By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

WHITEOUT: HOW THE MAINSTREAM PRESS TRIED TO SQUELCH THE "DARK ALLIANCE" STORIES

The Attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.

The word "pacification" is not inappropriate to describe the responses to Webb’s story. Back in the l980s, allegations about contra drug running, though backed by documentary evidence, could be ignored with impunity. Given the Internet and black radio reaction, in the mid-1990s this was no longer possible, and the established organs of public opinion had to launch the fiercest of attacks on Webb and on his employer.

This was a campaign of extermination: the aim was to destroy Webb and to force the Mercury News into backing away from the story’s central premise.

What Webb had done in the series was to show in great detail how a contra funding crisis had engendered enormous sales of crack in South Central [Los Angeles, how the wholesalers of that cocaine were protected from prosecution until the funding crisis ended, and how these same wholesalers were never locked away in prison, but were hired as informants by federal prosecutors.

It could be argued that Webb’s case is often circumstantial, but prosecutions on this same amount of circumstantial evidence have seen people put away on life sentences. Webb was telling the truth on another point as well: the CIA did not return his phone calls.

In fact, Webb did have a CIA source. "He told me," Webb remembers, "he knew who these guys were and he knew they were cocaine dealers. But he wouldn’t go on the record, so I didn’t use his stuff in the story. I mean, one of the criticisms is we didn’t include CIA comments in [the] story. And the reason we didn’t is because they wouldn’t return my phone calls and they denied my Freedom of Information Act requests."

On Friday, October 4, the Washington Post went to town on Webb and on the Mercury News. The onslaught carried no less than 5,000 words in five articles. The front page featured a lead article by Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus, headlined "CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking in Contra-Tied Plot."

Also on the front page was a piece by Michael Fletcher on black paranoia.

The next assault was a double-barreled one from either side of the country. On Sunday, October 17, at the New York Times, staff reporter Tim Golden was given an entire page on which to flail away at Webb. In the Los Angeles Times, an army of fourteen reporters and three editors put out a three-part series intended to finish off Webb forever.

Of all the attacks on Webb, the Los Angeles Times series was the most elaborate and the most disingenuous. For two months the dominant newspaper in southern California had been derided for missing the big story on its own doorstep. The only way it could salvage its reputation was to claim that there’d been no big story to miss. This is the path it took.

Even after his pummeling by the two big West and East Coast papers, Webb felt he still retained the support of his editors. "They urged me to continue digging on the story so that we could stick it to the Washington Post."

Soon after he returned to Sacramento from [a research trip to] Nicaragua, Webb got a call from (Mercury News executive editor) Jerry Ceppos, who had spent much of the winter months being treated for prostate cancer. Ceppos told Webb that he was going to publish a letter in the Mercury News admitting that "mistakes had been made" in the "Dark Alliance" series.

Ceppos originally wanted to run the apologia in the Easter Sunday edition. When Webb saw a draft of the column he was outraged. "This is idiotic," Webb recalls telling Ceppos. "Half this stuff isn’t even true. It’s unconscionable to run this." Ceppos told Webb not to take it personally, that it was just a column and it didn’t mean the paper was trying to hang him out to dry.

Ceppos’s column ran on May 11. It was a retreat on every front, and a shameful day for American journalism.

Predictably, Ceppos’s appalling betrayal of his own reporter was greeted with exuberance by the New York Times, where [reporter] Todd Purdum used it to legitimize their original attack and to lash out at Webb as a paranoid.

Then on December 18, 1997, came stories in the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News under headlines such as "CIA Clears Itself in Crack Investigation." CNN picked up the Mercury News’s story immediately, telling viewers that the very paper that had made the initial charges against the CIA was now reporting that "an investigation" had absolved the Agency.
(Ed. note: At the time, it was obvious that The Post and The Times were citing what was at most a "clarification" as being a full retraction. The behavior of the San Jose Mercury News was bad, and it is greatly to Webb’s credit that he wouldn’t go along with the Mercury News editocracy. Nonetheless, it does not seem to have made any difference what it actually said. The establishment papers simply lied to their readers in such an obvious way that it was almost surreal. Of course, only those who actually read all of them would notice. Before the Internet, this would have meant virtually no one.)

Looking back at the series in mid-1997, Webb said he had nothing to apologize for. "If anything, we pussy-footed around some stuff we shouldn’t have, like CIA involvement and their level of knowledge. I’m glad I did the series because this is a story that gutless papers on the East Coast have been ducking for ten years. And now they’re forced to confront it.