Death of a journalist

By Dan Hellinger

 

     It's been a dark winter for investigative reporters. On Jan. 10, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former CEO of the Associated Press, released their harshly critical report of CBS News' use of possibly forged documents in reporting on President George W. Bush's questionable National Guard Service. This news followed the suicide, at age 49, of Gary Webb, whose series "Dark Alliance" for the San Jose Mercury News connected the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras to the emergence of a crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.
     Webb was found with two gunshot wounds to the head, but his friends do not believe he was murdered. A suicide note was found, but its contents have not been released.
     Webb broke his "Dark Alliance" story in 1996, the product of a year's investigation. At its height, the story was receiving more than 1.5 million hits per day on the Mercury News Web site. It was arguably the first instance in which the gate-keeping role of The New York Times and Washington Post was overwhelmed by the dissemination of an investigative report on the Internet.
     The New York Post and other newspapers only took note two months later, once the reaction of outraged African-American civic leaders could no longer be ignored. Instead of pursuing the leads Webb had uncovered, the papers attacked his professionalism. The very fact that the Internet was the vehicle for its widespread dissemination was ipso facto evidence to disparage its credibility. Explaining the credibility of the story took precedence over investigating the facts in mainstream American media.
     Webb had enjoyed a distinguished career to that point. In 1980 he won an award for co-reporting on organized crime in the coal industry for the Kentucky Post. He produced several corruption-busting articles for the Cleveland Plain Dealer before moving to San Jose in 1988. There he shared with the staff a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the 1989 California earthquake.
     Under attack from the right, and abandoned by his colleagues, the lingering impression was that Webb-as the fired CBS employees today-had failed, because of his leftist prejudices, to adequately check facts. It was said that Webb had not proven that the CIA had deliberately targeted black neighborhoods as markets for crack.
     Webb alleged no such thing. His central contention was the existence of a "bizarre alliance" between "a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting gangstas' of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles."
     His lead said that a Bay-area drug ring had for nearly a decade "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."
     He contended that the operation "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles" and "helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons."
     As Webb later explained to the Washington Post, "this (series) doesn't prove the CIA targeted black communities. It doesn't say this was ordered by the CIA … Essentially our trail stopped at the door of the CIA."
     Not quite. Webb did characterize some traffickers as employed agents of the CIA, and perhaps he assigned too much blame to one drug network for America's urban drug crisis. John Kerry, chair of the Senate sub-committee that had investigated similar allegations in 1989, found only one flaw in the stories- that there was no evidence that "these traffickers ever targeted any one geographic area or population group."
     In 1998 the CIA published the results of its internal investigation on the allegations, and once again denied the allegation that Webb never made-that the CIA itself targeted black neighborhoods. The same report also described how the Reagan administration had thwarted investigations into drug trafficking and money laundering involving 50 Contra operatives and Oliver North.
     The media mostly treated the report not as a vindication of Webb's reports but as evidence of his incompetence and of paranoia among blacks who believed him.
     Why were Webb's transgressions exaggerated? In an interview with "PBS NewsHour" in October 1996, Webb explained the attitude of the mainstream media this way: "Now that it has been proven that the Contras were indeed selling drugs to Americans, I think they are hard pressed to explain their lack of attention to a topic that millions of Americans care very deeply about. To accept this story now is a tacit admission that the biggest media outlets in this country have been asleep at the switch for a decade-or worse."
     Under pressure, Mercury News editors took the story off the paper's Web site and apologized in a front-page editorial. Webb was demoted and assigned a suburban news beat far from his home. He resigned and was blackballed from getting another investigative journalist's job, though he did find work with a California legislative oversight committee. He was laid off in 2003, when he went to work for the Sacramento News and Record. His friends claim that his downward emotional spiral began with his demotion at the Mercury News.
     Most of Webb's work for the News and Record consisted of relatively low-impact stories on fighting traffic tickets or clearing clutter from your home. But just this past October he exposed how the U.S. military was devising and releasing video games as part of its recruitment strategy-and how the military was eavesdropping on the players. This story was picked up in the local St. Louis media market just before Christmas and presented as an ironic comment on the erosion of "Peace on Earth." Webb was not credited, as far as I know, for having broken the story.
     On first examination, it would seem that Webb's sad story has little in common with the firing of four CBS news employees for failing to verify the authenticity of photo-copied documents for a "60 Minutes-Wednesday Edition" exposé of Bush's record in the National Guard.
     The panel commissioned by CBS found that the network erred in rushing the story to air, violated several journalistic standards, relied too much on anti-Bush sources and should not have contacted the campaign of Bush's Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
     Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog, told "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman that he had no problem with the CBS action, but Goodman was not so sure.      Goodman pointed out on the program that Mary Mapes, the fired producer, continued to stand behind the story and that the investigation did not conclude that the papers were fraudulent, only that CBS had not done enough to verify their authenticity. Buried in an avalanche of criticism, few critics acknowledged that Mapes and her team had uncovered corroborative evidence for the story. For example, the secretary to Bush's commanding officer stated that the content of the document, but perhaps not the document itself, was accurate.
     Rendall responded, "It's fairly clear that they didn't sufficiently authenticate these documents, even though as you just stated, the documents were not found by this committee to have been forgeries, necessarily. They didn't properly practice journalism. They didn't authenticate these documents, and when they were called to account, they stonewalled. They insisted that their sources were unimpeachable. These are journalistic transgressions."
     Mapes herself has charged that the firings were "motivated by corporate and political considerations, ratings rather than journalism." She acknowledged that as photocopies, the documents were less trustworthy than originals, but she argued, "We did have context and corroboration and believed as many journalists have before and after our story, that authenticity is not limited to original documents. Photocopies are often a basis for verified stories."
     That Internet bloggers were able to cast doubt on the authenticity of the documents weakens Mapes' defense of her work. Her actions in putting Kerry campaign operatives in touch with her sources merit a rebuke. But do her "transgressions" merit the termination of a distinguished career?
     Mapes was the producer of the segment that broke (along with Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker) the scandal of Abu Ghraib, perhaps the most significant investigative report of the last few years. Why do Mapes' "transgressions" merit firing, while Judith Miller, whose stories for The New York Times verified non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, gets not even a slap on the wrist?
     Mapes and Webb were victims of scapegoating by a media system less inclined to conduct investigative journalism than ever before. Their mistakes pale before their accomplishments in exposing the sordid side of American globalism.
     I hope Mapes' constitution is stronger than Gary Webb's. May he rest in peace.
     Go to Democracy Now! for more information about Webb's career and death.