Jeremy Renner Ready To ‘Kill The Messenger’ In Film About CIA-Smeared Journo Gary Webb

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305. 11.05.14 Kill the Messenger:' A Shocking Story with Media Backlash

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/nation/kill-the-messenger-a-shocking-story-with-media-backlash


Kill the Messenger:' A Shocking Story with Media Backlash
Wednesday, 05 November 2014 11:36

kill_the_messenger_poster_optBY JOE TYRRELL
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Although it has a timely theme and good performances from an estimable cast, much of the media would prefer that you ignore “Kill the Messenger.”

With a limited release in New Jersey, the movie tells the shocking tale of a 1980s scandal involving cocaine shipments into the United States. Then, the equally disturbing tale of a media scandal to suppress that news after it got out in the 1990s.

The riveting Jeremy Renner plays the late Gary Webb, a real-life reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in 1995. He revealed that California-based Nicaraguans had imported cocaine and used the profits to fund CIA-backed insurgents as well as to enrich themselves.

And then the national news media, notably the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post ... which had been badly beaten on the story ... launched disinformation campaigns to discredit Webb and bury the news.

The previous year, the Los Angeles Times had done a major profile of “Freeway Rick” Ross, a notorious Los Angeles crack dealer facing a possibly life sentence.

Today, you can follow Ross on Facebook and Twitter, where he touts “Kill the Messenger” as a “great film.” But in 1994, reporter Jesse Katz had portrayed Ross in the newspaper as the “one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick."

gary-webbjpg-5b305982b9b2f2da-1_opt"Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived," Katz confidently reported.

Webb discovered the LA Times had missed the bigger story: Ross and others were being supplied by Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, a prominent Nicaraguan and backer of CIA-supported “contras” trying to overthrow that country’s government. Blandón was “the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California,” Webb wrote.

After a year of work, Webb and his editors turned it into a three-day, multi-part series, “Dark Alliance.” You can read the stories here: http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/shock/start.htm

There were problems. As the movie makes clear, Webb lacked sources within the intelligence community to confirm his findings. He relied on law enforcement and legal sources, and incomplete disclosures by Blandón and others connected to the drug trade.

His editors chopped the stories, removing nuances. They hyped the CIA angle and the impact of Blandón’s crack imports beyond the significant but limited numbers Webb documented. What they did not include was simple fairness, a response from the CIA.

Journalism is a highly imperfect business. Any story is simply a snapshot: what’s in view to this reporter at this time. Newspapers with closer connections to the intelligence community could have taken the usual approach, improving upon Webb’s start. What actually happened comprises the second half of “Kill the Messenger,” which is based on the book by Nick Schou, a Los Angeles-based reporter, as well as Webb’s work.

The series was a huge hit, attracting attention around the nation because it was available on the Times Mercury’s website in an era when many newspapers were suspicious of that new-fangled Internet. It caused particular alarm in African-American communities hit by crack cocaine and unequal drug sentencing.

But it was even more upsetting to Shelby Coffey 3rd, then the editor of the Los Angeles Times. He quickly assigned 17 staffers, not to investigate, but to debunk Webb’s stories. They included Katz, who in good Ministry of Truth fashion now wrote that no one, certainly not poor little Rick Ross, could be called central to the upsurge of crack cocaine.

The New York Times and Washington Post quickly joined the LA Times on the attack. Rather than the on-the-record quotes and documents Webb used in his stories, they relied significantly on unidentified CIA sources or their own pontificating about why poor benighted black folks are so susceptible to conspiracy theories.

Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive had criticized the shortcomings in Webb’s stories, but told the American Journalism Review the reporter “was unfairly the victim of piling on.” Kornbluh was particularly dismayed by the LA Times response.

“I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made, on their gullibility, on the support they offered the CIA… as well as getting a bunch of their facts wrong," he said.

Many of the attacks centered on a straw man, the false claim that Webb had accused the agency of being directly responsible for the crack epidemic, instead of merely looking the other way while its allies did business.

But public outcry eventually forced the CIA to respond. Its inspector general acknowledged that by 1981, the CIA already knew that a wing of the contras “had decided to engage in drug-trafficking activities to the United States to raise funds for its activities.” Without mentioning Blandón, the report confirmed it was the contra group he had supported.

The CIA report also revealed that between 1982 and 1995, the agency did not report any drug dealing by its assets, an arrangement made with the Department of Justice. The NY Times and WashPost minimized the report. The LA Times did not mention it for months. YOU CAN READ THE REPORT HERE.

So there is a certain black humor in Manohla Dargis’ review of the movie in The NY Times, which manages to avoid any mention of her employer. The paper’s media critic, David Carr, does in an article whose headline and subhead accurately reflect his confusion, calling Webb both “disgraced” and “wrongly disgraced.”

Kenneth Turan is more forthright in the LA Times, which in a 2006 piece by Schou had belatedly admitted its thuggish response to Webb. (Even Katz reportedly called the attacks “tawdry” in a radio interview.)

While other newspapers “criticized the shakier parts of his story,” Turan writes, the attacks proved “the truth of what one of Webb's sources tells him: ‘You get the most flak when you're right above the target.’”

But in a flop sweat over its greatly diminished brand, the once-estimable Washington Post has gone after the movie twice.

“This slightly overheated drama begins and ends with innuendo. In between is a generous schmear of insinuation,” Michael O’Sullivan writes in a review that combines innuendo and insinuation. But at least he praises Renner’s performance.

Then there is another attack on Webb by a long-time antagonist, Jeff Leen, which can be read here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no-journalism-hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger-says/2014/10/17/026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html

Notice in particular Leen’s description of then-Sen. John Kerry’s 1980s subcommittee on terrorism, which “seemed to be the final word on the matter.” So Leen, who had written about the Medellin cartel, was suddenly incurious. “And then Gary Webb came along.”

But aside from the Associated Press and the San Francisco Examiner, the major media largely ignored Kerry's investiation. That was the complaint of Jack Blum, the chief counsel for that committee and the movie’s “Fred Weil." Somehow, Leen does not mention that or this Blum quote about Webb:

“The disease that led the mainstream media to dump all over Gary Webb is the same disease that led the media to be so uncritical about the Iraq war. This guy was abused for doing his job.”

Leen does quote Schou on the origin of the crack epidemic, “The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors,” who got nice promotions.

But Leen ignores Schou’s finding that “Webb never actually stated that the CIA had intentionally started the crack epidemic… Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the contras were dealing cocaine, and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop them. He was right...”

Leen did not even mention a column by Geneva Overholser, the Post’s own ombudsman, who during the paper’s attacks on Webb cited “strong previous evidence that the CIA at least chose to overlook Contra involvement in the drug trade ... Would that we had welcomed the surge of public interest as an occasion to return to a subject the Post and the public had given short shrift.”

One might ask why the Post now turns to such a master of the cherry-picked quote to rebut “Kill the Messenger.” Leen is the paper’s assistant managing editor for investigations.