C.I.A., Crack, the Media

The neverending saga of the San Jose Mercury News, the C.I.A.,
contras and crack dealers took yet another strange twist recently when the
newspaper's editor saw fit to issue a public apology. Gary Webb's
fourpart series last year, "Dark Alliance," wrote editor Jerry Ceppos,
"fell short of my standards for the Mercury News."

Highprofile newspaper apologies, unprompted by lawsuits, are,
generally speaking, a rare and welcome sight. Ceppos notes, "For too long,
newspapers have believed that no one can disagree with them, that they
must have the last word." What is curious about Ceppos's decision is that
his apology ignored virtually everything that was right with his paper's
remarkable scoop and focused only on those aspects of the story that
overshot its goal. This focus perfectly mirrored that of the mainstream
national press, as well as that of the C.I.A. itself. The agency, which
usually keeps mum about newspaper stories involving its actions, issued
a statement calling Ceppos's apology "gratift'ing."

It is fair to say that no regionally generated story has inspired so
powerful a reaction as Webb's tangled tale of the introduction of crack
into L.A. ghettos by drug dealers who helped fund the C.I.A.backed and
created Nicaraguan contras. Initially ignored by the national media
even the Los Angeles Times the story spread around the world on the
Internet and ultimately led to Congressional investigations, vituperative
town meetings featuring then Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch
and lengthy rebuttals in almost every national newspaper. Like the O.J.
verdict, the story revealed a growing racial divide in the perception of
America's most powerful institutions. For many AfricanAmericans,
particularly poor ones, the idea that the C.I.A. deliberately introduced
crack into America's ghettos in order to fund foreign wars against
imaginary threats did not seem much of a stretch. "Dark Alliance" seemed
to confirm their world view. For the rest of America, however, the notion
went beyond what even the C.I.A. might consider. The agency was
overzealous, perhaps, but criminal? That was going too far.

ln fact, the series did go too far. As Ceppos's apology admitted, Webb
"presented only one interpretation of complicated, sometimes conflicting
pieces of evidence." He "oversimplified the complex issue of how the
crack epidemic in America grew." On the Internet in particular, the
series used "imprecise language and graphics" to create "impressions that
were open to misinterpretation." Webb never directly claimed that the
C.I.A. ran the drug dealers, or even had direct knowledge of their drug
dealing. Most of his reporting focused on the relationship between the
crack dealers and the contras. But his overhyped, sensationalized
language contributed to misimpressions that his reporting could not
support.

Webb gave his enemies a sword and they used it. Without exception,
bigfoot reporters focused not on the portions of his reporting that were
new and original but on the unsupportable allegations his story seemed to
imply. Iguoring the story as it built steam, both on the Internet and
through church and community group meetings in innercity neighborhoods,
the mainstream media finally fell on Webb's reporting with the subtlety
of a panzer division. The New York Times published an article titled
"Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. and Drugs Has a Life of Its
Own."

The L.A. Times, which according to one of its reporters created a "get
Gary Webb team," proved so eager to knock down the story it contradicted
its own reporting. In criticizing Webb's focus on drug dealer Ricky Ross,
a police source for reporter Jesse Katz insisted, "Even on the best day
Ricky Ross had, there was way more crack cocaine out there than he could
ever control." But two years earlier, Katz had written in the same
newspaper that "if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's
decadelong reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible
for flooding Los Angeles' streets with massmarketed cocaine, his name
was Freeway Rick.... Ricky Donnell Ross."

Similarly, the Washington Post attack on Webb was so onesided it
inspired the newspaper's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, to accuse the
paper of "misdirected" zeal. "The Post," she wrote, "showed more energy
for protect[ing] the CIA from someone else's journalistic excesses" than
it did "protecting the people from government excesses." In a textbook
example of elite journalistic arrogance, the paper even refused to
publish Jerry Ceppos's response to the critique of his newspaper.

The mainstream critique of Webb's reporting could be summed up in the
reaction of L.A. Times Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus, who
concluded that "most of the things that are new aren't true, and most of
the things that are true aren't new." But as Peter Komblub demonstrated
in a remarkably thorough examination of the evidence in the Columbia
Journalism Review, each of the papers that so enthusiastically pounced on
Webb's errors had systematically buried the story of contra cocaine
running back when it was new. Contra involvement in drug running across
the United States was substantiated by entries in Oliver North's diaries
and in an official 1989 report of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.

This sensational newsthat the National Security Council (in the person
of North) and the C.I.A. had turned a blind eye to drug smuggling in the
United States in order to further covert aims to destroy a government
with which the country was officially at peace~id not receive
onethirtieth the space that the media devoted to knocking down the
weaker aspects of Webb's work. Indeed, the story didn't make it to
network news. One needn't be a Freudian to wonder whether the fact that
Webb offered confirmation of an explosive story ignored by the
mainstream media had inspired a wish to destroy both the right and the
wrong in his reporting.

Now that Ceppos has apologized, however, The New York Times has decided
that the story is frontpage news, and even printed a condescending
editorial commending the Mercury News for other solid work it has done.
Doyle McManus called the apology "courageous." The Washington Post ran a
lengthy story on page A7. In defending the story many months ago,
however, Ceppos insisted that "the key finding of the series that people
associated with the C.I.A. also sold many tons of cocaine has not been
challenged." It still hasn't.

What did the agency know and when did it know it?

Don't expect answers any time soon.