For a truer analysis of the performance of Webb and US corporate-funded media, listen to Doug Henwood's 23 Oct 2014 interview of Ryan Grim on "Behind the News" (starting ~12 min into

http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20141023-Thu1200.mp3

ending ~38 min). Henwood has a particularly pointed bit of media criticism, toward the end of the piece: "there's a kind of template [applied by USCFM to reporting of unacceptable-but-true facts:] it's outrageous and irresponsible for you to say these things, we knew them all already, and besides they're not true." (Et tu, OTM!) The application of that template by people like Howard Kurtz onto people like Ed Snowden is discussed.

I'm so disappointed with OTM and its coverage of this story.
Seems as though important information was omitted.

Found your piece on Gary Webb very slanted, and treating his suicide like Oh well he suffered from depression was so callous. Listen to Mario Mario's interview on 10/9, and democracy Now the same day. Please revisit this story and give it the time and research it deserves.

I think everyone including Mr Roche has a very good grasp of facts and reality on what Gary Webb described in his pieces. Unfortunately what HL Mencken wrote in 1921 still rings true and people who really have a heart and skill in right place will pay the price if they are not for sale. The issue is Garfield and Gladstone are hacks and they are just not interested in comprehensive research on any issues as long as it contradicts a narrative that is already pre-formed and agreed upon. I got OTM once with its pants down with their story on Kickstarter which is a fabrication and fraud and WNYC response to the issue was just unbelievably brazen and arrogant. As far as Gladstone's work one can look at her "reporting" from Moscow for NPR in 1990s and see the trajectory that is ALL NPR ALL THE TIME.

Democracy Now! today has a *much* better piece[1] on Gary Webb and "Dark Alliance" (from 41:44 into the audio[2] to the end, ~17 min), with Robert Parry[3] (who first published on the CIA-contra-crack connection).

[1] http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/9/kill_the_messenger_resurrects_gary_webb
[2] http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/dn2014-1009-1.mp3
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Parry_%28journalist%29

This Garfield is a character. His disingenuous introduction makes it more obvious that he's not only ignorant on the subject but a shill. Then again, it is NPR.

The CIAs own report revealed that everything Webb said was true and, in fact, everything was worse than he'd even described it. The drug ring was bigger than he'd imagined. The CIA had much more direct involvement in/knowledge of what was going on. The DEA was protecting the traffickers from arrest. All while crack was flooding into black communities.

Considering that the above is readily in reach of anyone who knows how to use a search engine, it's truly bizarre that Garfield opens with some entirely misleading nonsense about "rumors" and Devereaux echoes the lazy, dishonest inanity of his Intercept piece, beating the drum about how Webb neglected to tell the CIA's side of the story. Webb insisted that he did call the CIA, that he even had a source inside the Agency, but he didn't use anything the guy told him because he wouldn't go on the record. Devereaux never mentions that Webb submitted FOIA requests to all the agencies involved and that they were all denied. I am at pains to see why a reporter who has been denied access to records which later vindicated his story entirely is under any obligation to seek a statement from one of the Agency's PR flaks. Nonetheless Webb claims he did and in light of the FOIA requests, I can't see why he would not.

Devereaux's tedious focus on this truly trivial detail is in line with his sympathetic treatment of the Agency overall. Considering the extent of malfeasance and recklessness on the CIAs part, both toward the Nicaraguan people and those living in crack-ravaged black communities in the US, Devereaux's sympathy would be mystifying were it not entirely consistent with the servility to the CIA that infects US media and which provoked the original witch hunt when Webb's story first appeared.

Webb's series is fascinating and the story of the what happened after it was published has been told far better by reporters who aren't dull, lazy and compromised in the way that Devereaux is. I recommend that listeners seek both out.

Great comments from Tom Roche, you're completely correct. Here's a recent breakdown of all the lazy cut-and-paste blogging Devereaux did at The Intercept to play down the fantastic work Webb did connecting these seemingly disparate dots. His backings up of Garfield's "gaping holes" characterization is unpacked:

http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-intercepts-ryan-devereaux-is-no-gary-webb/

Hey, kids! Try this do-it-yourself media criticism--it's easy as one-two-three!

1. Read the Devereaux piece[1], on which this interview is supposedly based, about Webb's reporting and its suppression.
2. Re-listen to this interview[2].
3. Ask yourself: how is it possible that the same reporting which, Devereaux points out[3], was well-supported by previous and subsequent declassified information, can be the same as that characterized by Garfield as "rumor" subject to "debunking" due to its "gaping holes"?

For extra credit, evaluate the quote from Webb that ends Devereaux's piece[1]:

"[Prior to 'Dark Alliance'] I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."

[1] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/
[2] http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm100314c.mp3
[3] Devereaux quotes Nick Schou, author of the book "Kill the Messenger"[4]: "[Webb] documented for the first time in the history of U.S. media how CIA complicity with Central American drug traffickers had actually impacted the sale of drugs north of the border in a very detailed, accurate story. [That's] the take-away."
[4] http://books.google.com/books/about/Kill_the_Messenger.html?id=2OZJLsqxYasC

I think the segment buried the lede by establishing toward the end that Webb's less sensational actual reporting, as opposed to the elaborations and deductions made from it by others, seems to have been substantially correct. I realise that your resources are limited, and so that your group couldn't be expected to do an exhaustive study of what actually happened, but surely that has already been done elsewhere, and I'd expect at diverse enough hands that some correction for bias would be possible.

That is, in reporting the story of a journalist ruined over the question of the veracity of their [sic] actual story, what could be more relevant, and so more necessary to be established early-on in the piece, that whether the journalist were right, at least in essence and (in this case) more so.

(Note: based on what I read at the time and my biases born of information good and [perhaps] bad, I never for a moment believed that the C.I.A. would intentionally addict black American people to crack, as that would require that they gave a damn about black American people---and, similarly, I found it entirely credible that they wouldn't care that their collusion allowed others to more easily do so, in effect.)

I agree with the above critique. I thought this piece was weak, oddly elliptical on the basic facts of the case and misleading on Garfield's part.

A much better re-examination of the CIA, Webb, and the role of the MSM was done by Robert Parry here:

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/26/the-ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover-up/

Devereaux: "credible reporters did find holes in the reporting."

Garfield: "For instance, there's not a whole lot of evidence that Gary Webb contacted the CIA for comment."[1]

Wait a minute: how is it negligent to *not* notify a known clandestine criminal organization that one intends to report its criminal activity? After all,

* that the CIA had financed "covert actions" by selling drugs had been known for over 20 years before 1996[2], and reinforced by the more-recent Kerry Committee report[3].

* that US political-control agencies (including the FBI[4] and NSA[5]) had targeted critical US journalists had been known since at least the Church Committee[6].

Sooo ... that Gary Webb did not paint a target on his back was wrong ... how? And, by the way,

Garfield: "[this] is a huge red flag, is it not?"

Devereaux: "It's pretty much standard practice to reach out to the agencies that are in question when you're making bold claims"[7]

When did *that* become "standard practice"? Why isn't it enough to for one's claims to just be *true*?

This is what bugs me *most* about this piece. Though Garfield never quite comes out and says it, he strongly suggests, from the beginning of the piece[8], that Webb's reporting was mostly false. And though Devereaux never quite comes out and says it, he seems to suggest that Webb's reporting was mostly true.[9]

Guys: I've got a hot tip for a bold new journalistic norm: gather and assemble facts the best you can and report them. Period.

Journalists shouldn't be required to get comments from "both sides" (they certainly don't do that now when foreign reporting--why should US targets be special?), nor should they be required to have their material vetted by one of the interested parties (esp if that party is known to target journalists, or engage in criminal conspiracies, or both). Journalists should be *required* to make sound claims: empirically-justified premises connected by valid reasoning. Everything else is gravy!

And how 'bout a fresh new approach to media criticism: when checking a story, *first* examine if its claims are sound, *then* critique its style and procedure. I know, it's pretty much *not* standard practice for OTM, but ... just give it a shot.

[1] ~5:40 into http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm100314c.mp3
[2] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Committee_report
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
[7] ~6:00 into http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm100314c.mp3
[8] Garfield: "Rumors don't hafta be true to generate a reaction; they merely hafta sound plausible."
[9] E.g., Devereaux ~7:53: "The CIA internal reviews of their own operations revealed that, for more than a decade, the CIA was not reporting its assets' involvement in drug trafficking."