Tweet
Re: X-files or Facts?
Largo,
the problem is that a Sibel Edmonds will not be interviewed or featured in any MSM other than in the passing and in a derogatory fashion.
Also, hard nosed investigative journalism in the MSM died after the Gary Webb incident. Here are the archived Gary Web articles at NarcoNews.com
The official story is that Gary took his own life -- yet doubts remain, as I said in my post above.
Largo,
the problem is that a Sibel Edmonds will not be interviewed or featured in any MSM other than in the passing and in a derogatory fashion.
Also, hard nosed investigative journalism in the MSM died after the Gary Webb incident. Here are the archived Gary Web articles at NarcoNews.com
In August 1996, Gary Webb began publishing the results of a yearlong investigation that traced the money fueling the horrific U.S.-backed “contra” war against Nicaragua to the profits from Los Angeles’ 1980s crack epidemic. The CIA led its contra army to spend the entire decade terrorizing the Nicaraguan people and their Sandinista government, happily allowing the contras to flood Los Angeles and other North American cities with cocaine to fund their efforts. Gary provided extensively documented evidence that while poor communities in L.A. paid the price of the crack explosion – from rampant addiction in their neighborhoods to oppressive law enforcement and jailing with Reagan’s stepped-up “war on drugs” – the United States government protected the men moving a great deal of the drugs coming into the city. Local dealers faced life sentences while the bigtime narcos from Washington to Managua went free.
What came next is well known. Gary’s story, and the website he and the San Jose Mercury News created to showcase and expand upon it, were initially the talk of the global village. Politicians cited the article in both Sacramento and Washington. The CIA launched an internal investigation. Millions of people were visiting the website.
But then the backlash came. The L.A. Times, embarrassed at having missed a major story on its own turf, and the New York Times, happy to follow its colleagues’ lead in squashing a story that didn’t fit with its own narrative, wielded their mercenary pens against him. Rather than follow up on his exhaustive research, the attack dogs on both coasts pulled his work apart and attacked him for things he hadn’t even said. Although the CIA’s internal investigation would later confirm many of Gary’s own claims, the paper retracted the story and marginalized Gary to the point where he was forced to quit.
San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos’ cowardly retreat from Dark Alliance included deleting the website, and destroying thousands of undistributed CDROM versions of the site. It was the Internet’s first book burning. Among Ceppos’ lame excuses for the latter was that the now-famous Dark Alliance logo (above; how much more straightforward could a logo for a story about the CIA and crack be?) was “too suggestive.” (Inherent in that statement is that Ceppos’ could not find sufficient fault with Webb’s story itself to censor the website.) And so, for a long time, the most talked-about investigative news story of the 1990s was largely inaccessible to world beyond the small daily’s reach.
Even when copies of the text from the published stories were posted on websites and sent out to mailing lists, it was not the same. The Dark Alliance website was truly groundbreaking, one of the first innovations in using the Internet to not just replicate but expand what journalism could be. Rather than remaining static, the articles lived on the website, surrounded by images, sound files, reader discussion forums that Gary participated in, and an entire library of background information supporting Webb’s powerful case against the C.I.A. Millions of readers flocked to these pages, a nearly unheard-of response in those early days of the World Wide Web.
Until the end of his life, Gary was immensely proud of this website and its role in expanding the idea of what Internet journalism could be. In 2002, having gotten his hands on one of the few remaining copies of the CD, he triumphantly resurrected it. At that time, Gary wrote:
What came next is well known. Gary’s story, and the website he and the San Jose Mercury News created to showcase and expand upon it, were initially the talk of the global village. Politicians cited the article in both Sacramento and Washington. The CIA launched an internal investigation. Millions of people were visiting the website.
But then the backlash came. The L.A. Times, embarrassed at having missed a major story on its own turf, and the New York Times, happy to follow its colleagues’ lead in squashing a story that didn’t fit with its own narrative, wielded their mercenary pens against him. Rather than follow up on his exhaustive research, the attack dogs on both coasts pulled his work apart and attacked him for things he hadn’t even said. Although the CIA’s internal investigation would later confirm many of Gary’s own claims, the paper retracted the story and marginalized Gary to the point where he was forced to quit.
San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos’ cowardly retreat from Dark Alliance included deleting the website, and destroying thousands of undistributed CDROM versions of the site. It was the Internet’s first book burning. Among Ceppos’ lame excuses for the latter was that the now-famous Dark Alliance logo (above; how much more straightforward could a logo for a story about the CIA and crack be?) was “too suggestive.” (Inherent in that statement is that Ceppos’ could not find sufficient fault with Webb’s story itself to censor the website.) And so, for a long time, the most talked-about investigative news story of the 1990s was largely inaccessible to world beyond the small daily’s reach.
Even when copies of the text from the published stories were posted on websites and sent out to mailing lists, it was not the same. The Dark Alliance website was truly groundbreaking, one of the first innovations in using the Internet to not just replicate but expand what journalism could be. Rather than remaining static, the articles lived on the website, surrounded by images, sound files, reader discussion forums that Gary participated in, and an entire library of background information supporting Webb’s powerful case against the C.I.A. Millions of readers flocked to these pages, a nearly unheard-of response in those early days of the World Wide Web.
Until the end of his life, Gary was immensely proud of this website and its role in expanding the idea of what Internet journalism could be. In 2002, having gotten his hands on one of the few remaining copies of the CD, he triumphantly resurrected it. At that time, Gary wrote:
“This site, which won a CNET “Best of the Web” award in 1996, was constructed from a CDROM made by the San Jose Mercury News to promote its Internet presence. Thousands of CDs were made, then quietly incinerated. The reason: the website’s logo—a crack smoker superimposed over the CIA seal—had been criticized as “too suggestive.” Fortunately a few CDs were saved from the flames. Despite the passage of time, this webpage remains a brilliant testament to the power of Internet journalism.”
.
Comment