A media watchdog group Wednesday released a report blasting the three most prestigious national newspapers in their treatment of a now-legendary San Jose Mercury News series which linked the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras to the spread of crack cocaine in urban America.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal group that monitors the media, characterized coverage of the series by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post as a "newsroom culture of denial," and added that "journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper's specific pieces of evidence."
The report concludes that the three newspapers "were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the contra-cocaine story - involving a decade-long suppression of evidence."
"FAIR has inherited the mantle as the toughest critics of the big media," said Peter Sussman, president of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. "Their emphasis is usually righter than most."
The Mercury News's series, "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," by Gary Webb has gained long legs because of continued updates and archived material on the paper's Web site.
"The Mercury News may have overstated its case, but you have to wonder why The New York Times, LA Times, and Post went to such great lengths to quash the story," said Sussman, whose organization last month named Webb its "Journalist of the Year."
A spokesperson for The New York Times said executives at the paper had not read the FAIR report and could not comment. Officials at the Post could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Doyle McManus, who has been covering the story for the LA Times and has not read the report, told Wired News: "I don't know of any suppression of evidence (by the LA Times) and I've been around the whole decade."
McManus praised the Mercury Center for providing links to documents, and to stories written by the Post, The New York Times, and the LA Times. "For the first time, a reader in Los Angeles who wants to weigh all the evidence can," he said.
The Media Consortium, another watchdog group whose editor and publisher, Robert Parry, co-wrote the first story on the CIA-crack cocaine connection in 1985 for the Associated Press, also released a report this week condemning the big media's reportage of the story, saying the major newspapers "bludgeoned the Mercury News story."
The right-wing group Accuracy in Media issued a report in October calling the Mercury News series a "hoax."
Hearings on the CIA-crack cocaine connection by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began this fall and are expected to resume in January.
