Pubdate: Wed, 15 Dec 2004
Source: San Diego City Beat (CA)
Copyright: 2004 San Diego City Beat
Contact:  http://www.sdcitybeat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2764
Author: Jeff Cohen
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Gary+Webb

EDITORIAL

REMEMBERING GARY WEBB

When we learned that investigative reporter Gary Webb had died from an
apparent suicide last Friday, we considered writing an editorial
praising his courageous journalism. Webb's defining work was a 1996
series in the San Jose Mercury News that detailed how Nicaraguan
Contra rebels in the 1980s were selling large amounts of crack cocaine
in poor African-American communities in Los Angeles to finance their
war against the Sandinista government. The series also connected the
Contra-cocaine scheme to Ronald Reagan's CIA. We came across a piece
written about Webb by Jeff Cohen (www.jeffcohen.org), founder of the
media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org).
Since we can't say it any better than Cohen, we asked him for
permission to publish his tribute to Webb, and he graciously gave it.

Unembedded Reporter

by Jeff Cohen

Gary Webb, a courageous investigative journalist who was the target of
one of the most ferocious media attacks on any reporter in recent
history, was found dead Friday after an apparent suicide.

In August 1996, Webb wrote one of the first pieces of journalism that
reached a massive audience thanks to the Internet: an explosive
20,000-word, three-part series documenting links between cocaine
traffickers, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the CIA-organized
right-wing Nicaraguan Contra army of that era. The series sparked major
interest in the social justice and African-American communities, leading
to street protests and demands by Congressional Black Caucus members for
a federal investigation. But Webb suffered a furious backlash at the
hands of national media unaccustomed to seeing their role as gatekeepers
diminished by the emerging medium known as the World Wide Web.

Webb's San Jose Mercury News series documented that funders of the
Contras included drug traffickers who played a role in the crack
epidemic that hit Los Angeles and other cities. Webb's series focused
heavily on Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine importer and federal
informant, who once testified in federal court that "whatever we were
running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution."
Blandon further testified that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a CIA asset
who led the Contra army against Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista
government, knew the funds were from drug running. (Bermudez was a
colonel during the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.)

Webb reported that U.S. law enforcement agents complained that the CIA
had squelched drug probes of Blandon and his partner Norwin Meneses in
the name of "national security." Blandon's drugs flowed into L.A. and
elsewhere thanks to the legendary "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross, a
supplier of crack to L.A. street gangs.

While Webb's series could be faulted for some overstatement in
presenting its powerful new evidence, the fresh documentation mightily
moved forward the CIA-Contra-cocaine story that national media had
been trying to bury for years. Any exaggeration in the presentation
was dwarfed by a mendacious, triple-barreled attack on Webb that came
from The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

The Post and others criticized Webb for referring to the Contras of
the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Force as "the CIA's army"--an
absurd objection since, by all accounts, the CIA set up the group,
selected its leaders and paid their salaries and directed its
day-to-day battlefield strategies.

The Post devoted much ink to exposing what Webb readily
acknowledged--that while he could document Contra links to cocaine
importing, he was not able to identify specific CIA officials who knew
of the drug flow. The ferocity of the attack on Webb led the Post's
ombudsman to note that the three newspapers "showed more passion for
sniffing out the flaws" in the Webb series than for probing the
important issue he had raised: U.S. government relations with drug
smuggling.

The L.A. Times' anti-Webb package was curious for its handling of
Freeway Ricky Ross, the dealer Webb had authoritatively linked to
Contra-funder Blandon. Two years before Webb's revelations, the Times
had reported: "If there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's
decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible
for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name
was Freeway Rick." In a profile of Ross headlined "Deposed King of
Crack," the Times went on and on about "South-Central's first
millionaire crack lord" and how Ross' "coast to coast conglomerate was
selling more than $550,000 [in] rocks a day, a staggering turnover
that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars."

But two months after Webb's series linked Ricky Ross to Contra
cocaine, the L.A. Times told a totally different story, now seeking to
minimize Ross' role in the crack epidemic: Ross was just one of many
"interchangeable characters"--"dwarfed" by other dealers.

The reporter who'd written the 1994 Ross profile was the one called on
to write the front-page 1996 critique of Webb; media critic Norman
Solomon noted that it "reads like a show-trial recantation."

The hyperbolic reaction against Webb's series can only be understood
in the context of years of bias and animosity toward the
Contra-cocaine story on the part of many national media. Bob Parry and
Brian Barger first reported on Contra-cocaine smuggling for AP in
1985, at a time when President Reagan was hailing the Contras as "the
moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." The story got little pickup.

In 1987 the House Narcotics Committee chaired by Charles Rangel probed
Contra-drug allegations and found a need for further investigation.
After the Washington Post distorted the facts with a headline "Hill
Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling," the paper
refused to run Rangel's letter correcting the record.

That same year, Time magazine correspondent Laurence Zuckerman and a
colleague found serious evidence of Contra links to cocaine trafficking,
but their story was blocked from publication by top editors. A senior
editor admitted privately to Zuckerman: "Time is institutionally behind
the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd
have no trouble getting it in the magazine." (The N.Y Times and
Washington Post both endorsed aid to the Contra army, despite massive
documentation that they targeted civilians for violence and terror.)

In 1989, when Sen. John Kerry released a report condemning U.S.
government complicity with Contra-connected drug traffickers, the
Washington Post ran a brief report loaded with GOP criticisms of
Kerry, while Newsweek dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

In this weekend's mainstream media reports on Gary Webb's death, it's
no surprise that a key point has been overlooked--that the CIA's
internal investigation sparked by the Webb series and resulting furor
contained startling admissions. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz
reported in October 1998 that the CIA indeed had knowledge of the
allegations linking many Contras and Contra associates to cocaine
trafficking, that Contra leaders were arranging drug connections from
the beginning and that a CIA informant told the agency about the activity.

When Webb stumbled onto the Contra-cocaine story, he couldn't have
imagined the fury with which big-foot reporters from national dailies
would come at him--a barrage that ultimately drove him out of mainstream
journalism. But he fought back with courage and dignity, writing a book
(Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion)
with his side of the story and insisting that facts matter more than
established power or ideology. He deserves to be remembered in the proud
tradition of muckrakers like Ida Tarbell, George Seldes and I.F. Stone.

In this era of "embedded reporters," an unembedded journalist like
Gary Webb will be sorely missed. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake