TO AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE is one mission of the media, as famously defined by the now almost anonymous columnist Finley Peter Dunne, while he paired that duty with comforting the afflicted. And we should also add, of course, telling truth to power.

Some in the media have been rightly exercised by a decision taken this week among the comfortable and powerful. Shareholders of the two companies involved voted overwhelmingly to agree. The infamous coal-mining firm Massey Energy will now be taken over by Alpha Natural Resources, for $7.1 billion.

Long overdue though it might be, mainstream reporters have at last been focusing attention on Massey Energy since the explosion just over a year ago in its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 men – the worst American coal-mining disaster in forty years.

For decades the company, led by the dedicatedly union-busting boss Don Blankenship (who incidentally is walking away from his company with a comfortable $12 million “retirement” package) had been collecting citations for safety violations at a clip that almost beggars belief. He set records by accruing violations at a rate of at least a thousand every two years, plus environmental violations at twice that rate.

But only local journalists, and specialist campaigners locally and nationally, paid much attention at the time. And that in spite of the fact that three years ago Massey was forced to pay a $20 million federal fine, the largest in the Environmental Protection Agency’s history.

Tuesday’s merger went through despite an independent report published just two weeks ago on last year’s disaster. Former federal mine safety chief Davitt McAteer, who led the investigation, uncompromisingly slammed Massey for “a corporate mentality that placed the drive to produce coal above worker safety” and for a “culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm“. In the legal sphere, both civil and criminal investigations are still ongoing.

WITH APT TIMING a new movie is opening that authoritatively explores Massey’s track-record of wrongdoing.

Like the best of documentaries, “The Last Mountain” (opening tomorrow in New York and Washington DC, and in many other cities over the next two months) employs a very particular instance of Massey-linked horrors to illustrate even wider and deeper concerns. Here those concerns are our national energy policy – or lack of one – and along with that the woeful inadequacy of our democratic institutions in protecting the powerless against the comfortable and powerful who in effect prey on them.

Produced by ex-Newsweek White House correspondent and author Clara Bingham along with documentarians Eric Grunebaum and Bill Haney, and forcefully directed by Haney, the documentary delineates the damage Massey has visited not only upon its own workers, but also upon residents throughout Coal River Valley, West Virginia, where one especially rapacious form of Massey’s mining activity is concentrated – ‘mountaintop-removal‘, to use its bluntly-phrased name.

This method’s crude simplicity is described by local campaigner Maria Gunno, a waitress and miners’ daughter, grand-daughter and sister, as grabbing easy access to the “layercake” – that comprises deposits of “coal on rock, on coal, on rock” – by blasting apart a mountaintop with explosives.

The film traces the insidious air- and water-pollution that results, plus the ever-present terror of toxic sludge, held back by the merest of dam-like structures. Massey’s 28 so-called “impoundments” of this thick semi-liquid waste (containing mercury, arsenic, lead and more) have spilled 24 times in the last decade, pouring out 300 million gallons of the sludge – an astonishing double the amount that BP spilled in its gushing Deepwater Horizon oil-rig disaster off the Gulf Coast.

TO THE BROAD CATEGORIES, “comfortable” and “powerful”, we need also to add the more precise term: “criminal”.

Environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr (who appears often in The Last Mountain, though with scarcely more prominence than rank-and-file activists, who carry most of its narrative) was laudably precise when he appeared at a pre-release screening this week.

The preview was held at the Jacob Burns Film Center and Media Arts Lab, which this month celebrates a decade of dedicated work from a perhaps surprising base: a commuter town north of New York City bearing the gratingly cute name of Pleasantville.

It’s a community very different from Coal River Valley, but it suffers from its own energy-based anxieties, thanks to the condemned Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant that looms threateningly nearby, jutting out as it does into the Hudson River. Kennedy is already well-decorated with plaudits in the Hudson valley for his efforts with the Riverkeeper campaign for clean and safe water.

In conversation after the Film Center screening, Kennedy pulled no punches – and described Massey’s operations as “a criminal enterprise”.

He has, of course, a strong basis for that contention. It’s rare that campaigners like him get to meet their targets head-on, but it happens in the film, when the attorney sits down, in a local diner, with an industry representative, Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. No real conclusion is reached there. More pointedly, though, I can recall a rare debate at Charleston University last year, between Kennedy and Massey’s own chief at the time, the now comfortably-retired Blankenship himself, in which the executive acknowledged that mountaintop removal simply can’t happen without the law being broken.

Kennedy: “Is it possible to do mountaintop-removal mining without violating the Clean Water Act?”

Blankenship: “I don’t think that it’s possible without a single violation.”

Every bit as sharply now as then, Kennedy re-emphasized after this week’s screening that Massey has formed merely one part of an overall alliance of mining companies, coal-hauling railroad companies and coal-burning electricity utilities, who together have spent an extraordinary $1.5 billion on political lobbying over the past decade.

I have often labeled politicians who so meekly regulate the energy industry as being little more than accessories to crime, but Kennedy is perhaps clearer (while also aiming more broadly) when he described the entire apparatus of political campaign finance which gets those politicians elected in the first place as quite plainly “licensed bribery”.

Kennedy told me he’s proud of the film, unsurprisingly. It certainly is salutary to watch this example of patriotic American movie-making – yes, patriotic in the way it so earnestly, and justifiably, decries criminal assaults on our “purple mountain majesties” (the lyrics of Katharine Lee Bates’ ‘America The Beautiful’ serve as sub-text to this film’s powerful imagery) along with the equally execrable undermining of our essential democratic values and processes.