Were it not something of a flop in the readership department, The Intercept might well be the U.S. ruling class’s highest achievement in propaganda. As the offspring of the Snowden whistleblowing event, it is forever identified with resistance to state authority, cultivating a readership almost fetishistically eager to believe that something fearless and adversarial is always underway. As such it can blatantly peddle doctrinal trash to an extent running dogs with less glamorously rebellious brands can only dream of.

Trash is mostly what Ryan Devereaux serves up in his recent piece on investigative journalist Gary Webb. His post is intended to tie in with an upcoming film, Kill The Messenger, about the mainstream media campaign that ruined Webb in 1996 after he’d published “Dark Alliance”, a three-part series that connected the CIA-backed Contras to the crack epidemic that devastated black communities in the 80s. Superficially, the piece is simply a review of the history covered by the film, using a recently released CIA document about the affair as its hook. But Devereaux inexplicably seizes the opportunity to resuscitate long-discredited planks from the original campaign against Webb and to sanitize the CIA’s role in his ruin.

Devereaux’s piece strongly suggests that Webb’s downfall owed at least in part to his own deficiencies; that the CIA’s role in the campaign against Webb was mostly passive; and that media compliance with the CIA’s designs was largely a happy coincidence, animated less by direct state interference or the media’s institutionalized service to power, than by petty jealousy and professional rivalry. In other words, Devereaux has produced the closest thing to a hit piece/whitewash that one can credibly write about a martyred journalist whose reporting has been entirely vindicated and with whose legacy one wishes to burnish one’s own brand.

Devereaux states that

Webb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.

This is largely correct except for its weird understatement of the crack epidemic, which devastated urban black communities from coast to coast. In fact, three times in the piece Devereaux restricts the epidemic to California, and elsewhere refers to the decade-long crisis diminishingly as the “crack scare.” Devereaux’s summary also neglects Webb’s claim that the Contra-connected drug wholesalers in his series were protected from prosecution and never went to prison, but were hired as informants by federal prosecutors.

More crucially, Devereaux’s account omits Webb’s vindication by the CIA’s and Justice Department’s own investigations. Volume One of the CIA’s report, published in January of ’98, largely confirmed everything Webb had claimed about the Bay Area drug traffickers — Danilo Blandón and Juan Norwin Meneses — their connection to the Nicaraguan Contra movement, and their ability to freely operate without the threat of law enforcement. Volume Two of the report, published in the following October, described how the Reagan-Bush administration had, in fact, protected more than 50 Contras and other drug traffickers, and by so doing thwarted federal investigations into drug crimes. A report by the Justice Department published in July ’98 contained similar findings. (source)

Here’s what Webb said about these reports:

…The CIA’s knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I’d ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and the drug traffickers was closer than I had written. And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest…(source)

Webb’s claims about the relationship between the drug traffickers in his piece and the crack epidemic were also entirely solid. Freeway Rick Ross, the main customer of Webb’s Contra-connected drug wholesalers was, and still is, widely credited with creating the crack cocaine crisis. Two years before the publication of Dark Alliance, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ross “did more than anyone else to democratize [crack], boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived…his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than $500,000 a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars.” (source)

In parallel with government reports vindicating Webb’s story, journalists and media critics exhaustively pulled apart each talking point in the campaign against him and none of them held up.

The first to do this was Pete Carey, an investigative reporter and a colleague of Webb’s at the San Jose Mercury News. After the shit hit the fan, the paper had him check Webb’s reporting against the charges of his critics. Carey’s report backed up Webb’s work and added new information to the story. (source).

In 1997, media critic Normon Solomon did an excellent, point by point analysis of the smear campaign for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, connecting it to the historic ties between the media and the CIA. The title of his piece, Snow Job: The Establishment’s Papers Do Damage Control for the CIA, encapsulates his findings.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair analyzed the affair exhaustively in their book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press (excerpted here), stating that “the attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.”

That Webb’s report stopped being “controversial” years ago seems to have slipped past Devereaux in the same way the scale of the crack crisis has. He keeps the merits of Webb’s reporting a somewhat open question through most of his post, despite his agreement with common consensus that the media campaign against Webb was in bad faith.

But Devereaux largely ignores the extent to which the campaign against Webb was built entirely from lies, straw men, denials by anonymous officials, and outright character assassination. Rather, the impression one gets from Devereaux’s selection of quotes and details is that Webb’s detractors had misplaced priorities; that instead of poking holes in Webb’s story, they should have been following up on his claims.

A mea culpa Devereaux includes from Jesse Katz, who was part of the Los Angeles Times‘ 17-member “Get Gary Webb” team, perfectly encapsulates this general thrust:

we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope. And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”

Perhaps Katz said more than this, but as mea culpas go, this excerpt could hardly be more dishonest and self-serving. It is beyond my scope here to pull apart the widely reviled hatchet job The Los Angeles Times did on Webb. But let’s look a little closer at Katz.

I quoted the Los Angeles Times above on Rick Ross’s peerless contribution to the crack epidemic. But just two years after the paper had called Ross the “criminal mastermind” of the epidemic, and credited him with “spreading disease on a scale never before conceived” a member of the “Get Gary Webb” team wrote this:

“the explosion of cheap smokable cocaine in the 1980s was a uniquely egalitarian phenomenon, one that lent itself more to makeshift mom and pop operations than to the sinister hand of a government-sanctioned plot…How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ricky Ross.” (source)

The reporter in both cases was – incredibly – Jesse Katz. Saying one thing in 1994 and then saying the opposite two years later is not putting something “under a microscope.” It’s not “overkill.” It is, quite simply, lying, and quoting his half-assed, misleading mea culpa without reference to his infamous reversal is in the same neighborhood.

In fact, the most damning thing said about the media’s assault on Webb in Devereaux’s piece comes from a 17-year-old article Peter Kornbluh wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review:

“[the L.A. Times] stumbled into some of the same problems of hyperbole, selectivity, and credibility that it was attempting to expose” while ignoring declassified evidence (also neglected by the New York Times and the Washington Post) that lent credibility to Webb’s thesis. “Clearly, there was room to advance the contra/drug/CIA story rather than simply denounce it,” Kornbluh wrote.

In other words, some of Webb’s zealous detractors were as bad as Webb! But one really can’t say this enough: there was nothing seriously wrong with Webb’s reporting. His series wasn’t perfect — no journalism is — but it was no more imperfect than any other investigative work. In fact, it’s considerably better, and by pioneering the posting of source documents online, Webb was more ethical than most of his predecessors, in that he enabled readers to review the evidence for themselves in a way others had not.

Nonetheless Devereaux states flatly, without argument, that “there’s no question that ‘Dark Alliance’ included flaws, which the CIA was able to exploit” implying, inanely, that with a bit more diligence, Webb might have somehow prevented or mitigated a baseless campaign manufactured out of whole cloth. As if the entire problem wasn’t that he had told his readers — most troublingly, his black readers — something people in high places felt they shouldn’t know. But having insulated himself and his readers from Webb’s near-complete rehabilitation, Devereaux trots out disparaging, unsubstantiated declarations about Webb’s journalism from three of the four people he quotes in the piece. It’s like it’s 1996 all over again, and indeed, only one of the three is speaking in the present.

First up is the CIA’s Nicholas Dujmovic, who speaks by way of “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story”, a recently declassified six-page article he wrote in the 90s for the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. “Nightmare” is a highly biased chronological account of how the media reception to “Dark Alliance” moved progressively more in favor of the CIA and against Webb, and of the role the CIA’s Public Affairs department played in that transition.

Devereaux says this document provides “fresh context to the ‘Dark Alliance’ saga” but, in fact, it doesn’t impart much that’s surprising or new to anyone familiar with the history, apart from a uniquely dishonest and skewed perspective. “Nightmare” frames the unprecedented campaign to discredit Webb as a quest for “more balanced reporting”, animated by the “journalistic profession’s…will and ability to hold its own members to certain standards.”

If Devereaux finds anything suspect in the CIA’s release of this undated, unredacted document only weeks away from the release of a film about Webb, he keeps it to himself, and this generosity pervades his face-value assessment of the document overall.

He reports that Dujmovic “pointed out that much of what was reported in ‘Dark Alliance’ was not new”, which is undoubtedly a reference to this passage:

…CIA media spokesmen would remind reporters that this series represented no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance.

The assertion here, that the Contra-cocaine charges had been disproved in the 1980s is, as Devereaux knows, undeniably false, which makes this passage interesting and newsworthy because one, it discloses to the knowledgable reader that the CIA was spreading a lie via its media contacts and two, it continues to propagate the lie to any readers of Dujmovic’s article, allegedly intended for internal consumption. But Devereaux remarks upon this passage only to resuscitate the “no news” plank from the original media campaign, neglecting to notice its multi-layered mendacity and the questions it raises about the document’s intended audience.

Devereaux quotes The Agency man at much greater length on Webb’s failings as a reporter:

Dujmovic complained that Webb’s series “appeared with no warning,” remarking that, for all his journalistic credentials, “he apparently could not come up with a widely available and well-known telephone number for CIA Public Affairs.” This was probably because Webb “was uninterested in anything the Agency might have to say that would diminish the impact of his series,” he wrote.

Devereaux parenthetically adds that “Webb later said that he did contact the CIA but that the agency would not return his calls”, helpfully noting that “efforts to obtain CIA comment were not mentioned in the ‘Dark Alliance’ series.”

Anyone familiar with the original campaign should be feeling deja vu, since this silly objection was raised again and again at the time, and Devereaux quotes not one but two people recapitulating it.

It borders on slimy — no, it is slimy — to twice touch on Webb’ s alleged negligence in this regard without reference to Webb’s account of government stonewalling in “Dark Alliance”:

None of the government agencies known to have been involved with [Nicaraguan drug traffickers] Meneses and Blandon over the years would provide the Mercury News with any information about them. A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have produced nothing so far. (source)

This seems sufficient grounds for taking Webb at his word that he had made calls that were not returned, but, honestly, who the fuck cares? I’ll let Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair explain:

…suppose the CIA had returned Webb’s calls? What would a spokesperson have said, other than that Webb’s allegations were outrageous and untrue? The CIA is a government entity pledged to secrecy about its activities. On scores of occasions, it has remained deceptive when under subpoena before a government committee. Why should the Agency be expected to answer frankly a bothersome question from a reporter? Yet it became a fetish for Webb’s assailants to repeat, time after time, that the CIA denied his charges and that he had never given this denial as the Agency’s point of view. ( source )

The complaint is a non-starter, an attempt to discredit based on an arbitrary technicality that says literally nothing about Webb’s series or his competence as a journalist. But trust The Intercept — the offspring of a whistleblowing event mediated by journalists who boast of routine consultations with government officials — to resurrect this chestnut as if it isn’t trivial and as if its likely origin in the CIA’s Public Affairs department is entirely beside the point.

After his generous allotment to the CIA’s viewpoint, Devereaux moves on to Peter Kornbluh’s 1997 analysis of the Webb affair in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In his CJR piece, Kornbluh said the series was “problematically sourced” and criticized it for “repeatedly promised evidence that, on close reading, it did not deliver.” It failed to definitively connect the story’s key players to the CIA, he noted, and there were inconsistencies in Webb’s timeline of events.

Devereaux has not tasked himself with providing any of the arguments for these claims in Kornbluh’s piece, which is a masterly example of the pointedly even-handed, ‘both sides are wrong’, analysis that are as much a part of defamation campaigns as outright hatchet jobs.

As paraphrased in The Intercept, Kornbluh simply endorses various elements of the disinformation campaign that were put to bed long ago. But since Devereaux brought it up, let’s take a closer look. As to the allegedly problematic sourcing and undelivered evidence, Kornbluh didn’t like that two of the figures of Webb’s series are “identified without supporting evidence as FDN officials.” Apparently their words and deeds in service to this august army aren’t enough. Perhaps Webb was to also have linked photos of their Contra membership cards.

Kornbluh was also vexed that Adolfo Calero, the political leader of the FDN — which Kornbluh admits is literally a CIA army — is identified as a “longtime CIA operative” without proof. That the CIA entrusted Calero with leading its army seems evidence enough. In any event, it is now known that Calero was a CIA informant in Nicaragua as early as 1963, so however Webb got his information, it was entirely correct. Would Kornbluh have even demanded evidence had Webb not posted so much other evidence online? Probably not.

Kornbluh also splits hairs over the identification of Enrique Bermúdez as a “CIA agent”, even though as a Contra military leader, this goes without saying. Do we need to see paystubs before connecting those dots? Are the ramifications of Webb’s story altered at all by parsing the difference between a CIA “operative” and a CIA “agent?”

As for “Webb’s timeline of events,” this broken record was played in one form or another again and again throughout the campaign. Webb responded to it at the time, as have multiple critics. Kornbluh finds inconsistencies where none exist, and then asserts, based on a legalistic technicality, that the Contra operation could not have been responsible for the crack explosion in US cities.

Since these matters were settled years ago — mostly by the CIA’s own report — one wonders why Devereaux is dredging them up. But at last he puts aside his 17-year-old documents and talks to an actual person, Nick Schou, who wrote the book on which Kill the Messenger is based. Of course Schou must also share his misgivings about Webb:

I think it’s fair to take a look at [“Dark Alliance”] objectively and say that it could have been better edited, it could have been packaged better, it would have been less inflammatory. And sure, maybe Gary could have, like, actually put in the story somewhere ‘I called the CIA X-amount of times and they didn’t respond.’ That wasn’t in there,” he said.

Let’s note that Devereaux is, for the third time, passing on a string of complaints about “Dark Alliance” almost entirely without reference to anything specific nor any evidence of merit. Schou’s seem particularly empty, as if to simply signify membership in the responsible journalist’s club. What does “packaged better” mean and why does it matter? The wish for a “less inflammatory” piece seems particularly odd and wrong. “Dark Alliance” is extremely straightforward and written in the plainest English. It is the claims Webb made that inflamed readers — particularly black readers — and rightfully so.

At least Schou understands how trivial his misgivings are:

these are all kind of minor things compared to the bigger picture, which is that he 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. And that’s, I think, the take-away here.

and that, right there — three quarters of the way into Devereaux’s piece — is the closest we get to giving Webb his due, as well as the single occurrence of the word “accurate.”

Elsewhere, Schou amplifies the other troublesome theme tainting Devereaux’s post: the ostensible passivity of the CIA in the whole affair.

Rather than some dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb, Schou posits that the journalist was ultimately undone by the petty jealousies of the modern media world. The CIA “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility,” Schou told The Intercept. “They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas.” “They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded,” Schou added.

I want to like this Schou guy — he did, after all, write a sympathetic book — but this is just nonsense. I’d let it pass were the central idea here — that the CIA played a small supporting role in Webb’s destruction — not echoed throughout the piece. Devereaux writes that Dujmovic’s document “paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time”, but it apparently tells us very little about the CIA, which seemingly just watches:

“How the CIA Watched Over The Destruction of Gary Webb”

“The CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster…”

“The CIA watched these developments closely…”

“They just sat there and watched these journalists…”

Of course, no Intercept offering is complete without online coaching from Intercept staff, so here’s Glenn Greenwald echoing Devereaux on Twitter:

Most interesting part of new docs: CIA realized they needn’t do anything against Gary Webb; US media did it for them

Here’s Liliana Segura saying essentially the same thing:

Main take away: press devoured Webb so CIA didn’t need to.

What does this even mean? Do Devereaux, Greenwald and Segura think the reporters just made up all those anonymous CIA, DEA and Contra sources on which they based their hatchet jobs? Do they infer nothing from Dujmovic’s reference to a “ground base of already productive relations with journalists” or from his title, “Managing a Nightmare?”

There is a useful point that could be made here, which is that between ambition, competition and a reflexive tilt toward power, mainstream journalists execute the propaganda aspect of our media system without much outside interference. But this self-directing quality is being grossly overstated here, and posits a false dichotomy between a CIA that “launched a dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb” and an Agency that simply watches and waits for the phone to ring. Among other things, the vision created here understates the damage the CIA can do when it takes a reporter’s call, as Dujmovic’s article makes clear.

However, that’s not all the CIA and its associates did.

Two of the papers most crucial to the assault on Webb were The New York Times and The Washington Post. Before going into specifics about what the CIA did besides “watching”, it’s important to get the lay of the land where the CIA and these papers are concerned. Norman Solomon wrote that “The New York Times and Washington Post have…connections to the CIA that go back nearly to the agency’s founding.” Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that “the agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials”, and that over the years the paper has provided Times cover to CIA employees. (source)

As to the Washington Post, Bernstein quoted a CIA official as saying of the Post’s late owner and publisher, “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from.” “In 1988” Solomon writes, “Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, (Phil’s widow), gave a speech at the CIA’s Langley, Va. headquarters. “We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” Graham told agency leaders. “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” (source)

Solomon also reports that the two papers had expressed editorial support for funding the Contras.

In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair describe a 1991 CIA memo claiming that The Agency maintains “relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network” and show that among the journalists taking influential swings at Webb were some that had exceptionally close ties: Ron Kessler of CNN, which an Agency memo credited with turning “some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories”; the right-wing commentator Arnaud de Borchgrave, who “boasted of intimate relations with French, British and US intelligence agencies”; and The Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus, whom the Washington Times reported as being known to The Agency as ‘the CIA’s house reporter.’

Cockburn and St. Clair write of the extensive influence of L. J. O’Neale, the Justice Department prosecutor who was Danilo Blandón’s protector and Rick Ross’s prosecutor. Cockburn and St. Clair describe a transcript from a deposition at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department that shows O’Neale “reveling in his top-secret security clearance with the CIA”; attempting to phone the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz; speaking to “CIA house reporter”, Walter Pincus; and criticizing Gary Webb, who, according to the transcript, O’Neale felt “had become an active part of Ricky Ross’s defense team.”

Now consider the calls O’Neale made to Kurtz and Pincus alongside Dujmovic’s remarks about the reporters’ paper.

The Washington Post ran two articles by leading journalists that criticized the assumptions and connections made by the original series. Public Affairs made sure that journalists and news directors calling for information and [officials representing the Agency] received copies of these more balanced stories. Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, creating what the Associated Press called a “firestorm of reaction” against the San Jose Mercury News.

Whiteout also describes how in December 1997, the CIA announced publication of the long-delayed report it had promised a month after “Dark Alliance” appeared. Stories appeared in major newspapers as well as Webb’s own to the effect that the CIA had absolved itself. News of these stories traveled widely via CNN and other outlets.

There was one problem, though. None of these newspapers or any other media outlet had been furnished with the report, because shortly after the CIA announced its self-exoneration, publication was delayed again. Nonetheless, along came additional stories by the New York Times‘ Tim Weiner and the CIA’s ally at the Washington Post, Walter Pincus, quoting anonymous officials claiming the investigation revealed no link between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. We now know the CIA report did nothing of the sort, but that was only revealed later, after the heat was off.

Clearly the CIA and its close associates did a bit more than watch. Rather, the record suggests that by way of publicity stunts and friends inside the media, they directly shaped the narrative at some of the most influential outlets, and this narrative then propagated through other outlets, facilitated by the CIA’s PR people responding to inquiries, friends at other outlets and the herd instinct.

This process, of course, doesn’t explain everything. Schou is not wrong entirely to cite the “petty jealousies of the modern media world” as having a role in the affair. Certainly there was some of that in play at the Los Angeles Times, which Webb’s smaller paper had bested on its own turf. But journalists do not spend every day of their lives embarked on campaigns to destroy each other. They require incentives, leadership and talking points, and the CIA and its media confederates happily oblige. There can be no question that had Webb written a series that was equal in every respect, technically, to “Dark Alliance” but did not take on a resourceful, powerful enemy whose very business is deception, manipulation and destruction on behalf of elites, it would have come and gone uneventfully, just as everything Webb had written before “Dark Alliance” had.

The Intercept muddies the water here on this obvious point, promoting a vision of the media that is, in an odd way, somewhat rose-colored in its elision of CIA penetration at the highest levels and the immense control and influence that imparts. In other words, Devereaux’s article, whether on purpose or by accident, is disinformative, and its resurrection of old, debunked complaints about Webb makes it particularly so. It is really rather shameful that Greenwald’s blog is clearly attempting to align itself historically with Webb and “Dark Alliance” when, in this particular case, it has more in common with the forces that destroyed him.

Acknowledgement: @RancidSassy assisted greatly in unpacking Peter Kornbluh’s bullshit. His general remarks about Devereaux’s piece were also quite helpful.

UPDATE

Bobby Harris, who claims to be a close friend and colleague of Gary Webb’s has dropped by to share an email he sent to Bob Garfield of On The Media, after Garfield did an atrociously dishonest interview with Ryan Devereaux about his Intercept post. You should read the whole comment but I will excerpt the part here that addresses the persistent myths about Webb’s reporting:

Within a few years, Gary became known as a great and determined drug-war reporter. That’s why he got the phone call from a jailed trafficker’s girlfriend, that put him onto the big story. Gary told me that he had reliable contacts — inside the CIA — that confirmed the details his reporting (connections, drug and money volumes), but who would (of course) not go on the record. The notion that he never called the CIA, as is repeatedly mentioned in Devereaux’s article, is utter nonsense. Gary was a true stickler for journalistic propriety (contrary to attacks on him), and he decided to simply not mention the agency in the context of their relations. He had confirmation from sources inside the agency, but could not use them; so, he didn’t feel allowing the agency to deny these affairs in a statement was fair play. That’s the real story of what happened on this topic. As far as timeline problems, Gary relied on sworn testimony by Meneses, against contrary information, from what he told me about this aspect. Blandon brought cocaine into SCLA at a third of the regular price at this time; giving Ross the ability to spring up the crack epidemic. Clearly, there were “tons” of cocaine and “millions” of dollars involved with this enterprise. Bob, can you or Devereaux point to actual, serious, pivotal problems with Gary’s story, or are we just continuing an erroneous spin that there are such problems? Nick Schou states to Devereaux that he: “readily concedes there were problems with Webb’s reporting,” that it could have been “better edited” / “packaged better;” but, this seems to lead back to the falsity that Gary never contacted the CIA or issues of how The SJMN handled the story. Even in the midst of this new and generally favorable attention, persists the canard that Gary’s story was faulty. (read all)