Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  With Webb, we get to the heart of the dust storm. On Saturday, December 13, the San Jose Mercury News announced that Gary Webb had resigned from the paper, after reaching a settlement on a grievance he had filed about his transfer from Sacramento to Cupertino. In the Washington Post and New York Times, Webb’s departure from the Mercury News was flagged, with the implication that somehow it offered further evidence of the conclusiveness of the CIA’s self-examination.

  It looks as though the Agency took the opportunity of Webb’s departure to leak a self-serving press release about its conduct. This item was eagerly seized upon by the papers who had been after Webb, and by the Mercury News, which had been terrorized into betraying a fine reporter.

  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.”

  Sources

  The attack on Gary Webb by his colleagues in the national press was relentless. There are a lot of examples, but perhaps none more blatant than Iver Peterson’s smear on Webb in the New York Times, nearly a year after Webb’s story had appeared. The initial assault was led by four “star” reporters at the nation’s biggest papers: Howard Kurtz and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post, Tim Golden at the New York Times and Doyle McManus (Lt. Colonel of a “Get Webb Team”) at the Los Angeles Times. Once these heavyweights drew blood, the editorial pages from across the country came in for the kill. The behavior of the top editors at Webb’s own paper, the San Jose Mercury News, was despicable and cowardly. Even the so-called progressive press took shots at Webb, most notably the Nation, whose David Corn sniped that Webb’s reporting was flawed.

  On the other hand, Webb had his defenders. The LA Weekly was quick to reveal the gaping holes in the Los Angeles Times’s saturation bombing of the “Dark Alliance” series. Norman Soloman’s article “Snow Job” for Extra!, the magazine of the media watchdog group FAIR, was a fine piece of work that was useful to us. Robert Parry and his colleagues at The Consortium wrote good press criticism and worked to advance the story. The Consortium also printed a harrowing account from Nicaragua by Webb’s partner, Georg Hodel, showing the dangers of writing about these forbidden topics in a hostile landscape. Similarly, Peter Kornbluh, the investigator at the National Security Archives, wrote a fine piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. Alicia Shepard’s story in the American Journalism Review is neither kind nor fair to Webb, but it does expose the biases and petty jealousies of his colleagues.

  As an example of the obdurate and spiteful hostility of the New York Times toward Webb, we include here two letters to the Times correcting serious inaccuracies and exhibitions of bias in the paper’s reporting. The first is a response by Webb to Peterson’s attack noted above. The Times refused to print it. The second is another commentary, which speaks for itself, on Peterson’s story. The Times likewise had refused to print this letter.

  To the editor:

  Since the New York Times allegedly places such a high value on accuracy, I would like to point out some factual errors and omissions in your June 3 story about me and the “Dark Alliance” series I authored last year.

  The statement that a state audit “cleared” Tandem Computers for its part in a $50 million computer debacle at the California Department of Motor Vehicles is incorrect. The audit, by California Auditor General Kurt Sjoberg, corroborated the findings of my investigation and the Tandem project was scrapped at considerable cost to the state’s taxpayers. Moreover, two state officials who approved and oversaw this project – and then went to work for Tandem – paid large fees to settle conflict of interest charges lodged by the state Fair Political Practices Commission. These charges were filed as a result of my reporting, which won the California Journalism Award in 1994.

  The statement that the Mercury News “never published a follow-up story” to the Tandem series is also false. Several follow-ups were published, including stories I wrote about the Auditor General’s report and the fines paid by the former state officials.

  (It might have been useful to note that the reporter who criticized my Tandem stories, Lee Gomes, was covering Tandem while its much-ballyhooed DMV project was collapsing, yet somehow managed to miss the story entirely.)

  Since your reporter, Iver Peterson, did not question me about my Tandem stories, perhaps it’s not surprising that these errors and omissions occurred.

  Finally, I found it amusing that while Mr. Peterson spent many inches airing vague complaints from people I’ve investigated, he would neglect to mention that I have won more than 30 journalism awards, been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize half a dozen times, and sent a number of corrupt or incompetent government officials and businessmen to jail or early retirement by exposing their misdeeds.

  Granted, this kind of reporting makes few friends and prompts libel suits, but being well-loved and lawsuit-free has never been part of a reporter’s duties as I understand them.

  Gary Webb,

  June 3, 1997

  To the editor:

  A Times reporter [Iver Peterson] has seen fit to lead a story (6/3) on the San Jose Mercury New’s “Dark Alliance” series with the stunning news that a request was placed on the agenda of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) to strip the series’ author, Gary Webb, of his 1996 Journalist of the Year award. Gratified as I am, as president of the organization, to see that our monthly agenda is of such interest to a national newspaper, in the interests of ethical journalism, which SPJ is dedicated to furthering, please allow me to correct the misleading impression that you have knowingly fostered with that lead paragraph.

  Putting an anecdote in the lead paragraph of a news story implies that it has some representative significance, and indeed your writer goes on to state that the agenda item “illustrates” how Webb’s series “continues to echo among journalists.”

  Actually, it illustrates no such thing. One person, an editor at a competing newspaper, has been insisting for nearly a year that the award be withdrawn, and she reiterated her request after appearance of the Mercury News column clarifying (not retracting) its series. As a courtesy to that one person, the item was placed on our agenda. But as your writer was aware – because he asked me – that person was in no way representative. In fact, she is the only person who has expressed such a view to us, and she acknowledges that she has other reasons to be angry with the San Jose Mercury News.

  When the board finally discussed the issue at the member’s request, there was no sentiment for withdrawal of the award. The discussion was brief, mostly centered on the irresponsibility of the Times’s story.

  Your reporter’s determination to prove a point with a misguided example is disturbing, but even more so is the fact that he knew in advance that it was misleading and even wrote that “Chances are remote that Webb will lose the award because of one request.” The reporter knew that the person who brought our meeting to his attention had an interest in inflating the significance of her own request. In other words, his informant’s interest illustrated his informant’s interest. Period.

  Indeed, if the SPJ chapter meeting had had the importance that the Times’s article implied, shouldn’t the paper have reported the results of the meeting after it was held?

  If the suggestion of potential retraction of Gary Webb’s SPJ award continues to echo among journalists, it echoes because those journalists have read it in the New York Times and perpetuated the misimpression by calling us to find out what happened at the meeting, hyped by the Times and its source.

  I suggested that the Times’s energy in bludgeoning flaws in the Mercury News series and personally attacking its author be matched by an equal or greater determination to
explore the far more important story of the degree of US government complicity in the Contras’ dealing in drugs that have devastated so many American communities. That is the story that the major news media have downplayed for more than a decade, while newspapers such as yours devote unprecedented lineage to debunking, in the most personal terms, the efforts of a reporter at another newspaper.

  Peter Y. Sussman, President,

  Northern California Chapter,

  Society of Professional Journalists

  June 6, 1997

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  ——. “A Letter to the Washington Post,” San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 18, 1996.

  ——. “A Letter to Our Readers.” San Jose Mercury News, May 11, 1997.

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  ——. “The CIA’s Latest Coup.” CounterPunch, Dec. 16–30, 1997.

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  ——. “Black Caucus Urges Probe of CIA Drug Charge.” Washington Post, Sept. 13, 1996.

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  ——. “Knight-Ridder Defends Botched Stories.” Washington Inquirer, Dec. 9, 1996.

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  ——. “Tracking the Genesis of the Crack Trade.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 20, 1996.

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  ——. “Editor Criticizes His Paper’s CIA Series.” Washington Post, May 14, 1997.

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  ——. “Contra–Crack Controversy Continues.” The Consortium, Jan. 6, 19
97.

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