The Narco News Bulletin
"The
Name of Our Country is América"
--
Simón Bolívar
Letter-to-the-Publisher
October
23, 2000
Gary
Webb Speaks
Al:
A friend emailed me your latest piece on Peter McFarren and the APME's
non-response to your perfectly legitimate questions. I was amused
to see my
contretemps with Jerry Ceppos cited in your article.
One minor correction:
though I'm sure I spend enough time in the library to
qualify as one, I am not actually a librarian. I do research
for the
California Assembly and am still doing investigative journalism
as a
freelancer.
It may either depress
or delight you to know, if you don't already, that the
Society for Professional Journalists gave Ceppos its first Ethics
In
Journalism award for his "clarification" of my series.
That should give you a
good idea of the prevailing definition of ethics in the upper
reaches of
American journalism, and perhaps may explain why he sees so little
to get
excited about with McFarren.
Great story. Keep on keeping
on.
Gary Webb
Publisher
Responds:
Gary: It's an honor to
hear from you. That the mercenary "parajournalists"
continue to feel it necessary to attack your 1996 Dark Alliance
reports on official US involvement in cocaine trafficking is
testimony to the continuing power of your work. Most recently,
the PBS Frontline series on the drug war misfired against
you again: an inadvertent admission that what then-editor of
the San José Mercury News Jerry Ceppos and others did
to you beforehand was not sufficient to erase the basic facts
of your story. Your reporting gave birth to The Story That
Will Not Go Away. And you know more than anyone how hard
they have tried to wash the truth like so many narco-dollars
in the US banks that hold the mortgages on major media outlets.
History will remember
Gary Webb as the Authentic Journalist who blew the whistle on
the hypocritical drug war and was persecuted unjustly for it.
History will remember your attackers as the roustabout linebacking
wound-up mechanical clones of the deteriorating reign of false
journalism who comforted and comfortable as they afflicted the
afflicted. What Jerry Ceppos and his ilk do is not journalism,
not by a longshot. The public understands that already.
We at The Narco News
Bulletin are glad to hear from you and are pleased that you
are still reporting. We offer our pages to you and your fine
work anytime you wish to publish here.
From somewhere in a country
called América,
un fuerte abrazo,
Al Giordano
Publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
Step By Step,
The Longest March...