Gary Webb is dead. He apparently committed suicide after the break up of his marriage and subsequent financial hardship.
Webb was featured in the recent book, Into the Buzzsaw,-- 18 journalists who spoke truth to power and found themselves discredited or censored.
Webb recounted:
If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?"
"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."
In 1996, Webb wrote a series of stories entitled Dark Alliances.
The series reported how a US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles to the city's biggest crack dealer. The series documented direct contact between drug traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contras in Central America. Moreover, it revealed how elements of the US government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little, if anything, to stop it. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the drug traffickers - a government informant - that a CIA agent specifically instructed them to raise money for the Contras in California.
The Dissent article adds:
We believe...journalists are selected on the basis that they areunlikely even to attempt to report "dangerous ideas" of this kind - troublemakers are quickly identified and filtered out as 'committed', 'biased' and 'emotionally involved'. By contrast, successful journalists, with rare exceptions, are happy to remain within the 'acceptable' parameters of debate, echoing government opinions without challenge, presuming the essential benevolence of state-corporate power, focusing on non-threatening problems, interpreting crimes as mistakes, and so on.
Gary Webb interview
Webb's reporting, and the subsequent story of the way in which his credibility and his work were attacked by mainstream press sources was a coming of age moment for me.
Gary Webb. Rest in Peace