Cross-posted from Consortium News
The mainstream news media's reaction to the new movie, "Kill the Messenger," has been tepid, perhaps not surprising given that the MSM comes across as the film's most unsympathetic villain as it crushes journalist Gary Webb for digging up the Contra-cocaine scandal in the mid-1990s after the major newspapers thought they had buried it in the 1980s.
Not that the movie is without other villains, including drug traffickers and "men in black" government agents. But the drug lords show some humanity and even honesty as they describe how they smuggled drugs and shared the proceeds with the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, President Ronald Reagan's beloved "freedom fighters."
By contrast, the news executives for the big newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, come across as soul-less careerists determined to maintain their cozy relations with the CIA's press office and set on shielding their failure to take on this shocking scandal when it was playing out in the 1980s.
So, in the 1990s, they concentrated their fire on Webb for alleged imperfections in his investigative reporting rather than on U.S. government officials who condoned and protected the Contra drug trafficking as part of Reagan's Cold War crusade.
Webb's cowardly editors at the San Jose Mercury News also come across badly as frightened bureaucrats, cringing before the collective misjudgment of the MSM and crucifying their own journalist for the sin of challenging the media's wrongheaded conventional wisdom.
That the MSM's "group think" was upside-down should no longer be in doubt. In fact, the Contra-cocaine case was conclusively established as early as 1985 when Brian Barger and I wrote the first story on the scandal for the Associated Press. Our sourcing included some two dozen knowledgeable people including Contras, Contra supporters and U.S. government sources from the Drug Enforcement Administration and even Reagan's National Security Council staff.
But the Reagan administration didn't want to acknowledge this inconvenient truth, knowing it would sink the Contra war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. So, after the AP story was published, President Reagan's skillful propagandists mounted a counter-offensive that elicited help from editors and reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets.
Thus, in the 1980s, the MSM treated the Contra-cocaine scandal as a "conspiracy theory" when it actually was a very real conspiracy. The MSM's smug and derisive attitude continued despite a courageous investigation headed by Sen. John Kerry which, in 1989, confirmed the AP reporting and took the story even further. For his efforts, Newsweek dubbed Kerry "a randy conspiracy buff."
This dismissive treatment of the scandal even survived the narcotics trafficking trial of Panama's Manuel Noriega in 1991 when the U.S. government called witnesses who implicated both Noriega and the Contras in the cocaine trade.
The Power of "Group Think"
What we were seeing was the emerging power of the MSM's "group think," driven by conformity and careerism and resistant to both facts and logic. Once all the "smart people" of Official Washington reached a conclusion -- no matter how misguided -- that judgment would be defended at nearly all costs, since none of these influential folks wanted to admit error.
That's what Gary Webb ran into in 1996 when he revived the Contra-cocaine scandal by focusing on the devastation that one Contra drug pipeline caused by feeding into the production of crack cocaine. However, for the big newspapers to admit they had ducked such an important story -- and indeed had aided in the government's cover-up -- would be devastating to their standing.
So, the obvious play was to nitpick Webb's reporting and to destroy him personally, which is what the big newspapers did and what "Kill the Messenger" depicts. The question today is: how will the MSM react to this second revival of the Contra-cocaine scandal?
Of the movie reviews that I read, a few were respectful, including the one in the Los Angeles Times where Kenneth Turan wrote:
"The story Webb related in a series of articles ... told a still-controversial tale that many people did not want to hear: that elements in the CIA made common cause with Central American drug dealers and that money that resulted from cocaine sales in the U.S. was used to arm the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua."Although the CIA itself confirmed, albeit years later, that this connection did in fact exist, journalists continue to argue about whether aspects of Webb's stories overreached."
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