Soul Searching in San Jose

The events that preceded the publication of the "Dark Alliance" series in the San Jose Mercury News last August and that led up to executive editor Jerry Ceppos's unusual mea culpa column about it this May have the elements of a pretty good newspaper movie. There is the aggressive lone-wolf investigative reporter who may or may not have fallen down a reportorial rabbit hole; the young Latina city editor, newly promoted and protective of her star reporter; the thoughtful executive editor struggling with his conscience as parts of a huge "holy shit!" story seem to unravel before his eyes; the racial and social undertones of news room politics; plus tales of personal tragedies and professional laxity. The backdrop is the CIA's history and dirty laundry, angry mistrust among some African-Americans about their government, about the injustices of the drug war, and the devastation of inner-city communities from crack.

The movie would be about a newspaper slowly and painfully distancing itself from what it once had seen as one of the bigger and better stories it had done. But getting the plot just right would be tough. The details are difficult to put together, partly because after much grandstanding about healthy public debate and openness with readers, the Mercury News has gone silent. Ceppos and the editors involved in the contentious story and its internal review all declined to be interviewed. The only person directly involved in the making of it who spoke freely and on the record is Gary Webb, the embattled author.

From another perspective, maybe the story is too mundane for a movie. What happened inside the Mercury News during this last year is something like what can and does happen in any number of newsrooms -- writers misjudging or exaggerating the portent of their reporting; editors failing to inspect the undergirding of a story's logic; busy executives getting distracted ; editorial systems breaking down. Except that what went wrong in San Jose was so much more damaging, inside and outside the newsroom. And thus worth trying to understand.

 The series certainly invited scrutiny. (See "The Furor Over 'Dark Alliance,'" CJR, January/February.) Right in its opening sentences it made inflammatory charges:

 For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

 Similar allegations of contra involvement with inner-city drug dealing had been reported for years. But this was the first time that a major daily had found a small chain of named individuals -- three drug dealers, two of them connected to the contras -- and drawn such horrifying conclusions.

The reaction in the black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles was intense and immediate. On August 30, 1996, Maxine Waters, the U.S. congresswoman, wrote Attorney General Janet Reno demanding an investigation so that her crack-ravaged community might "get answers to the many questions that have been raised by the San Jose Mercury News expose." In a highly unusual move, CIA Director John Deutch held a community meeting in Watts in November to try to defuse the anger. Debate over the series built up, fanned by attention on the Internet and on talk radio.

On October 4, The Washington Post slammed the series in a page-one news piece. On October 13, in reaction to the Post's article, Webb's fellow Mercury News investigative reporter, Pete Carey, dissected the series in the pages of the Merc. Carey's article confirmed charges raised by critics that Webb had left out some evidence that contradicted one of the story's key sources.

After The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times also ran page-one stories alleging major inaccuracies in the series, Ceppos wrote a lengthy article in November defending it. Staff meetings were held to address newsroom tension. And a steady flow of memos concerning questions about the series' reporting flew back and forth between San Jose and Sacramento, where Webb lives and works, from winter into spring.

 At one point, in February, Webb was summoned to San Jose to meet with top Mercury News editors to talk once again. " I thought we were finally going to discuss the follow-up," Webb says. "Instead, I got told that we still needed to settle the issues about the series. I said, 'What issues? I thought we already did that.'"

In his celebrated May 11 column, Jerry Ceppos explained to readers that the paper still supports what he sees as the core of the series -- that "a drug ring associated with the Contras sold large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles in the 1980s at the time of the crack explosion there" and that "some of the drug profits from those sales went to the Contras."

But, he went on: "After spending months reexamining our effort with the help of seven other reporters and editors, I have concluded that the series did not meet our standards in four areas."

 -- The Mercury News "presented only one interpretation of complicated, sometimes-conflicting pieces of evidence."

 -- "We made our best estimate of how much money was involved, but we failed to label it as an estimate."

 --The paper "oversimplified the complex issue of how the crack epidemic in America grew."

 -- And finally, the Mercury News "through imprecise language and graphics," created "impressions that were open to misinterpretation."

 One such "impression" was the strong im plication that the Central Intelligence Agency knew about the drug dealing. Webb argues that the series never actually says that the CIA knew about that. The paper's own editorial department had the impression that it did. Its editorial on the series was headlined "Another CIA disgrace: Helping the crack flow".

In his column, Ceppos conceded: "Although members of the drug ring met with Contra leaders paid by the CIA, I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship. I be lieve that part of our contract with readers is to be as clear about what we don't know as what we do know." He noted that reporter Webb does not agree with his conclusions about the series.

Webb was surprised and angered by the column -- "I told them, everyone who wants this story to die will read this as a retraction." The Washington Post and The New York Times both ran front-page stories covering the Merc's second thoughts, as well as editorials that praised Ceppos for "repudiating" the series, as the Post editorial put it.

Ceppos's column may have little effect on anti-government sentiment in segments of the black community. "There is a lot of suspicion that there is some truth associated with the claims in the story," Los Angeles city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas told Time. "Frankly, these suspicions will not go away."

 The CIA said its own investigation of the charges would be completed by the end of the year. The Justice Department and two congressional committees have also said they would look into the charges.

If Webb was surprised by Ceppos's column, many of his colleagues were not. Inside the San Jose newsroom, Webb's series had become controversial soon after he filed it, in March 1996. Word got around about "Gary's cocaine story" after several reporters sneaked unauthorized reads of it from the central computer system. Some thought it might give the Merc a chance at its third Pulitzer, but many others could not believe the paper would publish something that they thought read like a conspiracy manifesto.

It didn't help Webb's case in the newsroom that quite a few reporters and editors at the Mercury News see him as an arrogant reporter who is given too much freedom by management despite "problems" with his stories. In one such problem, according to The New York Times, the Mercury News assigned a second reporter to check out Webb's 1994 series about the alleged failures of Tandem Computers, Inc. to modernize state motor vehicle computers. The reporter wrote in a memo that Webb's ser ies was, "in all its major elements, incorrect." But others at the Merc say at least some of the disputed elements of that story were seen, in time, as on target. The paper never ran a correction.

Not many journalists at the Mercury News really know Webb, who works out of his home in Sacramento and the Merc's three-person bureau there, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from San Jose. In his nearly ten years at the paper he has had minimal contact with San Jose.

He had a similar investigative position at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland before being recruited by Jonathan Krim, the Mercury News's assistant managing editor for projects, in 1988. As The New York Times reported, Webb was sued for libel three times at The Plain Dealer. One suit was dismissed. The paper settled the other two.

Over the years he has won more than two dozen journalism awards, including the 1996 Journalist of the Year award from the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter for his work on "Dark Alliance," and the 1994 H.L. Mencken award from the Free Press Association for his series on drug forfeiture laws. He was also part of the six-person Mercury News team that won a 1990 Pulitzer for its coverage of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

And he has his backers. "I'm seeing Gary being made out to be a pariah and I just don't get it," says Tim Graham, editor of The Oakland Tribune, who has known Webb for nineteen years. "He is one of the finest and most aggressive reporters around and he is also always in need of a strong editor -- what's wrong with that? The editors are supposed to be the gatekeepers."

According to Webb and other Mercury News reporters, the normal editing process for an investigative project requires a reporter to work closely with an assistant city editor who then turns over the story to a senior editor, usually projects editor Krim, for a second read and edit. Once these three people have all signed off on the story, it goes to the managing editor or executive editor for final approval and then to lawyers if the subject matter warrants. "Dark Alliance" followed a somewhat different route.

 Webb's frontline editor and main San Jose contact is city editor Dawn Garcia. She had come south in 1993 from the rival San Francisco Chronicle, where she covered city politics, after a stint as a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford. Garcia rose quickly at the Merc, moving from state editor to city editor in May 1996. Some saw her as having bypassed a more experienced editor, a white male, and thus something of an affirmative-action-backlash cloud hung over the internal debate on "Dark Alliance."

 Webb's next line of editing on the series came from David Yarnold, a Mercury News veteran who rose from the graphics department to become managing editor when Ceppos was promoted to executive editor in 1995. Several staff members note that projects editor Krim, who has a reputation as a tough and thorough editor, particularly on investigative projects, would normally oversee a complicated series like "Dark Alliance." But for reasons not altogether clear, Krim was not involved in the editing. Insiders say that management seemed to want to spread the chance to work on major projects to other top editors. In any event, Yarnold took an interest in "Dark Alliance," and it was soon known as "Yarnold's baby."

 For four months, Garcia and Yarnold worked on shaping Webb's long and complex stories into a series. Then, about a month before publication, Yarnold left the paper to go to corporate parent Knight-Ridder's new-media department in San Jose. He would return to his position at the Mercury News in April 1997, eight months after "Dark Alliance" was published. Paul Van Slambrouck, assistant managing editor for news, stepped in to fill Yarnold's shoes both as acting managing editor and senior "Dark Alliance" editor. Van Slambrouck decided to re-edit the entire series. He later told staff members that he "toned it down."

How much sustained attention the people responsible for "Dark Alliance" were actually able to give it is open to question. Garcia's promotion meant that she was supervising about forty reporters instead of seven. She was also struggling with a recently reorganized metro section that left fewer reporters to fill the same space. Yarnold, criticized behind his back for his background in graphics but respected as a good administrator, was managing editor for a newsroom of about three hundred people, as was Van Slambrouck when he filled Yarnold's shoes.

 Much was happening during the editing in the personal lives of some of the players as well. Garcia was going through a divorce. Ceppos was quietly getting medical tests that would confirm that he had prostate cancer.

 Webb says he doesn't know whether the story went to the papers' lawyers. And whether Ceppos read it before publication is also unclear. Webb, again, says he doesn't know. Sources close to management say that if the managing editor has already read a series, then Ceppos might not read it himself if he is too busy.

 As Webb sees it, the editing process was "more intense than what I usually get. It basically got edited twice," going from four parts to three, then back to four, then back to three. He argues that the criticisms of the 400-inch series that are warranted stem from a lack of space. "We didn't detail some stuff very well," he admits, "specifically regarding the money trail and specifically regarding the genesis of the crack market in LA." He says that when he raised that concern, his editors told him that he had made his case.

 When the series finally saw ink last August, the newsroom divided roughly into two camps: those who believed that regardless of its flaws, the series was significant, and those who thought it was a one-sided conspiracy theory from a cowboy reporter. To some extent the split fell along lines of who tended to be critical of management and who didn't, but it also tended to break along ethnic and gender lines. "The 'supporters,' the people who believed aspects of the theories, were mostly women and ethnic minorities , while the opposition was led by what I guess you could call the 'angry white guys,'" says Ricardo Sandoval, Mexico correspondent for the Mercury News, who was in the San Jose newsroom through most of the controversy. "It really reflected the division in the public at large." Several other staffers also confirmed this characterization.

 When the Washington Post story ran October 4, the level of gloating by what some staff members were calling the "Dark Alliance Nazis" got so high that executive editor Ceppos wrote a two-page memo October 10 calling for dialogue and inviting everyone to a "brown-bag" to talk the situation over. The memo said:

"Everybody: Many of you have been talking about the Washington Post's reporting on our 'Dark Alliance' series. A copy of the letter that I've written to the Post is attached. In brief, it says that no one -- including the Post -- has proven that our conclusions were wrong. It says that we strongly support the conclusions that the series drew -- and will until someone proves them wrong . . . . There are papers famous for their back-stabbing environment (when Woodward and Bernstein first broke Watergate, the Post newsroom sounded much like ours does now, only worse). I tell applicants that, at the Mercury News, our goal is to become famous for dealing with tough situations in a much healthier fashion."

Ceppos is big on dialogue, and he got it. At staff meetings in October and again in May, some employees expressed deep frustration and anger. "If I had done what Gary did I would be fired," one staffer said during the May meeting. "Why is he still working here?" Another said that the series had "shamed" everyone at the paper.

 Ceppos announced in October that Jonathan Krim would be heading a "projects committee" to scrutinize the editorial process and make recommendations for improvements in handling special projects. The goal, says committee member Stephen Buel, an assistant editor and an outspoken critic of "Dark Alliance," "was to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again." Other committee members concur.

In a preliminary five-page memo, the committee concluded that "We believe the newspaper needs a more formal process for vetting projects -- at the idea stage and at the editing stage." The committee's recommendations, written by Krim, include a much more formal review of special projects from beginning to end.

"Once a project has been edited . . . at least three other people will formally review the story. These three will be the AME Projects or AME News; a reporter or editor who knows something about the subject area, and the ME or EE . . . . Stories whose original editor is one of the people involved in the process still will be reviewed by three other people."

That is still fewer people than at some papers. "The stuff that happened in San Jose would never happen here," says Jim Mulvaney, speaking as projects editor at The Orange County Register. "There are always reporters who push the envelope and it is the editors' jobs to pull them back." Mulvaney, who moved in June to the New York Daily News, says the Register has at least five editors read any major investigation, at least one of whom comes to the story cold.

In his May 11 column, Ceppos said "Dark Alliance" would be edited differ ently today: "It would state fewer conclusions as certainties, and be clearer in examining why, given the thicket of sometimes conflicting evidence . . . we drew the conclusions that we did."

While the projects committee was at work, another committee w as doing its own assessment of "Dark Alliance," one that would lead to Ceppos's May 11 column. Meanwhile, Webb and two other experienced reporters were working on follow-up stories to the series.

 Back in October, Webb says, he was offered three book deals and one movie deal for the series. But he contends Ceppos told him he couldn't do those projects and still follow the story for the Mercury News, which, Webb says, Ceppos wanted him to do. In late October and early November, "I went down to Central America to follow up the CIA and the money angles." He worked with a Managua-based free-lance journalist, Georg Hodel, who has helped Webb with his Central America reporting."We came up with some great stuff," he says. "If anything, I feel better about the series now than when we ran it. We didn't know how right we were."

 In January, Webb claims, management seemed eager to get these stories into the paper, "because they wanted to shut The Washington Post up." Webb says he filed four stories in January and February, one 130 inches long, another 220 inches, and two 50 to 60 inches. None of the follow-ups ever ran.

Sources close to management say that the four stories have indeed been filed, but that they are not the nails in the CIA's coffin that Webb sometimes makes them out to be. According to one person who read them, they have some very promising information, most of which is buried deep in long, rambling articles that need lots of editing. During one March meeting Webb attended with top editors, he says, Ceppos told him that they were not going to run his stories. "I got very agitated. I said, 'This is outrageous.'" But Webb claims that Garcia later told him that it was her intention to make sure they got into the paper.

Earlier in March, Webb had gone to interview another source in Florida and then took vacation time to go to Managua, Nicaragua, for more interviews with people allegedly familiar with contra drug deals -- despite having been told by Paul Van Slambrouck to come back to "settle this other stuff first," meaning the questions still open about his series. Webb says the trip resulted in "some amazing interviews with these people, but nobody was very interested. They never asked for notes or anything."

 In late May, Webb told CJR that he had had no communication with anyone in San Jose except Garcia since March: "Total silence." He said that no one had given him a copy of the projects memo yet and wasn't sure how or if he would be affected by it. He said he would keep researching his leads to follow-up "Dark Alliance" until somebody in San Jose told him to stop.

On Wednesday, June 4, somebody did. Ceppos called Webb and took him off the story. Webb said he was invited to drive to San Jose the next day to "discuss my future at the paper." There, Ceppos told him that he would be transferred from the state capital to Cupertino, and out of investigative work. Webb said he would fight his job change through the Guild. Yarnold and Garcia remain in the same positions; Van Slambrouck was promoted June 11 to deputy managing editor.

Ceppos also told Webb that another reporter would follow up "Dark Alliance" for the Mercury News, Webb says, but he isn't holding his breath. "I think that Ceppos's column is the last time that this story will ever go in the Mercury. I mean, when they put it up in the website as an 'epilogue,' that's a pretty clear sign."

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