In other words, on the issue of Contra drug trafficking, there was a confluence of interests between the Reagan administration, which was determined to protect the Contras' public image at all costs, and senior news executives, who wanted to adopt a "patriotic" posture after convincing themselves that the country shouldn't endure another wrenching battle over wrongdoing by a Republican president.
The popular image of courageous editors standing up for their reporters in the face of government pressure was not the reality, at least not where the Contras were concerned.
Reverse Rewards
So, instead of a process that outsiders might imagine -- where journalists who dig out tough stories get rewarded -- the actual system worked in the opposite way. There was a steady weeding out of journalists who wouldn't toe the line.
The clever careerists in the news business quickly grasped that the smart play when it came to the Contras was either to be a booster or at least to pooh-pooh evidence of the Contras' wanton brutality in the field and especially their moonlighting as drug traffickers.
The same rules applied to congressional investigators. Anyone who pried into the dark corners of the Nicaraguan Contra war faced ridicule, as happened to Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts when he followed up the AP stories with a courageous investigation that discovered more ties between cocaine traffickers and the Contras.
When his report was released in 1989, its
findings were greeted with yawns and smirks. News articles were buried
deep inside the major newspapers and the stories focused more on
alleged flaws in his investigation than on his discoveries about Contra
cocaine trafficking.
For his hard work, Newsweek summed up the prevailing
"conventional wisdom" on Senator Kerry by calling him a "randy
conspiracy buff." Being associated with breaking the Contra-cocaine
story was also regarded as a major black mark on my own career.
To function in this upside-down world, where reality and perception often clashed, the big news outlets developed a kind of cognitive dissonance that accepted two contradictory positions.
On one level, the news outlets did accept the undeniable reality that some of the Contras and their backers, including the likes of Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, were implicated in the drug trade, but then simultaneously treated this reality as a conspiracy theory.
Squaring the Circle
Only occasionally did a major news outlet seek to square this circle, such as during Noriega's drug-trafficking trial in 1991 when U.S. prosecutors called as a witness Colombian Medellà n cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who -- along with implicating Noriega -- testified that the cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, an allegation first unearthed by Senator Kerry.
"The Kerry hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991, acknowledged. "The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."
However, the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry's hearings had been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past neglect.
And, everything quickly returned to the status quo in which the desired perception of the noble Contras trumped the clear reality of their criminal activities.
So, from 1991 until 1996, the Contra-cocaine scandal remained a disturbing story not just about the skewed moral compass of the Reagan administration but also about how the U.S. news media had lost its way.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).