Conspiracy theorists take heart....we're in good company

Consortium News has a great article, a tribute to Gary Webb. About halfway through the article, we find this: "Though the big newspapers pooh-poohed our discovery, Sen. John Kerry followed up our story with his own groundbreaking investigation. For his efforts, Kerry also encountered media ridicule. Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.” I suggest we write the media and tell them we are not "internet conspiracy theorists," we are "randy conspiracy buffs"!

Here some more excerpts, and the URL

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.

On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

<. . .>Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons

Failed Media

Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.

...kind of sad too. i remember very well how easily the thugs swept the whole thing under the rug (often with "plausible" deniability - "I don't recall selling arms to Iran and running drugs in Central America").

Must be nice to be above the law. I can imagine telling a cop "I don't recall speeding" or some such nonsense.

the first people to have gone through this little circus with the MSM (how the hell they get the rep for being "left-leaning" is a mystery to me) -- they lean to the left as long as it looks like that's who's lining their pocketbooks. Radical, paradigm-shifting shit is too deep for them. Even for the Fucking New York Times (yes, I've change their name: I know longer call them NYT, it's FNYT from now on).

I hope the fiasco doesn't drive anyone here to suicide, but I think it helps to remember those who've gone before

...and the "randy conspiracy buff" -- well, that's just icing on the cake.

Yeah, I hope Kerry's reading this too....you randy conspiracy buff you!

Don't you wonder if John Kerry ever reads DU?
If so, hey John, :yourock:

Try making a list of fraudulent actions by Republicans (& one major one by LBJ), and you'll be surprised at how long it is, and how they got off scott free every time...

and you'll get an eyeful as well.

These patterns are all too predictable based on past history.

NYT has endorsed is this one:

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/

Perhaps conspiracies which have been dead for four hundred years are acceptable.