Calhoun's Cannons for Oct 27, 2014
"You get the most flak when you're right above the
target."
Kill the Messenger
The late investigative reporter, Gary Webb, should have been
the wake-up call, a warning bell that a new era had arrived. But the real meaning of his life and death
got lost among the din. And remains lost
to this day. Which was the point.
The era Webb was writing about was Reagan's, the War On Drugs was running
full-blast, as was the CIA and their
"dirty-little wars," various black-ops being run under the public's
radar. Webb was what's known in the popular imagination and in Hollywood
portrayals as a "dogged reporter."
One of those passionate post-Nixon, post Watergate, post Woodward and
Bernstein guys who actually believed that journalism was an honorable
profession. He was working for the San Jose Mercury News, a smallish paper
that had a pretty solid reputation, a paper that Hollywood
would portray as "scrappy."
Until Gary
stumbled on a story that seemed inconceivable
at the time -- that during the '80s the U.S.
government, namely the CIA knew/ had to have
known/ knowingly was laundering drug money (specifically cocaine funneled into L.A.
and most pointedly and politically explosively into black South Central L.A.,
via a major drug-dealer, "Freeway" Ricky Ross). Gary tracked the
story down and in 1996 the Merc News
ran it and before anyone had invented the word "going viral," the
story went viral.
At the time, I remember reading the story and I watched in
amazement at the growing firestorms, and headlines by the other "big
papers" -- the Los Angeles Times,
Washington Post, New York Times -- that followed: accusations that the CIA
had deliberately funneled crack cocaine into the black community in order to
destroy it, that the CIA itself was selling
the drugs to pay for it's secret Nicaraguan "Contra" wars, each claim
more outrageous than the other and all being laid at Gary's feet. Then came the shift in focus from denial to a
growing criticism of Gary's story,
and finally Gary himself, until the ultimate betrayal by his own paper, which
threw him under the bus in an effort to save itself.. All of which is very well portrayed in the
new film, "Kill the Messenger," staring Jeremy Renner as Webb.
However, throughout this media assault, I kept noticing one constant,
repeating small point that consistently got steamrolled: The accusations and claims making the
headlines and being debunked, were NOT what Gary
had written. He never said what the news
stories were reporting he said. But
instead of taking Gary's lead and
running with the story, taking it further, digging deeper, the media stopped
looking and just repeated the straw-man lies until that false narrative became
"true." Then they ran with that.
And continued to run with it for years whenever events
caused the story to be referenced again.
Fake "facts," like some Urban Myth, endlessly repeating. It
was a surreal phenomenon to watch at the time and I kept thinking that surely,
a big paper like the L.A. Times would discover its error and
correct their own record.
Years later, when the CIA
'fessed up that they were doing exactly what Webb reported -- looking the other
way as drug money was laundered to buy guns for their "contra"
operations -- the L.A. Times buried
that story way back in the middle of the paper in a single column and it wasn't
until 2006 that they finally acknowledge their own complicity in the falsification
of that story. But by that time, Gary
was dead, his death ruled a suicide, his career destroyed, his reputation
sullied; death by a thousand cuts administered, not by his enemies, but by his
professional colleagues.
For a man who considered journalism to be an honorable
profession, it was an unimaginable betrayal, and is perfectly represented by
the film's ending: Gary, his career
already in ruins, is shown accepting an "Excellence in Journalism
Award." The bitter irony was not
lost on the audience.
Tragically, the public didn't pay attention to what had just
happened with Gary, a dangerous change in how the media/corporate/government
complex operates that continues (on steroids) to play out today: the rise of
mega-corporate news organizations, the too-cozy willingness of that media to act as a lapdog to government,
not a watchdog, the willingness of both media and the public to focus on the
messenger, not the message, the ease with which a narrative can be falsified by
changing even one word, and the willingness of the public to "buy"
that false narrative, even at their own peril.
What happened to Gary Webb was the template for how easy it is to get away with it all --
crash an economy, start wars on lies, spy on millions of Americans, you name
it. The list is endless but the M.O. is
the same: Falsify the narrative, kill the messenger, distract the audience
until it loses interest, then re-write history.
Simple.
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