Gary Webb, RIP. posted by Richard Seymour

The death of reporter Gary Webb is, aside from being another episode for conspiracy theorists to mull over, a tragedy for serious news reporting. Webb published a famously devastating series of articles on the connections between the CIA and cocaine trafficking . Further, as Doug Ireland reports:

A huge amount of what Webb wrote was later confirmed in a CIA Inspector General's report , and in the findings of investigators for the Senate committee that investigated the CIA-drug links (as the top investigator for the Senate Select Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, the admirable Jack Blum, testified in 1996).

Doug also notes that the LA Times, the most egregious of the many newspapers that took to viciously slandering Webb as he dropped his bombshells, has decided to issue a disgusting obituary on Webb. One thing I would dissent on is the idea that, as Doug quotes Marc Cooper saying, this is a case of "a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it". My guess is that the LA Times did not merely 'drop the ball' on this story; they, and the rest of the news industry, were simply uninterested in publishing the story. MediaLens offer an interesting account in this regard:

Gary Webb is a typical example of the kind of journalist who dismisses Media Lens-style analyses as so much extreme conspiracy theorising. Webb was an investigative reporter for nineteen years, focusing on government and private sector corruption, winning more than thirty awards for his journalism. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on California's 1989 earthquake. In 1994, he was awarded the H.L. Mencken Award by the Free Press Association, and in 1997 he received a Media Hero's Award. Webb describes his experience of mainstream journalism:

"In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It +encouraged+ enterprise. It +rewarded+ muckracking."

Alas, then, as Joseph Heller wrote, "Something Happened":

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." (Webb, 'The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On', in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7)

In 1996, Webb wrote a series of stories entitled Dark Alliances. The series reported how a US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles to the city's biggest crack dealer. The series documented direct contact between drug traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contras in Central America. Moreover, it revealed how elements of the US government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little, if anything, to stop it. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the drug traffickers - a government informant - that a CIA agent specifically instructed them to raise money for the Contras in California.

The response to the first instalment of Dark Alliance was interesting - silence; the rest of the media did not respond. Normally this would have been the end of the story, but Mercury News had placed the report on its website, which was deluged with internet visitors from around the world - 1.3 million hits on one day alone. This attention generated massive public interest "despite a virtual news blackout from the major media", Webb writes. Protests were held outside the Los Angeles Times building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who questioned how the Times could ignore a story of such obvious importance to the city's black neighbourhoods. In Washington, black media outlets attacked the Washington Post's silence on the story. It was at about this time, Webb writes, that "my reporting and I became the focus of scrutiny". (p.305)

The country's three biggest newspapers - The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times - focusing on Webb rather than on his story, all declared the story "flawed", empty, and not worth pursuing. Webb comments:

"Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper." (p.306)

Webb's editors began to get nervous, 5,000 reprints of the series were burned, disclaimers were added to follow-up stories making it clear that the paper was not accusing the CIA of direct knowledge of what was going on, "even though the facts strongly suggested CIA complicity", Webb notes. Despite a lack of evidence or arguments, the story was quickly labelled "irresponsible" by the media. Ultimately, Mercury News backed away from the material, apologising for "shortcomings" in a story that had been "oversimplified" and contained "egregious errors". Webb quit Mercury News soon thereafter.

As additional information subsequently came to light, Webb recognised that he had indeed been in error:

"The CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and drug traffickers was closer than I had written." (p.307)

Despite the press condemnation, Webb writes, the facts became more damning, not less - but they were never seriously explored. Instead the story was permanently tarred as "discredited".

So why did the press turn on the story and on Webb himself?

"Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighbourhoods in the 1980s... The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work. The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, and the clamour for an independent investigation continued to grow. But after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam...". (p.309)

There is a very concise and accurate summary of Webb's career at Wikipedia . Wikipedia goes to great lengths to get its articles as accurate and 'neutral' as possible, so it is instructive to note that they credit Webb with having been proven right in most essentials by the findings of the CIA Inspector, Senator John Kerry (who?), the Justice Department, and by a letter published by Representative Maxine Waters. Not only was he proven right, moreover - without his reports, it is unlikely that these investigations would have been carried out.

How many journalists can claim as much?

Update: Just noticed this excellent article by Yoshie Furashi at Critical Montages . The quality and consistency of Yoshie's output has landed her a couple of articles in Counterpunch and Dissident Voices.