Muckraking the legacy of a journalism sacred cow

Knight Ridder (NYSE: KRI - News) announced today that Jerry Ceppos, vice president/news, has elected to take early retirement, effective Aug. 31.

Ceppos, 58, has been in his current job since 1999. In it, he has had oversight of the news operations for all of Knight Ridder's daily newspapers, for the company's Washington Bureau and (with Tribune Co.) for the content of Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. From 1995 until 1999, he was executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Prior to that, he had spent 23 years in various news positions at The Miami Herald and the Mercury News.

This is the same Ceppos that pulled the rug out from under Gary Webb after he penned his groundbreaking investigative series for the Mercury News exposing the soft underbelly of this nation’s war on drugs. Earlier this summer, Narco News’ Dan Feder put it this way:
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But then the backlash came. The L.A. Times, embarrassed at having missed a major story on its own turf, and the New York Times, happy to follow its colleagues’ lead in squashing a story that didn’t fit with its own narrative, wielded their mercenary pens against him. Rather than follow up on his exhaustive research, the attack dogs on both coasts pulled his work apart and attacked him for things he hadn’t even said. Although the CIA’s internal investigation would later confirm many of Gary’s own claims, the paper retracted the story and marginalized Gary to the point where he was forced to quit.

San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos’ cowardly retreat from Dark Alliance included deleting the website, and destroying thousands of undistributed CDROM versions of the site. It was the Internet’s first book burning. Among Ceppos’ lame excuses for the latter was that the now-famous Dark Alliance logo (above; how much more straightforward could a logo for a story about the CIA and crack be?) was “too suggestive.” (Inherent in that statement is that Ceppos’ could not find sufficient fault with Webb’s story itself to censor the website.) And so, for a long time, the most talked-about investigative news story of the 1990s was largely inaccessible to world beyond the small daily’s reach.

Narco News’ Al Giordano described Ceppos’ legacy in more poetic terms in an article written late last year in the wake of Gary Webb’s suicide.

The hand on the trigger at that moment – his – is not the first, nor is he acting alone. Gary had to wait in line and take a number behind all those who set his suicide in motion years ago. It was a miracle he didn’t do this back when San Jose Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos, now 58 and vice president of the Knight-Ridder news company, cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger on the most authentic journalistic career of the late 20th Century. That was the day that the bullet flew out of the cartridge and, as if in very slow motion, took years to reach Gary’s head...

Now Ceppos wants to share his vision of journalism with a future “generation of swine” – to steal a line from another journalistic legend who recently blasted off the planet.

More from PRNewswire:

Ceppos said, "I have been thinking about this move for some time. I have talked it over with my family, and we have decided to take the plunge. I would like to devote more time to aspects of journalism that I care about most -- journalistic ethics, education and overall improvement -- and I might like to do some of it in academic settings as well as newsrooms. I may also, finally, try to plant the backyard vineyard in Saratoga that I have talked about for 18 years ... but I'm more certain about the journalism than the vineyard!"

It should be reassuring to cost-conscious bean counters in the news business that someone like Ceppos will be teaching college kids and cub reporters about journalism “ethics.”

He certainly will represent a great bargain. His students will be getting a genuine two-for-the-cost-of-one deal -- otherwise known as a lesson in the old "double standard."

Maybe he would be better off sticking to the vineyard plan, a job that is bound to require plenty of manure.

Sorry to throw mud on your retirement parade Mr. Ceppos, but then muckraking can be a dirty job – something Gary Webb would understand.