Pubdate: Thu, 25 Sep 2014
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: Melinda Welsh

RETURN OF THE MESSENGER

How Jeremy Renner's New Film Kill the Messenger Will Vindicate 
Sacramento Investigative Journalist Gary Webb

Nearly two decades after the reporter exposed a connection between 
the CIA and crack cocaine in America, Hollywood chimes in with a major movie

This one has all the ingredients of a dreamed-up Hollywood 
blockbuster: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers a big story 
involving drugs, the CIA and a guerrilla army. Despite threats and 
intimidation, he writes an explosive expose and catches national 
attention. But the fates shift. Our reporter's story is torn apart by 
the country's leading media; he is betrayed by his own newspaper. 
Though the big story turns out to be true, the writer commits suicide 
and becomes a cautionary tale.

Hold on, though. The above is not fiction.

Kill the Messenger, an actual film coming soon to a theater near you, 
is the true story of Sacramento-based investigative reporter Gary 
Webb, who earned both acclaim and notoriety for his 1996 San Jose 
Mercury News series that revealed the CIA had turned a blind eye to 
the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras trafficking crack cocaine in South 
Central Los Angeles and elsewhere in urban America in the 1980s. One 
of the first-ever newspaper investigations to be published on the 
Internet, Webb's story gained a massive readership and stirred up a 
firestorm of controversy and repudiation.

After being deemed a pariah by media giants like The New York Times, 
Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and being disowned by his 
own paper, Webb eventually came to work in August 2004 at SN&R. Four 
months later, he committed suicide at age 49. He left behind a 
grieving family-and some trenchant questions:

Why did the media giants attack him so aggressively, thereby 
protecting the government secrets he revealed? Why did he decide to 
end his own life? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Gary Webb?

Like others working at our newsweekly in the brief time he was here, 
I knew Webb as a colleague and was terribly saddened by his death. 
Those of us who attended his unhappy memorial service at the 
Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento a week after he died thought that day 
surely marked a conclusion to the tragic tale of Gary Webb.

But no.

Because here comes Kill the Messenger, a Hollywood film starring 
Jeremy Renner as Webb; Rosemarie DeWitt as Webb's then wife, Sue Bell 
(now Stokes); Oliver Platt as Webb's top editor, Jerry Ceppos; and a 
litany of other distinguished actors, including Michael K. Williams, 
Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia and Robert Patrick. Directed by Michael 
Cuesta (executive producer of the TV series Homeland), the film opens 
in a "soft launch" across the country and in Sacramento on October 10.

Members of Webb's immediate family-including his son Eric, who lives 
near Sacramento State and plans a career in journalism-expect to feel 
a measure of solace upon the release of Kill the Messenger.

"The movie is going to vindicate my dad," he said.

For Renner-who grew up in Modesto and is best known for his roles in 
The Bourne Legacy, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, The Avengers 
and The Hurt Locker-the film was a chance to explore a part unlike 
any he'd played before. During a break in filming Mission Impossible 
5, he spoke to SN&R about his choice to star in and co-produce Kill 
the Messenger.

"The story is important," said Renner. "It resonated with me. It has 
a David and Goliath aspect.

"He was brave, he was flawed. ... I fell in love with Gary Webb."

'The first big Internet-age journalism expose'

There's a scene in Kill the Messenger that will make every 
investigative journalist in America break into an insider's grin. 
It's the one where-after a year of tough investigative slogging that 
had taken him from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to a 
moldering jail in Central America to the mean streets of South 
Central Los Angeles-Renner as Webb begins to actually write the big 
story. In an absorbing film montage, Renner is at the keyboard as it 
all comes together-the facts, the settings, the sources. The truth. 
The Clash provides the soundtrack, with Joe Strummer howling: Know 
your rights / these are your rights ... You have the right to free 
speech / as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it.

It took the real Gary Webb a long time to get to this point in his career.

His father, a U.S. Marine, moved Webb around a lot in his youth, from 
California to Indiana to Kentucky to Ohio. He wound up marrying his 
high-school sweetheart, Sue Bell, with whom he had three children. 
Inspired by the reporting that uncovered Watergate and in need of 
income, he left college three units shy of a degree and went to work 
at The Kentucky Post, then The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where he 
rose quickly through the ranks of grunt reporters. Dogged in his 
pursuit of stories, Webb landed a job at the Mercury News in 1988 and 
became part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for reporting 
on the Loma Prieta earthquake.

It was the summer of 1996 when the lone-wolf journalist handed his 
editors a draft of what would become the three-part, 20,000-word 
expose "Dark Alliance." The series was exhaustive and complex. But 
its nugget put human faces on how CIA operatives had been aware that 
the Contras (who had been recruited and trained by the CIA to topple 
the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua) had smuggled cocaine 
into the United States and, through drug dealers, fueled an 
inner-city crack-cocaine epidemic.

When "Dark Alliance" was published on August 18 of that year, it was 
as if a bomb had exploded at the Mercury News. That's because it was 
one of the first stories to go globally viral online on the paper's 
then state-of-the-art website. It was 1996; the series attracted an 
unprecedented 1.3 million hits per day. Webb and his editors were 
flooded with letters and emails. Requests for appearances piled in 
from national TV news shows.

"Gary's story was the first Internet-age big journalism expose," said 
Nich Schou, who wrote the book Kill the Messenger, on which the movie 
is partially based, along with Webb's own book version of the series, 
Dark Alliance. "If the series had happened a year earlier it, 'Dark 
Alliance' just would have come and gone," said Schou.

As word of the story spread, black communities across 
America-especially in South Central-grew outraged and demanded 
answers. At the time, crack cocaine was swallowing up neighborhoods 
whole, fueling an epidemic of addiction and crime. Rocked by the 
revelations, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, congresswoman for Los Angeles' 
urban core to this day, used her bully pulpit to call for official 
investigations.

But after a six-week honeymoon period for Webb and his editors, the 
winds shifted. The attacks began.

On October 4, The Washington Post stunned the Mercury News by 
publishing five articles assaulting the veracity of Webb's story, 
leading the package from page one. A few weeks later, The New York 
Times joined with similar intent.

The ultimate injury came when the L.A. Times unleashed a veritable 
army of 17 journalists (known internally as the "Get Gary Webb Team") 
on the case, writing a three-part series demolishing "Dark Alliance." 
The L.A. paper-which appeared to onlookers to have missed a giant 
story in its own backyard-was exhaustive in its deconstruction, 
claiming the series "was vague" and overreached. "Oliver Stone, check 
your voice mail," summed Post media columnist Howard Kurtz.

Now, even some of Webb's supporters admitted that his series could 
have benefited from more judicious editing. But why were the "big 
three" so intent on tearing down Webb's work rather than attempting 
to further the story, as competing papers had done back in the day 
when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal?

Some say it was the long arm of former President Ronald Reagan and 
his team's ability to manipulate the gatekeepers of old media to its 
purposes. (Reagan had, after all, publicly compared the Contras to 
"our Founding Fathers" and supported the CIA-led attempt to topple 
the Sandinista government.)

Others say that editors at the "big three" were simply affronted to 
have a midsize paper like the Mercury News beat them on such a big 
story. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review claimed some L.A. 
Times reporters bragged in the office about denying Webb a Pulitzer.

One of their big criticisms was that the story didn't include a 
comment from the CIA. When reporters at the big three asked the 
agency if Webb's story was true, they were told no. The denial was 
printed in the mainstream media as if it were golden truth.

Other issues fueled controversy around Webb's story. For example: It 
was falsely reported in some media outlets-and proclaimed by many 
activists in the black community-that Webb had proven the CIA was 
directly involved in drug trafficking that targeted blacks. He simply 
did not make this claim.

In some ways, Webb became the first reporter ever to benefit from, 
and then become the victim of, a story that went viral online.

After triumphing in the early success of the series, Webb's editors 
at the Mercury News became unnerved and eventually backed down under 
the pressure. Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, published 
an unprecedented column on May 11, 1997, that was widely considered 
an apology for the series, saying it "fell short" in editing and execution.

When contacted by SN&R, Ceppos, now dean of the Manship School of 
Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, said he was only 
barely aware of the film coming out and wasn't familiar with the 
acting career of Oliver Platt, who plays him in the movie. "I'm the 
wrong person to ask about popular culture," he said.

Asked if he would do anything differently today regarding Gary Webb's 
series, Ceppos, whose apologia did partially defend the series, 
responded with an unambiguous "no."

"It seems to me, 18 years later, that everything still holds up. ... 
Everything is not black and white. If you portrayed it that way, then 
you need to set the record straight.

"I'm very proud that we were willing to do that."

Some find irony in the fact that Ceppos, in the wake of the 
controversy, was given the 1997 Ethics in Journalism Award by the 
Society of Professional Journalists.

Webb, once heralded as a groundbreaking investigative reporter, was 
soon banished to the paper's Cupertino bureau, a spot he considered 
"the newspaper's version of Siberia." In 1997, after additional 
run-ins with his editors, including their refusal to run his 
follow-up reporting on the "Dark Alliance" series, he quit the paper 
altogether.

But a year later, he was redeemed when CIA's inspector general, 
Frederick Hitz, released his 1998 report admitting that the CIA had 
known all along that the Contras had been trafficking cocaine. 
Reporter Robert Parry, who covered the Iran-Contra scandal for the 
Associated Press, called the report "an extraordinary admission of 
institutional guilt by the CIA." But the revelation fell on deaf 
ears. It went basically unnoticed by the newspapers that had attacked 
Webb's series. A later internal investigation by the Justice 
Department echoed the CIA report.

But no apology was forthcoming to Webb, despite the fact that the 
central finding of his series had been proven correct after all.

'I never really gave up hope'

Earlier this month, Webb's son Eric, 26, opened the door to his 
Sacramento rental home with a swift grab for the collar of his 
affable pit-bull mix, Thomas. Eric-lanky at 6 feet 4 inches, with his 
father's shaggy brown hair and easy expression-attended college at 
American River College and hopes to become a journalist someday. He 
was happy to sit down and discuss the upcoming film.

To Eric, the idea that a movie was being made about his dad was 
nothing new. He'd heard it all at least a dozen times before. 
Paramount Pictures had owned the rights to Dark Alliance for a while 
before Universal Studios took it on.

"I stopped expecting it," said Eric.

Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, 
had heard it all before, too.

"I'd get discouraged," she said, "but I never really gave up hope." 
Back in 1997, SN&R brought the controversy about Gary Webb to readers 
with "Secrets and Lies," a cover story about why the mainstream media 
attacked his Mercury News series. In 2004, four months before his 
suicide, Webb came to work at SN&R.

Things finally took off almost eight years ago, when screenwriter 
Peter Landesman called author Schou, now managing editor at the OC 
Weekly, about his not-yet-published book about Webb. Landesman was 
hot to write a screenplay about Webb's story, said Schou.

It was years later when Landesman showed the screenplay to Renner, 
whose own production company, The Combine, decided to co-produce it. 
Focus Features, which is owned by Universal, now has worldwide rights 
to the movie Kill the Messenger.

"When Jeremy Renner got involved," said Schou, "everything started rolling."

It was the summer of 2013 when Stokes and Webb's children-Eric, his 
older brother Ian and younger sister Christine-flew to Atlanta for 
three days on the film company's dime to see a scene being shot.

"The first thing [Renner] did when he saw us was come up and give us 
hugs and introduce himself," said Eric. "He called us 'bud' and 
'kiddo' like my dad used to. ... He even had the tucked-in shirt with 
no belt, like my dad used to wear. And I was like, 'Man, you nailed that.'"

The scene the family watched being filmed, according to Stokes, was 
the one where Webb's Mercury News editors tell him "they were gonna 
back down from the story."

"I was sitting there watching and thinking back to the morning before 
that meeting," said Stokes. "Gary was getting nervous [that day]. He 
said, 'I guess I should wear a tie and jacket' to this one. He was 
nervous but hopeful that they would let him move forward with the story."

Of course, they did not.

After a pause, Stokes said: "It was hard watching that scene and 
remembering the emotions of that day."

Just a few months ago, in June, Webb's family flew to Santa Monica to 
see the film's "final cut" at the Focus Features studio. All were 
thoroughly impressed with the film and the acting. "Jeremy Renner 
watched our home videos," said Eric. "He studied. All these little 
words and gestures that my dad used to do-he did them. I felt like I 
was watching my dad."

When asked how playing the role of Gary Webb compared to his usual 
action-adventure parts (such as in The Bourne Legacy), Renner said it 
was like "apples and oranges" to compare the two, but then admitted, 
"I can say this one was more emotionally challenging."

Renner laughed when asked about the impressive cast he'd managed to 
round up for a comparatively low-budget movie and how he was "going 
to be washing a whole lot of people's cars and doing their laundry."

Stokes has no regrets about the film.

"Seeing a chapter of your life, with its highs and lows, depicted on 
the big screen is something you never think is going to happen to 
you," she said. "It was all very emotional.

"But I loved the movie. And the kids were very happy with how it 
vindicated their father."

Said Renner, "If [the family gets] closure or anything like that ... 
that's amazing."

'I've shot that gun so I know'

It was an otherwise routine Friday morning in December 2004 when Eric 
Webb was called out of class at Rio Americano High School. The then 
16-year-old was put on the phone with his mother, who told him he 
needed to leave campus immediately and go straight to his grandmother's house.

"I told her, 'I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what 
happened,'" said Eric. So she told him about his dad.

"He killed himself," she said.

Eric had the family BMW that day, so he floored it over to his 
father's Carmichael home-the one his dad had been scheduled to clear 
out of that very day. Webb had just sold it with the alleged plan of 
saving money by moving into his mother's home nearby.

"I needed a visual confirmation for myself," said Eric. He pulled up 
to the house and saw a note in his dad's handwriting on the door. It 
read, "Do not enter, please call the police." Eric went inside and 
saw the blood, "but his body had already been taken," he said.

For his children and Stokes, nothing was ever the same. And almost 10 
years later, questions still reverberate around Gary Webb's death.

It's clear from all who knew him well that he suffered from severe 
depression. Some-like Stokes-believe in retrospect that Webb was also 
likely ill with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Still, why did he do 
it? What makes a man feel despair enough to take his own life?

After leaving the Mercury News in '97, Webb couldn't get hired at a 
daily. After writing his book, he eventually found a position working 
for the California Legislature's task force on government oversight. 
When he lost that job in February 2004, a depression he'd fought off 
for a long while settled in, said Stokes.

Though divorced in 2000, the couple remained friendly. On the day 
that would have been their 25th anniversary, he turned to her, 
utterly distraught, after hearing he'd lost the job.

"He was crying, 'I lost my job, what am I gonna do?'" she said. He 
knew the development would make it tough to stay in Sacramento near 
his children. She urged him to regroup and apply again at daily 
newspapers. Surely, she thought, the controversy over his series 
would have waned by now.

But when Webb applied, not even interviews were offered.

"Nobody would hire him," she said. "He got more and more depressed. 
He was on antidepressants, but he stopped taking them in the spring," 
said Stokes. "They weren't making him feel any better."

It was August when Webb finally got work as a reporter at SN&R. 
Though he hadn't set out to work in the world of weekly journalism, 
with its lesser pay and more hit-and-miss prestige, he was a 
productive member of the staff until near the end. During his short 
time with SN&R, he wrote a few searing cover stories, including "The 
Killing Game," about the U.S. Army using first-person shooter video 
games as a recruitment tool.

In fact, Eric edited a book in 2011 for Seven Stories Press, The 
Killing Game, that included 11 stories his father had written for 
various publications, including SN&R. "I was always happy to see his 
covers," said Eric, attending high school at the time. "We got SN&R 
on our campus, and I would be like, "Hey, my dad's on the front page. 
That's awesome.'"

It was the morning of December 10 when SN&R's editorial assistant Kel 
Munger entered editor Tom Walsh's office with word that Gary's son 
had just called saying, "Somebody needs to tell the boss that my dad 
killed himself."

Within a few hours, SN&R was fielding press calls from all around the 
country, said Munger. A week later, it was she who had the thankless 
job of cleaning out Webb's work cubicle so as to pass his belongings 
on to his ex-wife and kids. "There was bundled-up research material, 
a bunch of Detroit hockey paraphernalia, photos of his kids. ... I 
remember he had a 2004 Investigative Reporter's Handbook with Post-it 
notes throughout."

"I was having a hard time keeping it together," said Munger. "Like 
everyone else, I'd been looking forward to getting to know him."

In the days following his death, the Sacramento County Coroner's 
Office came out with a preliminary finding that was meant to cease 
the flood of calls to his office. The report "found no sign of forced 
entry or struggle" and stated the cause of death as "self-inflicted 
gunshot wounds to the head."

But it was too late to stop the conspiracy theorists. The CIA wanted 
Webb dead, they hypothesized, so the agency must have put a "hit" out 
on him. To this day, the Internet is full of claims that Webb was 
murdered. The fact that Webb had fired two shots into his own head 
didn't dampen the conjectures.

Said Eric, "The funny part is, never once has anybody from the 
conspiracy side ever contacted us and said, 'Do you think your dad 
was murdered?'"

The family knew what Webb had been through; they knew he had been 
fighting acute depression. They learned he'd purchased cremation 
services and put his bank account in his ex-wife's name. They knew 
that the day before his suicide he had mailed letters, sent to his 
brother Kurt in San Jose, that contained personal messages to each 
family member.

Receiving the letters "was actually a big relief for us," said Eric. 
"We knew it was him. They were typed by him and in his voice. It was 
so apparent. The things he knew, nobody else would know. ... He even 
recommended books for me to read."

According to Eric, the "two gunshots" issue is "very explainable," 
because the revolver Webb had fired into his head, a .38 Special 
police addition his Marine father had owned, has double action that 
doesn't require a shooter to re-cock to take a second shot. "I've 
shot that gun so I know," said Eric, who said his father taught him 
to shoot on a camping trip. "Once you cock the trigger, it goes 
'bang' real easily. ... You could just keep on squeezing and it would 
keep on shooting."

In Kill the Messenger, Webb's death goes unmentioned until after the 
final scene, when closing words roll onto the screen. Renner said he 
felt it would have been a disservice to the viewer to "weigh in too 
heavy" with details of the death. Including Webb's demise would have 
"raised a lot of questions and taken away from his legacy," he said.

'Stand up and risk it all'

It was eight days after Webb's death when a few hundred of us 
gathered in Sacramento Doubletree Hotel's downstairs conference room 
for an afternoon memorial service. Photo collages of Webb were posted 
on tables as mourners filed into the room. There he was on his prized 
red, white and blue motorcycle. There he was camping with his 
children. There he was featured in an Esquire magazine article 
recounting his saga. Family members and friends, longtime colleagues 
and SN&R staffers packed into the room.

My own distress at Webb's passing wasn't fully realized until my eyes 
lit on his Pulitzer Prize propped on a table just inside the 
entryway. It was the first one I'd ever seen. I wondered how many 
more exceptional stories he could have produced if things had gone differently.

"He wanted to write for one of the big three," said Webb's brother 
Kurt. "Unfortunately, the big three turned [on him]."

Praise for the absent journalist-his smarts, guts and tenacity-flowed 
from friends, colleagues and VIPs at the event. A statement from now 
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, then a senator, had been emailed 
to SN&R: "Because of [Webb]'s work, the CIA launched an Inspector 
General's investigation that found dozens of troubling connections to 
drug-runners. That wouldn't have happened if Gary Webb hadn't been 
willing to stand up and risk it all."

And Rep. Waters, who spent two years following up on Webb's findings, 
wrote a statement calling him "one of the finest investigative 
journalists our country has ever seen."

When Hollywood weighs in soon on the Webb saga, the storm that 
surrounded him in life will probably be recycled in the media and 
rebooted on the Internet, with old and new media journalists, 
scholars and conspiracy theorists weighing in from all sides.

But the film itself is an utter vindication of Webb's work.

Renner was hesitant to say if those who watch Kill the Messenger will 
leave with any particular take-home lesson. "I want the audience to 
walk away and debate and argue about it all," he said of his David 
and Goliath tale. And then, "I do believe [the film] might help 
create some awareness and accountability in government and newspapers."

And what would the real live protagonist of Kill the Messenger have 
thought of it all? It's at least certain he'd have been unrepentant. 
In the goodbye letter his ex-wife received on the day of his suicide, 
Gary Webb told her:

"Tell them I never regretted anything I wrote."
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