A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Remeece march from Croyden to Brixton, a joyful experience due to the overwhelmingly positive response from shoppers, bus and car drivers, shop owners along the route, and the presence of the charismatic Remeece himself, whose relentless work at schools around the country has been vilified in the corporate media and earned him the respect of every […]
Julian Assange remains cut off from the world in Ecuador’s London embassy, shut off from friends, relatives and thousands of supporters, leaving him unable to do his crucial work, as John Pilger discusses with Dennis J. Bernstein. In a recent communication between Randy Credico, an Assange supporter, comic and radio producer, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House […]
When the young computer staffers at the Mercury News’s fledgling Mercury Center division posted the story on the paper’s new Internet site, they also removed the hocus pocus mystery of “journalism” that the major media had long fed the public.
“The only way you’re going to do effective journalism is to be truly independent,” Webb once said. “It’s a difficult thing to do, but [investigative journalists] George Seldes and I.F. Stone did it. There’s no reason modern-day journalists can’t do it too. You don’t get 401-Ks and health benefits, but at least you get to tell the truth.”
There is more truth about American journalism in the film “Kill the Messenger,” which chronicles the mainstream media’s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie “All the President’s Men,” which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
Gary Webb’s reports were that powerful that they made careerist journalists tremble and lash out and dutifully show that era’s media bosses that they had done their bidding. And then there were others who tried to be fairer to Webb but still feared the big media lords so much that they colored their defenses of the essential truth of the Dark Alliance series with sprinkled disclaimers that he had made errors or wasn’t a saint. You know, the false dichotomy of “telling both sides” of a story that does not have two sides that is formula for corporate media.
