CRACK REPORTING

In 1996, Webb's "Dark Alliance" series in the San Jose Mercury News
connected the CIA to crack dealing in Los Angeles during the 1980s and
ignited a firestorm of protests throughout the country. Conspiracy
theorists and prominent African Americans demanded the government
explain why it had dumped crack into South Central L.A., sparking a
drug epidemic that ravaged families and communities nationwide.

Within weeks, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the
Washington Post launched their own investigations repudiating Webb's
reporting. Webb, the papers insisted, had shown a link to a few drug
dealers and CIA operatives, but he had failed to prove that the CIA
started the crack scourge or that it had dumped "tons" of drugs in
California in order to fund it's guerrilla armies in Latin America.
The Mercury-News admitted it had overreached and Webb lost his job. It
was the beginning of a long fall from grace for the Pulitzer Prize
winner who ended his agony two years ago by putting a gun to his head.

Nonfiction

Kill The Messenger: How The CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed
Journalist Gary Webb By Nick Schou

Avalon, 233 pages, $14.95

The story of Gary Webb, like most real-life sagas, is complicated. Even in
the hands of someone as sympathetic as journalist Nick Schou, Webb appears a
fatally flawed man. In his new book Kill The Messenger: How The CIA's
Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, Schou vacillates
from defending Webb to portraying him as a cavalier reporter. The author
reserves his strongest criticism for the three national newspapers that
ignored the CIA-drug connection for years and instead invested their efforts
in discrediting a fellow journalist.

An OC (Orange County) Weekly reporter, Schou has covered the drug
world for several years. He is convinced that much of Webb's articles
were true. In his introduction, Schou writes that Webb "was the best
investigative reporter I've ever known" and claims "Gary Webb got it
right and that was the worst possible thing he could have done."

Perhaps you don't care about Webb or what happened to him. He's a
coward, you might say, for taking his own life and leaving his two
sons and a daughter without a dad. Maybe, like me, you don't care for
journalists who swagger around the newsroom and act like they're
starring in some black-and-white movie -- wearing trench coats,
screwing around on their wives and drinking heavily. But Gary Webb's
blunt dismissal affects us all. It certainly soured journalists on
tackling the government's involvement in the drug market. And it left
a bad taste in the mouths of many investigative reporters who risk
much by exposing the misdeeds of the powerful. The fear of being
wrong, of being disparaged by armies of officials and being censured
by one's own colleagues is enough to keep journalists from asking
tough questions, like: How do we really know there are weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq?

Kill The Messenger underscores many aspects about the CIA drug
connection that Webb got right -- that the CIA was involved with crack
dealers in L.A. But it also highlights, in a much more readable
account than previous newspaper stories, the facets Webb scrimped on.
He cherrypicked facts, he wasn't interested in fairness and ignored
anything that didn't support his thesis. He gave in to aggrandizement.
He gave into his ego. "Dark Alliance" was the biggest story of Webb's
career, and it was his undoing but not for the reasons Schou alleges.

I started reading the book wanting to be convinced that Webb was
right, that he had been unfairly judged. I met Webb briefly in the
fall of 1996 while his series was under attack. He explained the
nightmare conditions under which he'd rewritten the series -- he was
in the middle of moving and on vacation when the series was edited and
finally went to press; he was coerced into writing a lead paragraph
that was overreaching; he wasn't in the newsroom to see the inaccurate
headlines before they were printed.

Schou's exhaustive reporting seems to prove more than the author
realizes or intended. Instead of viewing Webb as a victim, readers are
likely to view Webb as a philanderer, slacker, druggie, hypocrite and
risk-taker.

Besides his many affairs, I couldn't get over that the man who was
investigating the CIA's involvement in the illicit drug trade was
himself a daily pot smoker. Then, after he left the paper and went to
work for a California government agency, Webb was the epitome of a
lazy bureaucrat -- often the targets of journalistic exposes. The
lesson in the Gary Webb affair seems to be that the personal is the
professional. Dishonesty can't be overlooked in a private life or a
public career.

Schou is wrong. In the end, it wasn't the government that destroyed
Webb but Webb's own duplicity that did him in. There are no shortcuts
to the truth.