As an investigative reporter covering the drug trade for the Miami Herald, also a Knight Ridder newspaper, I wrote about the explosion of cocaine in America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the role of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel in fueling it.īeginning in 1985, journalists started pursuing tips about the CIA’s role in the drug trade. He had money troubles and other problems, and ended up taking his own life at 49 in December 2004. He worked as an investigator for a legislative committee in California and finally for an alternative weekly in Sacramento. The mainstream press, now known as the legacy media, which had vilified him and which he had vilified in turn, never employed him again. Webb resigned and wrote a book defending his reporting. Jeremy Renner plays Gary Webb in “Kill the Messenger.” (Chuck Zlotnick/Focus Features) “Through imprecise language and graphics, we created impressions that were open to misinterpretation.” “We oversimplified the complex issue of how the crack epidemic in America grew,” Ceppos wrote. Jerry Ceppos, the Mercury News’s executive editor, wrote a piece concluding that the story did not meet the newspaper’s standards - a courageous stance, I thought. The paper transferred him to its Cupertino bureau and did an internal review of his facts and his methods. Gradually, the Mercury News backed away from Webb’s scoop. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, in a rare show of unanimity, all wrote major pieces knocking the story down for its overblown claims and undernourished reporting. The black community roiled in anger at the supposed CIA perfidy. Webb’s story became notable as the first major journalism cause celebre on the newly emerging Internet. What he lacked was the extraordinary proof. Webb’s story made the extraordinary claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in America. But Webb was a real person who wrote a real story, a three-part series called “ Dark Alliance,” in August 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News, one of the flagship newspapers of the then-mighty Knight Ridder chain. The Hollywood version of his story - a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media - is pure fiction. It might have saved his journalism career, though it would have precluded his canonization in the new film “ Kill the Messenger.” It is the salient lesson of the Gary Webb affair. That old dictum ought to hang on the walls of every journalism school in America. Jeff Leen is The Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for investigations.Īn extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.
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