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 Mercuy 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 whole-salers 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 Woshington 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 (Mereury 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 head-lines 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.

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.

However they chose to confront it, they still have to say what the story's
about."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)