A new film out in theaters this week tells the story of one of the most maligned figures in investigative journalism: Gary Webb. In 1996, Webb published an explosive series in the San Jose Mercury News titled “Dark Alliance.” It began, quote, “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”
Gary Webb’s exposé provoked protests and congressional hearings. It also provoked a fierce reaction from the media establishment, which went to great lengths to discredit Webb. The Los Angeles Times alone assigned 17 reporters to dissect both Webb’s reporting and his personal life. Recently declassified CIA files show the agency used a, “ground base of already productive relations with journalists [at other newspapers]” to counter what it called, quote, “a genuine public relations crisis.”
Robert Parry talking:
history owes a great deal to Gary Webb. If it weren’t for Gary and his courage in reviving this story in 1996, we would not have known anything near like the full picture of what happened in the 1980s. Some of us that were reporting it back then—myself and my colleague Brian Barger at the Associated Press wrote the first story in December of ’85, and that sparked Senator John Kerry to do a fairly good investigation that reported more about this in—by 1989. But because the major news organizations back then did not want to pursue this very difficult and painful story—they tended to dismiss it back then, as well—it was up to Gary Webb in reviving the story in 1996 that forced the CIA to finally take seriously this investigation. And the inspector general, Frederick Hitz, did a fairly thorough job, produced a report that amounted to an institutional confession by the Central Intelligence Agency that indeed they were aware of the contra drug trafficking as far back as 1981, that it had continued throughout the decade, and that the CIA had consistently protected those drug traffickers, even to the point of steering away investigations by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Justice Department, as well as Congress. So you had the CIA finally coming to the table and admitting that what we reported in the ’80s and what Webb reported in the ’90s was in fact true.
The tragedy was that the mainstream news organizations that had dismissed the story in the ’80s would not face up to this reality when it was even admitted to by the Central Intelligence Agency. We saw a complete failure, perhaps one of the most shameful examples of how the mainstream press can operate in destroying a fellow journalist for getting at an important story. And Webb suffered mightily for this. There’s a special pain when your colleagues in your profession turn on you, especially when you’ve done something that they should admire and should understand. It’s hard to do these kinds of stories. They’re really—they’re very difficult, because of the reporting that’s required, the going into the field, dealing with often unsavory characters, dealing with secret government sources. And to do all that work and then have The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times attack you and try to destroy your life, there’s a special pain in that.
– source democracynow.org
Robert Parry, veteran investigative journalist who worked for years as an investigative reporter for both the Associated Press and Newsweek magazine. His reporting led to the exposure of what is now known as the “Iran-Contra” scandal. He edits the website consortiumnews.com.