How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb (2014)
I&#x27;ll again volunteer to write the un-fun comment here.<p>The subtext of this Intercept piece isn&#x27;t the abuses CIA or the drug war. It will seem like it is, if you aren&#x27;t already familiar with the Webb story, but that&#x27;s not really what it&#x27;s about. It&#x27;s about the Intercept, and the kinds of people who support the Intercept, and their perspective on the state of journalism and their distaste for the journalistic establishment.<p>The basic Webb story is that he published a bombshell piece for the San Jose Mercury News, establishing a link between the CIA and the crack epidemic of the 1990s, and then had his career destroyed in retaliation.<p>The full Webb story is more complex than that; in fact, it&#x27;s complicated enough that it&#x27;s taught in journalism ethics courses.<p>Webb&#x27;s &quot;Dark Alliance&quot; story was important, but Webb prosecuted the story overzealously. The major news outlets of the time --- including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times --- <i>unanimously</i> tore the piece to shreds. Many of the reporters involved had already been on the national drug smuggling beat and noticed factual problems with the piece. All the newspapers involved --- <i>including Webb&#x27;s own paper</i>, which conceded faults in the story and eventually disavowed it --- noticed that the piece simply failed to present evidence for its most important claim.<p>In the alternate telling of the Webb story, his career fell apart because he became enraptured with the fundamental truth he perceived in the story he was telling (the CIA introduced crack cocaine to black America) and stopped doing the nuts and bolts job of journalism.<p>The Intercept sees this as heroic. The piece we&#x27;re reading is from 2014 because it&#x27;s in support of a hagiographic movie about Webb. Other journalists don&#x27;t see it that way. The Washington Post originally had Walter Pincus write the takedown of &quot;Dark Alliance&quot;, but Pincus is himself a highly problematic figure in American journalism. But this piece by Jeff Leen at WaPo in 2014 doesn&#x27;t have Pincus&#x27;s baggage, and goes into detail about the intersection of Webb&#x27;s reporting and Leen&#x27;s own from the same time period:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;gary-webb-was-no-journalism-hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger-says&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html?utm_term=.a4abae46fc2b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;gary-webb-was-no-jou...</a><p>I&#x27;ll add: pretty much nobody on the left (where I too reside!) likes Leen&#x27;s piece. But their criticisms of it are essentially the same as The Intercept&#x27;s: there&#x27;s a deep truth to Webb&#x27;s story --- surely the CIA must have had some hand in the crack epidemic, we feel it in our bones! --- and it&#x27;s immoral for reporters like Leen to expect Webb to put professionalism ahead of the truth.<p>Whether or not you believe the CIA of the 1980s could have been involved in the US drug trade (and I would put very few things past the CIA of the 2000s, let alone the 1980s), the question of how reporting should work and what the standards of professionalism are is a vital one. A huge fraction of us believe in fundamental truths that transcend reportable fact, of the power of first principles reasoning and of a web of credibility extending from sources to journalists to our favored analysts. I find this world view terrifying, but I understand why other people have it.<p>But it&#x27;s worth reflecting on a little?