Robert Parry: Who Betrayed 'Objective' Journalism?

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Who Betrayed 'Objective' Journalism?

By Robert Parry
April 30, 2009


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For instance, during the 1980s, when I was with the Associated Press and Newsweek, I witnessed extraordinary demands for airtight evidence regarding the real problem of cocaine trafficking by the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contras, compared with easy acceptance of flimsy evidence about similar accusations against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

After all, President Ronald Reagan had hailed the contras as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” and had denounced Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as "a totalitarian dungeon.” Truly objective U.S. journalism would have tossed out Reagan’s characterizations and simply evaluated the cocaine-smuggling evidence, but that was not how it worked.

Even years later, in 1998 when the CIA’s inspector general concluded that scores of contra figures and groups were implicated in cocaine smuggling, the mainstream U.S. news media ignored or downplayed those findings, while continuing to pummel journalist Gary Webb for flaws in his multi-part investigative series that had revived the contra-cocaine issue in 1996.

The journalistic blacklisting of Webb – carried out by the leading lights of U.S. newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times) – contributed to Webb’s suicide in 2004.

While the Webb tragedy may have been an extreme case of the mainstream news media tailoring its coverage of a controversial issue to fit acceptable political parameters, the constraints that applied to the contra-cocaine issue were part of a long-running pattern.

Indeed, several years after ganging up on Gary Webb – and protecting Reagan’s beloved contras – many of the same newspapers got in line behind President George W. Bush’s case for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Claims about Hussein’s supposed WMD stockpiles were trumpeted while contrary evidence was muted.

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http://consortiumnews.com/2009/043009.html