Measuring the Messenger

A drugs and media commentary — by Scott Thomas Anderson

It seems every time I tell someone I’m a journalist, they feel inclined — maybe even obligated — to chime in with some variation on the lament that “true investigative reporting” is dying.

Such exchanges seem especially relevant as the film “Kill the Messenger” hits store shelves and HBO. Starring Jeremy Renner, it portrays the true story of a Northern California journalist who met his end in 2004; and while it shows the very best of some newsroom personalities, and the very worst of others, “Kill the Messenger” is an important film because media outlets have become even more skittish in their coverage priorities since the events that it depicts.

For news junkies, the name Gary Webb may not register, but the work Webb did in 1996 to uncover a link between CIA-backed Nicaraguan insurgents in Central America and crack-cocaine being smuggled into inner-city neighborhoods in California was a watershed moment. It was also a pathfinder for the moral ambiguities we continue to discover in our national security apparatus. Despite the fact that Webb’s journalistic findings were later reinforced by congressional investigations, he was not rewarded for breaking this story for the San Jose Mercury News; rather his career was effectively destroyed over it.

Webb’s last fulltime job was for Sacramento News & Review. When “Kill the Messenger” was first released, his former SNR coworker Melinda Welsh published a story revisiting the questions that fans of investigative reporting should have when it comes to the assassination of Webb’s career. Why did Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury take credit for his findings at first, and then abandon him when the CIA lashed out over the story? Why did the biggest newspapers in the nation spend their resources trying to discredit Webb rather than follow up on the disturbing nature of his probe? For me, another wrenching question is this: Why didn’t any newspaper crime reporters — journalists who understand that some stories can’t be broken without the use of criminal sources — stand up to defend Webb’s right to rely on testimony from the drug world in context of reporting on the CIA? After all, if we’ve learned anything from the recent Edward Snowden saga, it’s that the CIA and NSA are not agencies that report on themselves.

If you think these questions are “inside baseball” for myself and my colleagues, think again. Investigative reporting can only continue if editors and media ownership groups understand readers demand watchdog coverage. If various newspapers have highly-paid consultants insisting they dumb down content, rely on mindless, forgettable features and salacious gossip, and generally pander to the lowest I.Q. point — and if, at the same time, they don’t hear any different from readers en mass — they’ll continue to push what’s left of the newspaper industry choke itself to death with mediocrity.

And while “Kill the Messenger” is a story about a reporter being taken apart by the forces of cowardice, envy and careerism within the ranks of his peers, I believe that Webb would have found some protection if readers had spoken out more forcefully.

Of course, there absolutely was a group of readers back in 1996 who were highly appreciative of Webb’s reporting and making their voices heard in favor of it — i.e., families from the poorest neighborhoods in South Central Los Angels where crack addiction was exploding on epic levels. But those were not the particular kind of readers America’s newspapers were listening for, which is the other poignant if pathetic lesson of “Kill the Messenger.” The big newspapers in California and Washington D.C., supposedly the civic alarm systems for all communities, were apparently tone deaf to the voices of those devastated neighborhoods. For those readers, Webb was the only journalist who would listen.