The Dark Alliance Between the CIA and the Media

Gary Webb, the brashly independent investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News, famously fell afoul of the CIA and the elite press after writing “Dark Alliance,” the 1996 expose of how Nicaragua’s Contra rebels helped finance their dirty war in the Reagan era by cocaine trafficking in U.S. inner cities – while their CIA backers conveniently looked the other way. At first lionized as a brave truth-teller – particularly in Black communities that were most hard hit by the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s – Webb was soon torn apart by the PR-sensitive CIA and its accomplices at the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Webb and his editors made some minor errors – as all investigative reporters do. Like Watergate heroes Woodward and Bernstein, they are generally able to refine their work as they pursue their prey along the investigative trail. But under ferocious attack from their big media competitors, the Mercury quickly folded and made Webb a scapegoat. With his career in ruins, Webb ended up killing himself in 2004.

This sad story came back to me this weekend when I screened Kill the Messenger the dramatic film about Webb, for my son Nat, who was outraged by the corporate media’s role in Webb’s destruction. Meanwhile I made my own link between the CIA’s targeting of Webb and the FBI’s role in Ernest Hemingway’s mental dissolution (see below).

As Nicholas Schou told The Intercept back in 2014, soon before the film about Webb was released, “Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have. He was never able to recover from that.”

The CIA, added Schou, “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility. They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas. They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded.” 

I feel some residual guilt of my own about Webb’s professional and emotional decline. I was running Salon at the time – and looking back years later, I felt I should’ve hired Webb. Maybe my life raft would’ve saved him.

After Webb’s death, I did the next best thing I could think of – I hired Nick Schou to write Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, one of the titles in the Hot Books investigative series I was editing at the time for independent publisher Skyhorse. Schou had written the book on which Kill the Messenger was based. It was hard to find a Washington-savvy journalist to do Spooked. All the reporters on the national security beat whom I could think of were too, well, spooked to take on the CIA.

But Schou knew something about the dark labyrinth of national security and how its tentacles reached into newsrooms and studios. And, like Webb himself, he worked for a West Coast newspaper that was off the radar of Langley – the OC (Orange County) Weekly. Schou now works for a Santa Barbara newspaper.

 As the Webb tragedy starkly demonstrated, the top national security reporters for the leading newspapers are embedded in the intelligence complex. These reporters are all beholden to the CIA, NSA, FBI etc. for access and even legitimacy. (And some are even secret intelligence assets.) When a journalist with stubborn integrity does emerge on this beat, they are soon forced out – as James Risen was at the New York Times in 2017, after years of butting heads with his editors and publisher over his aggressive coverage of surveillance of U.S. citizens and other dicey subjects. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Risen now works as a national security reporter for The Intercept.

These days you can energetically report on racial injustice, the climate emergency, voting rights, the immigration crisis, right-wing thuggery, gun industry lobbying, labor rights and a vast array of other burning domestic topics. Even the conservative, Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is trying to be more woke on these issues. But national security? Forget about it. It’s still the black hole down which the elite media throws the likes of Gary Webb and Julian Assange.

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