Will Hollywood Give Him Last Word Against the CIA’s Media Apologists? The Resurrection of Gary Webb
October 07, 2014
Will Hollywood Give Him Last Word Against the CIAs Media Apologists?
The Resurrection of Gary Webb
by JEFF COHEN
Its been almost a decade since once-luminous investigative journalist Gary Webb extinguished his own life.
Its been 18 years since Webbs Dark Alliance series in the San Jose Mercury News exploded across a new medium the Internet and definitively linked crack cocaine in Los Angeles and elsewhere to drug traffickers allied with the CIAs rightwing Contra army in Nicaragua. Webbs revelations sparked anger across the country, especially in black communities.
But the 1996 series (which was accompanied by unprecedented online documentation) also sparked one of the most ferocious media assaults ever on an individual reporter a less-than-honest backlash against Webb by elite newspapers that had long ignored or suppressed evidence of CIA/Contra/cocaine connections.
The assault by the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times drove Webb out of the newspaper business, and ultimately to his death.
Beginning this Friday, the ghost of Gary Webb will haunt his tormenters from movie screens across the country, with the opening of the dramatic film Kill the Messenger based partly on Webbs 1998 Dark Alliance book.
The movie dramatizes Webbs investigation of Contra-allied Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon (whose drug activities were apparently protected for reasons of U.S. national security) and their connection to L.A.s biggest crack dealer, Freeway Ricky Ross.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/07/the-resurrection-of-gary-webb/

MinM
(2,650 posts)The trailer looks good..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017204130
Peter Landesman acting as the screenwriter though is a red flag..
Judi Lynn
(162,815 posts)MinM
(2,650 posts)By Nick Schou Thursday, May 30 2013

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.
Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, "Dark Alliance," in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.'s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua...
No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. But on May 22, Katz, who has penned a Los Angeles magazine story hitting newsstands now that resurfaces the Gary Webb episode, essentially apologized, on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk With Larry Mantle.
Katz was discussing "Freeway Rick Is Dreaming" in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine, in which he profiles Ricky Ross, the notorious crack-cocaine dealer with whom Katz has a long, tortured relationship. In 1994, shortly after Ross got out of prison for coke trafficking, Katz wrote that Ross was the mastermind of America's crack-cocaine epidemic, at his peak pushing half a million rocks a day.
"If there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick," Katz's 1994 L.A. Times article claimed. "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived."
But Webb's 1996 Mercury News series exposed a startling fact: Ross' mentor and chief supplier, who helped him climb to the top of the crack trade, was Nicaraguan exile Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes. Blandón belonged to one of Nicaragua's most prominent political families and was a major backer of the "contras" a rebel movement secretly created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista rebels...
http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/news/gary-webb-jess-katz-crack/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025272048#post68
Judi Lynn
(162,815 posts)MinM
(2,650 posts)Judi Lynn
(162,815 posts)Judi Lynn
(162,815 posts)Journalist Gary Webb Gets the Last Word in "Kill the Messenger"
Jeff Cohen from Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College says Webb exposed how the CIA supported the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua by trafficking cocaine, leading to an epidemic of crack use in major US cities - October 10, 14
[center]
~ snip ~
COHEN: Well, the important issue is that big elite newspapers and magazines had suppressed the Contra story beginning from its eruption back in 1985 during the Contra War, when the CIA, under Reagan, had organized and funded, supervised a Contra army, a right-wing army to try to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua, the Sandinista government.
And beginning in 1985, Brian Barger and Bob Perry at Associated Press had exposed that some of the Contras and their allies were engaging in drug trafficking. And the big newspapers wouldn't pick it up. Move to 1987, where Congressman Rangel, the head the House Narcotics Committee, does a preliminary investigation of whether the CIA's Contras or their allies are trafficking in cocaine. And Congressman Rangel says, we need a more serious investigation. The Washington Post distorted that. He said, here's a letter to the editor that corrects the record, and The Washington Post refused to publish it.
That same year, 1987, Time magazine, two reporters have worked up this story linking the CIA's Contras or their associates to drug trafficking, and they can't get it into the magazine. And one of the reporters is pulled aside by an editor and says, look, Time magazine--this is a word-for-word quote--Time magazine "is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine."
So you could go on and on. Senator John Kerry did an investigation. He found that Contra allies were engaged in drug trafficking, and they apparently were protected by reasons of so-called national security. That was in 1989. So the mainstream media has--and when that happened, by the way, Newsweek called Senator Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."
More:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12510
Archae
(46,980 posts)Can't anyone do a straight documentary on this topic, instead of some "docudrama," because they are notorious for simply lying.