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Citation: The Nation August 24 1998, v267, n6, p10(2)
Author: Cockburn, Alexander
Title: The press devours its own.(Column) by Alexander Cockburn
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COPYRIGHT 1998 The Nation Company Inc.
Two years ago, almost to the day, Gary Webb's series "Dark Alliance," on
contra complicity in the trafficking of drugs into areas such as South Central
Los Angeles, appeared in the San dose Mercury News. The series should have
earned Webb the respect and honor of his profession. Instead, he was subjected
to a merciless campaign of abuse by the most powerful newspapers in the
country and betrayed by his own editor, Jerry Ceppos. Yet Webb's charges were
soundly based and have been buttressed by admissions in reports issued by the
Inspector Generals of both the CIA and the Justice Department. Today, Webb is
a consultant to the State of California, working more or less the same beat in
Sacramento as he had as a reporter for the Mercury News, probing corruption of
stare agencies.
This summer, on June 7, CNN aired a report produced by Jack Smith and April
Oliver charging that US forces had used sarin nerve gas in Laos. Within a
drastically compressed time frame, they experienced the same treatment as
Webb, plus a meretricious attack by a couple of corporate lawyers, Floyd
Abrams and D avid Kohler, brought together by CNN to scrutinize the program
which so violently angered the Pentagon and Henry Kissinger.
Hardly had Smith and Oliver been trashed by CNN before another reporter was
being savaged by his colleagues; disowned by his newspaper, the Cincinnati
Enquirer; and facing ferocious assault in the courts. Back in May, Mike
Gallagher had written a series on a company, Chiquita Brands International,
which under its old name of United Fruit was synonymous with predatory
corporate imperialism. Despite Gallagher's vilification, and assuming the
series is not purged from the historical record by the Enquirer (now acting in
concert with Chiquita's lawyers), his stories will stand comparison with the
best that American muckraking has produced, whether Puter's Looters of the
Public Domain or Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company.
Aggressive reporting always has been risky business, hut most disgusting
about these recent assaults are not the predictable onslaughts of corporate
lawyers--whether Chiquita's legal team or the mealy-mouthed Abrams--but the
venom with which other journalists have turned on their colleagues.
Take Webb. By the time he wrote "Dark Alliance" he had spent nearly two
decades as a reporter delving successfully into corruption involving
politicians and state agencies, in California, Kentucky and Ohio. In what was
the lowest of all the attacks on him, one of the New York Times's more
undistinguished reporters, Iver Peterson, went over Webb's earlier work,
charging that he had "a penchant for self-promotion" and a loose relationship
to fact.
Peterson dredged up four libel suits, two of which had been dismissed and
two settled. Webb says no corrections were required. Peterson also quoted
targets of Webb's investigations, who obviously were not appreciative of the
reporter. They included a judge in Ohio whom Webb's stories identified as
having taken contributions from mob-related organizations. Although there had
never been a retraction, Peterson dutifully cited the judge's comment that
Webb "lied about me." It was as if some reporter had used Richard Nixon as a
reliable source on the reporting techniques of the New York Times. When Webb
wrote a letter to the Times detailing Peterson's numerous errors and
misstatements of fact, the newspaper refused to publish it.
There is, these days, an elaborate machinery for discrediting reporters.
Noticeable in the deployment of this machinery is the low priority given to
assessing the actual content of stories under attack. The underminer's art
consists in seizing on some sup posed dereliction, then using this to
discredit the story as a whole.
In Gallagher's case it was Chiquita's in-house voice mails which Gallagher
allegedly stole. (He insists he was given them by a whistleblower.) Chiquita's
lawyers lunged at this issue. What choice had they? After all, Gallagher had
convincingly charged the company with serious crimes that included use of
chemicals that had injured and killed Honduran workers; use of goon squads and
army units to evict villagers and intimidate workers; ownership titles
designed to conceal illegal corporate control; possible implication in drug
running. Chiquita's only shot was to distract attention by hollering about
voice mail, which in fact revealed Chiquita executives discussing cover-ups to
Gallagher's questions.
The tactic worked splendidly. Reporters and pooh-bahs from journalism
schools and departments of ethics went charging off on the matter of
journalistic propriety without pausing to ask whether this "impropriety" might
be overshadowed by such improprieties as poisoning a worker with
organophosphates, which, according to a Honduran coroner, caused the death of
Greddy Mauricio Valerin Bustos from internal bleeding and brain damage. Only
later did Douglas Frantz of the New York Times go back to the series and point
out the gravity and apparent substance of the charges. By then, the moment was
lost. Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner, one of the nastiest pieces of work on the US
corporate-political scene, had his victory. As Larry Birns and Anna Made Busch
of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs put it, Gallagher is accused of stealing
tapes; Lindner, meanwhile, hijacked US foreign policy, handing over $500,000
to the Democratic National Committee the morning after the White House went to
the World Trade Organization to complain about Chiquita's lack of access to
European markets,
One of the red herrings used against Webb was his supposed failure to
elicit comment from the CIA. In fact, Webb did have a CIA source. "He told
me," Webb says, "be knew who these guys were and he knew they were cocaine
dealers. But he wouldn't go on the record, so I didn't use his stuff in the
story. I mean, one of the criticisms is we didn't include CIA comments. And
the reason we didn't is because they wouldn't return my phone calls and they
denied my Freedom of Information Act requests."
Say the CIA had returned Webb's calls. What would a spokesperson have
offered, other than that the charges were outrageous and untrue? The CIA, an
agency pledged to secrecy, repeatedly deceptive when under subpoena before
government committees, guilty of heinous deeds, is treated by journalists as
if it were some vaguely aboveboard body, like the Supreme Court.
Vultures Like Kurtz
At an hour and not eighteen minutes, CNN's Smith and Oliver would have had,
as they have repeatedly emphasized, an interesting and well-researched case
suggesting that the US military used satin in a raid in Laos. But CNN
executives forced the show into eighteen minutes, removed a crucial qualifier
and then attacked the producers for not providing proof. For a spirited
rebuttal to their assailants, I recommend Smith and Oliver's
seventy-seven-page response to CNN's lawyers.
Whatever the final word may be on this story, there was something absurd
about the Pentagon being treated as a credible witness. Remember, the Pentagon
and the CIA, conducted a "secret" airwar on Laos, which involved dropping high
explosives every eight minutes on average, for many years. At the end of the
war one-third of the population had become refugees. By 1971 the CIA was
practicing a scorched earth policy in Hmong territory against the incoming
Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with herbicides, which killed the rice and
opium crops and also poisoned the Hmong. CIA-patronized journalists later
spread the story that the Hmong were victims of Communist biological warfare.
The Wall Street Journal made an extensive propaganda campaign out of "yellow
rain" in the Reagan years. When these were finally exposed as false, no
journalists lost their jobs or were hauled to court.
Amid the attack on Smith and Oliver, the fact that the Pentagon had an
inventory of 30 million pounds of satin, some of it in Southeast Asia, was
mentioned but never explored.
On the much-discussed matter of CNN's wounded "credibility," the network
has almost always whored for the Pentagon, shamelessly relaying its lies and
evasions. During the Gulf War the weapons designer and military consultant
Pierre Sprey was asked by Bernard Shaw to discuss the performance of high-tech
weapons. The show turned out to be an ambush. Sprey said most of these were
electronic junk, and was assailed by three Pentagon apologists, impugning his
facts and his patriotism. (He retorted that he had two planes in the war, the
A-10 and the F-16. How many had his critics?) Sprey turned out to be entirely
right. CNN had been grossly inaccurate in a crucial aspect of its war
reporting, but on this topic, we've seen no commissions of inquiry by Abrams,
no snide jabs from the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.
This same Kurtz was one of Webb's earliest and most tendentious assailants.
And when the vultures began picking over Smith and Oliver, there was Kurtz
again, putting the producers in the same drawer as The New Republic's faker
Stephen Glass. Kurtz is on the payroll of CNN, for which he does a show, but
the issue of his own self-interest was never raised. Similar questions could
be asked of the work performed by Floyd Abrams for CNN. A veteran of corporate
salvage work, Abrams was paid by CNN to join David Kohler, a CNN vice
president and corporate counsel, in a hasty review of Smith and Oliver's
original broadcast, said review completed at the start of July and resulting
in CNN's recantation.
Abrams now maintains he hoped to exonerate Smith and Oliver. If this was
so, why did he immediately go for help in his review to the Washington snoop
firm of Kroll and hire--as Editor and Publisher disclosed in a good piece by
Allan Wolper--several former career CIA officers? One of Abrams's
investigators, Ted Price, was a onetime head of the CIA's clandestine
services. Another, Brian Jenkins, was a former Green Beret who had briefed
Kissinger several times and was quoted in Newsweek (in a despicably prejudiced
and sexist piece by Evan Thomas and Gregory Vistica) deriding Smith and
Oliver's work.
Why were two corporate lawyers (Abrams works on behalf of big business at
Cahill Gordon) deemed to be qualified to assess a news documentary? What Smith
and Oliver have faced is an endless raising of the bar of proof, otherwise
known as the demand for the "smoking gun." Webb faced the same challenge. Of
course, a signed order for any criminal action by the government almost never
exists. And where there is such written evidence, or something remarkably like
it--like Oliver North's notations on coca paste in his diaries, or a CIA memo
worrying about exposure of the CIA's role in recovering $36,800 in drug money
seized by the San Francisco police and returning it to contra drug
smugglers--Webb's assailants simply passed it over.
There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping
newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging
to corporations or the state. Here we find people like Kurtz, or Marvin Kalb,
who once promoted one of the great nonsensical stories of the Reagan years,
the "Bulgarian connection" in the supposed KGB plot to kill the Pope. There
are always journalists and lawyers available to make the hit on the state's
behalf. Back in the early 1970s one of America's most distinguished soldiers
in Korea, Anthony Herbert, charged war crimes in Vietnam. Just when his
disclosures were becoming a major embarrassment for the government, CBS's 60
Minutes went after him and his credibility. Herbert sued and had the
gratification of seeing the biases of his assailants in CBS and the Pentagon
exposed, though eventually his claims came before that famous whore for the
state (and friend of the Times) Judge Irving Kaufman, who decreed that
Herbert's claims could not go to trial. That servant of the vested media
interests, Floyd Abrams, at one point acted for CBS. Herbert's main antagonist
in the US Army, J. Ross Franklin, went to Florida, where his persuasive
skills, once exercised on Mike Wallace, were directed upon elderly retirees
whom he defrauded, being convicted of that offense in the early 1990s.
How many journalists or organizations associated with the profession
rallied round Webb, or Gallagher, or Smith and Oliver? FAIR has done great
work on all three cases. Pacifica's Democracy Now show has done fine reporting
and commentary. But have any large mainstream institutional voices been raised
in the defense of the beleaguered reporters and producers?
Daniel Schorr put it well in an excellent NPR commentary on the Chiquita
affair. Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous
to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a
Fortune 500 member like Chiquita, or the conduct of the military in Southeast
Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone.
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