America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb

[JHB]

America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb
By Robert Parry
December 13, 2004

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up. On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.

Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.
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Full article:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html

[barbaraann]

1. This is an excellent article that everyone should read.

Thanks for posting it.

[aikido15]

2. Yes it is...

an excellent article and the US media NEEDS to read it also!

[Ken Burch]

3. Goodbye Gary. Your colleagues done you wrong.

A good man hounded out of journalism by cowards, and now hounded to death by the same. I hope the bastards are satisfied, as they do their lifestyle features and print the White House press releases verbatim.

Thanks for taking the risk, Gary.

[Ken Burch]

4. If I.F. Stone were around today, would HE have the will to live?