13 December 2004

“…what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never really retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in the memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms…
The Waste Land  -- T.S. Eliot

Suicide is.

It cannot be understood and therefore, I don’t try to understand why. It just is.

The obituaries here in the United States of America all read the same. Words like “contended,” “controversial,” and “criticized” are used to again diminish his work.

As if they could do anymore damage to a man that withstood the pressure of an entire industry after his own editors chose to back away from the ugly, ugly truth the reporter uncovered.

Gary was a contender. He didn’t buy the official line. He stepped forward, asked for everything they got and shot back with a barb and hook in the form of a question. He leaned into the controversy and pulled it back with him, into the light, before the public, and out of the dark realm of buried secrets. And he criticized. Damn him if he didn’t. He wouldn’t be worth our time or the ink that ran his stories if he didn’t report what he did and not have some criticism for the powers that be.

“By this, and this only, we have existed…”

Gary never gave up. Even after Knight-Ridder shipped him to the Siberia of the Mercury News’ reach, Cupertino. Even after he left the paper in 1997, he took a job with the California Assembly Speaker’s Office of Member Services and the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.

Some one singled out, derided, and nearly black listed like him would likely have left newspapers, journalism, and maybe even the country. But not Gary Webb.

Ever the contender, he stuck at it, continuing his expose of the CIA’s collaboration with known drug smugglers connected to the Contras in Nicaragua a year after he left the Merc in a freelance piece for the LA Weekly. His report for California Assembly Speaker’s office on racial profiling among California Highway Patrol Officers and his investigation of ousted California governor Gray Davis and his $95 million no-bid contract to Oracle were critical and controversial. Running with Bill Conroy’s piece on Lok Lau and investigating how much Sacramento County made off red-light cameras, he never shied away from the truth.

It didn’t matter where he was; investigative reporting is what Gary Webb did.

Long before he took his life, Gary gave his life for us, for those who dared to wonder if there was something more to the official line, if there was another story lurking, trapped, beneath the surface of a placid, moralistic nation. He showed us it could still be done.

“Which is not to be found in our obituaries…”

It’s the little things I’m going to remember. The practical advice he gave to a budding young reporter, who’s still a budding young reporter, only no longer living off a pittance of freelancer’s wage, but the pittance of a daily reporter’s wage for the very company that backed away from Gary when the heat became scorching.

Why I should go work for a daily with a good editor to get my chops down (Guess what Gary, I did, and he’s a colleague of yours.) How I should approach reporting this wild story I was just starting to dig into about the FBI’s investigation of some California Prison Gang (Shit, Gary, you never even heard all that it took for Julie and I to finally get that published in the United States).

…

I found some notes I took from his presentation in Merida about working under a deadline, the very same speech I gave this year in Cochabamba with my beloved brother Reed and beloved sister Clau.

Q: What if the speaker actually says nothing and it’s more of a performance for the press?

I think as a journalist, you have two choices. You can not write a story or you can expose it as a press event, which sometimes tells you a lot more about that organization than doing a phony story or no story. What you can say is the speaker said nothing new. He’s said this fifteen times before. There were two journalists in attendance and it stirred no public reaction whatsoever.

Q: How do we figure out what our story is?

Your story, often, will choose itself for you, when you sit down to write it. Do not worry early on what your story is going to say at the end of your research because if you do, you will miss everything else that you’re not looking for. (GBS NOTE: DAMN GARY, THAT’S A GOOD POINT!)  Take everything in, take it all in, and see at the end of it, what is the most interesting, what you were the most curious about, what you found the most fascinating.

…

“Accuracy and the truth are accuracy and the truth, regardless why you’re here.”

…

“Journalists are revolutionaries, despite what you’ve been told.”

…

One more thing…

At the paper today, my co-worker and I are working on this story about a 19-year-old who held up a fast food joint after hours and ended up stabbing someone to death. My co-worker comes across an unreported fact: the kid used a security uniform to get into the joint.

After a little digging through court records and talking to the security company folks, I discovered the kid had been arrested six days after the state granted him his security license in July. A big no-no. Had the company known about the arrest, he would have been fired. Had he been fired, he wouldn’t have the uniform anymore (well, that may be up for speculation). But why didn’t the company know the kid had been arrested, I asked the company’s president. Because the state agency that keeps tabs on our guards hadn’t informed us, he said. Because the state hadn’t informed you…

…Hmmm, what would Gary do…

“So what’s the name of the government agency that should have informed you…”