Word: webbe
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...sort of sensational investigative story that brings a newspaper attention, praise, often prizes. A three-part series in the San Jose Mercury News last August, the product of a year's work by reporter Gary Webb, alleged that the crack epidemic in inner-city Los Angeles was largely started by Nicaraguan drug suppliers who introduced the new form of cocaine into the ghetto and used the profits to help support the antigovernment rebels known as contras...
...this recantation--as unusual as it was--did not knock the struts out of the story entirely. Ceppos noted that Webb's reporting was "right on many important points." The series did, for example, establish a link between one of the most notorious L.A. drug dealers--"Freeway Rick" Ross--and Nicaraguan suppliers who were admitted supporters of the contras. And while strongly hinting at CIA knowledge of the drug connection, the story never explicitly made that claim...
...paper's mea culpa likely to change the minds of those who want to believe that the U.S. government was behind the introduction of crack into the inner city. Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who was among the first to take up Webb's reporting as a political cause, has reaffirmed her belief that the basic story is sound and has vowed to continue pressing for congressional hearings. Says Los Angeles city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas: "There is a lot of suspicion that there was some truth associated with the claims in the story. Frankly, those suspicions will...
Another who continues to stand by the series is reporter Webb, whose disagreement with some of Ceppos' criticisms were explicitly noted in the editorial. Webb, who has spent eight years at the Mercury News, mostly reporting from Sacramento, the state capital, maintains that the paper "is not backing down from the central assertion of the story"--that cocaine sold in Los Angeles in the 1980s produced money for the contras. He says he has written four follow-up stories that bolster his allegations: one featuring an eyewitness interview that, Webb claims, confirms some dollar figures, and another based on documents...
...former are by nature advocates; they work for many months on their lonely quest, become passionate about their story, and sometimes promise more than they can responsibly deliver. The latter must act as the voice of caution, tamping down enthusiasms and reining in excesses. At the Mercury News, Webb played his assigned part with gusto, but it's not so clear that the editors adequately performed theirs. Though Ceppos did not directly edit the story, he has taken responsibility...