Kill The Messenger: How The Media Destroyed Gary Webb

In the mid- to late '80s, a number of reports had surfaced that connected the Contras to the cocaine trade. The first was by Associated Press scribes Brian Barger and Robert Parry, who published a story in December 1985 that begins, "Nicaraguan rebels operating in northern Costa Rica have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government, according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work with the rebels."

Only a few outlets followed Barger and Parry's lead, including the San Francisco Examiner and the lefty mag In These Times, which both published similar stories in 1986, and CBS's "West 57th" TV series, which did a segment in 1987. A Nexis search of the year following Barger and Parry's revelation turns up a total of only four stories containing the terms "Contras" and "cocaine" -- one of them a denial of the accusation from a Contra spokesperson. Stories popped up here and there over the next decade, but many of them make only oblique reference to a couldn't-possibly-be-true conspiracy theory.

Then came the San Jose Mercury News piece, a 20,000-word three-parter by Pulitzer Prize–winning staffer Gary Webb published under the title "Dark Alliance." "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found," it begins.

The series initially received little attention from major media outlets, but it was eventually transported across the nation by the Internet and black talk radio. The latter put its own spin on the tale: That the U.S. government had deliberately spread crack to African-American neighborhoods to quell unruly residents. The Post newsroom was bombarded with phone calls asking why it was ignoring the story, the paper's ombudsman later reported.

In response, the Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times would all weigh in with multiple articles claiming that Webb's assertions were bunk. His career was effectively ruined, and even his own paper eventually disavowed "Dark Alliance," despite having given it a cutting-edge online presentation complete with document transcriptions and audio recordings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/kill-the-messenger_n_5962708.html