Gary Webb, the maligned author of the Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News, had his career ruined over the story. He committed suicide in December.

The editors who supervised him went on to have great careers.

This American Journalism Review story, however, suggests the series suffered from bad editing -- but even then, it was right about a lot of things.

An excerpt:

Unfortunately for Webb, he made a few too many errors. The Mercury News posted the series on the paper's Web site, using the power of the nascent alternative media to fan the flames of indignation among African Americans. They, in turn, accused the nation's most powerful newspapers--the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times--of laziness at best, and of genocide at worst. The papers fought back, discrediting Webb and his reporting: The Los Angeles Times, for example, assigned two dozen reporters and published a page-one series of almost 20,000 words, painting the CIA "as law-abiding and conscientious," as one critic put it. But none of the papers adequately investigated the CIA's connection to Central American drug dealers, a relationship the agency confirmed in 1998, two years after Webb's series ran, and a year after he was exiled from journalism.

That revelation barely registered on the radar of the mainstream media, consumed as they were by Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the ensuing impeachment battle. Webb, meanwhile, became radioactive, unable to find work at a daily newspaper, shunned and isolated from the world of journalism he loved.

In the final analysis, "Dark Alliance" was a series in search of competent editing; the remarkable lack of editorial oversight produced what became one of the most notorious sagas in American journalism. Much of what Webb wrote was accurate: The drug traffickers he profiled were sending money to help the CIA-backed contras in the war in Nicaragua. But his editors allowed him to push the story's thesis far beyond what the facts could support, suggesting drug-dealing contras caused America's crack epidemic with the CIA's knowledge. The story included no CIA response; Webb said his editors never asked for one. Though Webb compiled an impressive circumstantial case, the editors failed to hold the story to what he could substantiate, letting him make leaps in reasoning that would earn failing marks in freshman logic.

"If Gary had had a decent editor, the key mistakes that ended up costing him so dearly would have been caught and dealt with," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with George Washington University's National Security Archive, an expert on the contra war and an early critic of "Dark Alliance." "He became quite unfairly the victim of piling on in one of the most extraordinary episodes of piling on by the mainstream press ever."

In the aftermath, the Mercury News "did a mea culpa, [the] editors got promoted, and Gary bore the burden of the damage," says Scott Herhold, a Mercury News editor in the late '80s and a columnist there now. The editors who directed the series saw their careers flourish: David Yarnold was promoted to executive editor (he later became editorial page editor and recently left the paper to become an executive with an environmental organization); Paul Van Slambrouck became executive editor of the Christian Science Monitor (he is now a senior editor); Jerry Ceppos is vice president for news at Knight Ridder; and Dawn Garcia is deputy director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. All four declined to be interviewed for this article.