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Gary Webb: Mainstream Reporting Died Five Years Ago
Submitted by fyl on Thu, 2009/12/10 - 04:23.
Sorry I missed this yesterday. It has been five years since we lost the honest investigative journalism of Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News. As most of you probably remember, Webb's big stories were about Iran-Contra. This article, by Robert Parry, is a good reminder of what Webb tried to do and how "truth wasn't acceptable". From the article
I told the L.A. Times reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the L.A. Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of the CIA inspector general’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The L.A. Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb, nor the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The Times obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.
Schou
The L.A. Times missed the whole story, originally (which greatly benefit Webb). Then, they unfairly criticized the bulk of Webb’s work based mostly on tangential claims or implications he could not prove (which greatly and unfairly damaged Webb). They tried to refute his work, and assigned 16 reporters to produce a rebuttal, one that ended up longer than Webb’s series at nearly 22,000 words. Years later they did eventually offer up a piece on the truth of the matter, albeit not by one of Webb’s L.A. Times competitors and not exactly a Times apology. See Nick Schou’s L.A. Times op-ed piece from 2006, The Truth in Dark Alliance. Schou was at that time, promoting his book on the matter, something done elsewhere with other articles (Schou had covered the crack epidemic in Orange County, and at times worked with Webb). For example, see 2006 Village Voice, Kill the Messenger -- The tragic death of Gary Webb, one of America's most important investigative journalists ; this article is is based on Schou’s book of nearly the same name, "Kill the Messenger --How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb". Parry doesn’t mention Schou, the later work, nor the resulting book – all of which seem to matter per his thesis. After all, Webb’s original 3-part “Dark Alliance” newspaper series for the San Jose Mercury News did not actually make a case for the CIA being behind the U.S. based crack explosion (online conspiracy theorists did that part). And, Webb’s work had been edited to imply that huge drug profits went to the Contras in exchange for huge amounts of crack going to U.S. inner cities, and the original story included an image of a shadowy figure smokin’ crack in front of the CIA governmental seal. Webb later admitted in his book on the same topic that he never believed, never wrote, and never stated that there was a CIA conspiracy tied to the crack epidemic (his comment was often that they couldn’t even mine a harbor, so how could they pull off a conspiracy of such magnitude?). In 2007-2008 Universal Studios bought the rights to Webb’s book, and also this one by Schou. Peter Landesman was said to be writing the screenplay; he has recently handled other scripts on the sex trade, Watergate, Russian Arms dealers, etc.