George Lessard posted this to CAJ-L, where I saw it. The story details the final days of what the L.A. Times says was the troubled life of Gary Webb, reporter of the notorious Dark Alliance series in the mid-1990s.
An excerpt:
Webb's suicide has left friends and loved ones trying to sort through tangled feelings about a man who was known not so much for the triumphs of a high-impact journalism career as for what he is accused of getting wrong.
In 1996, Webb produced a series of stories for the San Jose Mercury News that suggested the CIA was involved in the nation's crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s as a means of helping Nicaraguan drug dealers funnel money to the Contras. His premise that the government knew about and even encouraged the drug sales — with South Los Angeles as ground zero — sparked outrage, especially among members of the African American community.
Government agencies and the media, most notably the Los Angeles Times, launched their own investigations into Webb's report. Resoundingly — and some believed venomously — they dismissed Webb's thesis. Later, his bosses at the Mercury News all but disavowed the piece, with a front-page editor's note stating that the series had largely overstated its provocative findings. Eventually, Webb was forced to resign.
As the CIA story began to unravel, so did Webb's life, sending him down a self-destructive path. While many of his supporters believe that the mainstream media's condemnation was largely to blame for the journalist's demise, those closest to him say Webb's downward spiral is far more complicated.
For more than a decade, the journalist struggled with clinical depression, sometimes so profound that he sought solace in reckless and dangerous behavior. He crashed cars and motorcycles, he had illicit affairs and he took journalistic risks — beyond what his research could support — in his stories. (He was sued for libel four times, two of the suits resulting in settlements.)
I'll comment more on this later.
Here's some earlier blog postings on Webb: