense initially led him to believe that the president couldn’t possibly have made such a stupid mistake. But his scepticism soon gave way and led him to the understanding that “the conventional wisdom is the enemy of good reporting”.

Turkish-American journalist Cenk Uygur, co-creator of The Young Turks, an independent online news commentary program available via subscription, draws on Stone’s understanding of how the media world works. “If your job is to please advertisers,” he explains, “then that’s who you’ll set out to please. If your job is to please subscribers, then that’s who you’ll set out to please.”

All Governments Lie also looks at how the practices of corporate media have perverted the course of responsible journalism. Its prime example is CBS CEO Leslie Moonves’s 2016 justification for opening the door on what he refers to as “the circus” provided by Donald Trump’s initial run for president.

“It may not be good for America,” Moonves says, “but it’s damn good for CBS. The money’s rolling in and this is fun. Bring it on, Donald.”

By way of response, Jeff Cohen, the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at New York’s Ithaca College, says, “It makes you ask seriously whether those who run media conglomerates have any more ethics and morals than those who run the oil and gas industries.“

The film also follows several journalists working on assignments that their mainstream counterparts have overlooked. Described by Cohen as “a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and I.F. Stone”, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibi takes a very different line from Moonves in his investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign in New Hampshire.

And six-time Emmy Award-winning Mexican-American freelancer and documentary filmmaker John Carlos Frey investigates unanswered questions about mass graves in Texas, near the Mexican border, in which nobody else seems interested. “The choices that are made are entertainment-based. Who’s pretty? Who speaks English?” he says. “We’re being dumbed down, misinformed, misled.”

The faux-independent “fake news” plague has ambushed “the spirit of I.F. Stone” and made the importance of a media that maintains a critical distance from those occupying positions of power even more crucial.

And the notion put forward in Peabody’s film by Amy Goodman, longtime host of the global news show Democracy Now!, that the news media should serve as “a sanctuary of dissent”, has never been more pressing.

All Governments Lie – Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone is on DocPlay.

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