The scandal was a dirty secret that was best kept out of public view and away from a thorough discussion. After all, the journalistic careerists who had played along with the US government's Contras defenders had advanced inside their media corporations. As good team players, they had moved up to be bureau chiefs and other news executives. They had no interest in revisiting one of the big stories that they had downplayed as a prerequisite for their success.
Pariahs
Meanwhile, those journalists who had
exposed these national security crimes mostly saw their careers sink or
at best slide sideways. We were regarded as "pariahs" in our
profession. We were "conspiracy theorists," even though our journalism
had proven to be correct again and again.
The Post's admission that the Contra-cocaine scandal "didn't
get the attention it deserved" didn't lead to any soul-searching
inside the U.S. news media, nor did it result in any rehabilitation of
the careers of the reporters who had tried to put a spotlight on this
especially vile secret.
I was also hired by PBS Frontline to investigate whether there had been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal -- whether those arms-for-hostage deals in the mid-1980s had been preceded by contacts between Reagan's 1980 campaign staff and Iran, which was then holding 52 Americans hostage and essentially destroying Jimmy Carter's reelection hopes. [For more on that topic, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
In 1995, frustrated by the pervasive triviality that had come to define American journalism -- and acting on the advice and with the assistance of my oldest son Sam -- I turned to a new medium and launched the Internet's first investigative news magazine, known as Consortiumnews.com. The Web site became a way for me to put out well-reported stories that my former mainstream colleagues seemed determined to ignore or mock.
So, when Gary Webb called me that day in 1996, I knew that he was charging into some dangerous journalistic terrain, though he thought he was simply pursuing a great story. After his call, it struck me that perhaps the only way for the Contra-cocaine story to ever get the attention that it deserved was for someone outside the Washington media culture to do the work.
When Webb's "Dark Alliance" series finally appeared in late August 1996, it initially drew little attention. The major national news outlets applied their usual studied indifference to a topic that they had already judged unworthy of serious attention.
It was also clear that the media careerists who had climbed up their corporate ladders by accepting the conventional wisdom that the Contra-cocaine story was a conspiracy theory weren't about to look back down and admit that they had contributed to a major journalistic failure to inform and protect the American public.
Hard to Ignore
But Webb's story proved hard to ignore. First, unlike the work that Barger and I did for AP back in the mid-1980s, Webb's series wasn't just a story about drug traffickers in Central America and their protectors in Washington. It was about the on-the-ground consequences, inside the United States, of that drug trafficking, how the lives of Americans were blighted and destroyed as the collateral damage of a U.S. foreign policy initiative.
In other words, there were real-life American victims, and they were concentrated in African-American communities. That meant the ever-sensitive issue of race had been injected into the controversy. Anger from black communities spread quickly to the Congressional Black Caucus, which started demanding answers.
Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News, which was the local newspaper for Silicon Valley, had posted documents and audio on its state-of-the-art Internet site. That way, readers could examine much of the documentary support for the series.
It also meant that the traditional "gatekeeper" role of the major newspapers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times -- was under assault. If a regional paper like the Mercury News could finance a major journalistic investigation like this one, and circumvent the judgments of the editorial boards at the Big Three, then there might be a tectonic shift in the power relations of the U.S. news media.
There was something revolutionary about this breakdown of the established order. This combination of factors led to the next phase of the Contra-cocaine battle: the counterattack.
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