One dead messenger
In the mood for a film that helps explain a lot about the nature and practice of journalism, including the pettiness, ego and timidity that can exist in newsrooms, especially at the largest dailies?
If so, don’t overlook the film Kill the Messenger, currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon and other services. I can make such a statement because I’ve certainly witnessed and experienced it all, up close and personal inside metropolitan papers across five states.
The 2014 film is about the rise and fall of the late investigative reporter Gary Webb, whose award-winning career led from daily papers in Kentucky and Ohio to California’s San Jose Mercury News, owned during the 1980s by Knight Ridder.
It’s also about Webb’s resourcefulness and dogged determination to tell the important story of crack cocaine flowing into California and across the nation in the 1980s from our CIA-backed and trained Contra rebels in Nicaragua, drug sales that raised millions to help fund the the Contras’ revolution against the leftist Sandinista government.
As with many reporters who practice what I call First Amendment journalism, Webb got onto his blockbuster 1996 series “Dark Alliance” through a source followed by a leaked grand jury transcript that related testimony by a drug kingpin and CIA-backed informant in federal court.
He traveled to Nicaragua to confirm what he’d learned, then wrote his stories, published in the print editions with additional information online, purportedly in the face of warnings from those who appeared in the film to be CIA agents well aware of the story he was pursuing.
Initially, Webb’s editors were supportive, even developing what would become the controversial logo for Webb’s three-part series, depicting a crack pipe and the CIA’s emblem. In the film, Webb felt the crackpipe image went too far when compared with known facts at the time. He need time for further reporting. His objection was noted and overruled.
Eventually, Webb’s series reportedly drew up to a million viewers daily online. The Mercury News had earned its national chops and clear commitment to authentic journalism.
Webb (who had a wife and three children) chose to disclose his findings even if it meant ignoring warnings not to from within the federal government and others.
The series was initially met with overwhelmingly favorable response from across the nation and the world, especially in predominately black south central Los Angeles, which suddenly had become the epicenter of crack cocaine abuse from the steady Nicaraguan flow.
Webb also was lauded for his courage and resourcefulness within that Bay Area paper. Webb received national accolades and was planning necessary follow-up stories, also initially supported by his editors.
Then came the crusade to demonize and destroy not the story alone,
but the messenger. Network talking heads interviewed Webb who repeatedly had to explain how they (and other media) were reporting aspects of his series that he never actually wrote.
As stated even today in Wikipedia, the media turned against Webb in a full-out assault to discredit rather than enlarge on his findings. “Notably, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ran
articles calling his argument unfounded,” despite the fact all his sources had been listed in the series. He was also accused of using excessive and unsupported hyperbole in key paragraphs.
After initially standing by their reporter and his work, the Mercury News soon caved to the avalanche of major media denunciations. The paper’s executive editor at the time, Jerry Ceppos, even published an apology for much of the series’ content in May 1997.
Webb soon found himself ostracized and adrift after resigning from the Mercury News, leaving mainstream journalism.. He wrote a book about the series by the same name before dying alone in 2004 at 49 from two gunshot wounds to the head in what was officially deemed a suicide.
I write this today to say Webb’s story in many ways prompted my reflections. During an ongoing career, similar in many ways to Webb’s at some of the largest newspapers and today back home in Arkansas by choice, I appreciated my good fortune to have mostly had supportive editors and publishers.
The most enthusiastically supportive by far over the years is the man who publishes this newspaper, Walter Hussman Jr. The fact is, without backing from the owner of any publication or media outlet, investigative reporting outside the Internet doesn’t exist.
I can recall Walter’s words as far back as 1973 in Hot Springs when, after the paper’s attorney advised against running an exposé about a local state politician, Hussman, who had hired me as editor of that paper, told me: “It strikes me if lawyers ran newspapers, we’d probably never publish anything. Let’s run it on page one.”
Another time, after I’d endured seven grueling hours in a federal court deposition over the jailhouse murder of Marvin Williams, a young black veteran from Menifee, Hussman forwarded a copy of the exorbitant attorney bill for representing me with the note: “Sometimes the price of telling the truth can be expensive.”
I felt deeply for Webb after watching the obviously Hollywood-ized but nonetheless powerful film, and I suspect you will too, should you watch. And I’m thankful yet again I work for a man who lives by his sincere Statement of Core Values published daily on page two. Among its valid messages: “[A] news organization must not just cover the news, but uncover it.”
In today’s world of disgracefully slanted, biased and self-destructive politicized media reporting at the highest levels, Hussman, who in 2008 was named Editor and Publisher Magazine’s Publisher of the Year, remains a truly unique and valuable asset, both to my craft and all our freedoms.
Godspeed, Gary Webb. Wish our paths had crossed back in the heyday.