Time magazine's May 17 issue ran a feature on the funding of the Kosovo Liberation Army, titled "A Fighting Chance," suggesting that the KLA is sustained by donations from ethnic Albanians outside of Kosovo. The article reports that the Republic of Kosova Fund holds "more than $33 million" in a bank in Albania, yet in a graphic titled "How the KLA Gets Its Money," Time cheerfully reports that the KLA gets its money from "fund raisers, mailings and other sources." What "other sources"? Bake sales? Time doesn't say. Fortunately, there has been some investigation into the question. The London Times [...]
Jan
01
1998
Forgotten Behind Bars
Abuse of women in prison doesn't "set off" media
When the Supreme Court upheld a judge's decision to cut by more than half the suggested prison sentences of the police officers who beat Rodney King (to 30 months), there was no media outcry calling the justices, or the public, "soft" on cops who commit crimes. Yet when a Cambridge judge decided to let Louise Woodward go free on time served, the same media that had blanketed the nation with emotive reporting on the British au pear lashed back at the public. "There's just something about a woman behind bars that sets people off," suggested Laura Mansnerus in a front-page [...]
Jul
01
1997
Gary Webb Defends Gary Webb
CounterSpin Transcript
In August, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published its "Dark Alliance" series by reporter Gary Webb, revealing the links between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras and crack cocaine trafficking in the U.S. The series became a national controversy after wide transmission on the Internet and in independent and black-oriented news media--followed by a savage backlash against the series by national dailies like the New York Times and Washington Post that had spent years downplaying or distorting evidence of the contra-cocaine link (See "Snow Job," Extra!, 1-2/97). On May 11, 1997, as if displaying the white flag of surrender, Mercury News [...]
Jul
01
1997
Pot Boiler
Why Are Media Enlisting in the Government's Crusade Against Marijuana?
By Mike Males
As America’s officially ignored death toll from overdoses of heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs and alcohol mixed with dope took another huge jump in 1995 (taking 10,000 lives, up 65 percent since 1992), America’s media raged with the threat to the republic posed by . . . sick people smoking marijuana to relieve pain. And ABC News teamed up in March with the private Partnership for a Drug-Free America to push a month-long "March Against Drugs," including hourly ads, numerous specials, and "Straight Talk About Drugs" appended to its evening news with a heavy focus on teenage marijuana use. Newsweek (11/25/96) [...]
Oct
01
1996
Exposed: The Contra-Crack Connection
The wave of crack addiction that crippled inner-city neighborhoods across the country in the '80s had its roots in the CIA's efforts to fund the secret contra war against Nicaragua, according to an investigative report by the San Jose Mercury News' Gary Webb (8/18-20/96). The story of the year? Not according to the New York Times, which has so far ignored the Mercury News' well-documented revelations. The major TV networks gave it no coverage. A few dailies prominently reprinted Webb's work (like the Seattle Times, 8/22/96), or ran an Associated Press account summarizing his findings (e.g., Chicago Tribune, 8/21/96). But [...]
Sep
01
1992
Don't Forget the Hype
Media, Drugs, and Public Opinion
By Micah Fink
Solid lines: number of stories per month in New York Times index on drug abuse, addiction, and traffickingDiamonds, dashed lines: percentage of U.S. public saying drugs are "the most important problem facing this country today"Circles, dotted lines: percentage of high school seniors who say they have used any illicit drugs in the past 12 months The New York Times/CBS News poll records two periods during the last decade when public concern about drugs suddenly skyrocketed. In spring 1986, when the media "discovered" crack, the percentage of the public identifying" drugs" as "the No. 1 problem facing the nation" climbed from [...]
Nov
01
1991
Time Suppresses Contra Drug Story
As Time magazine's resident expert on narcotics trafficking, Elaine Shannon was a predictable choice for the New York Time Book Review (7/28/91) to critique the book Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Predictably, she slammed the book, whose central thesis is that the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras "trafficked extensively in cocaine while the CIA, National Security Council, and Justice Department ignored the evidence." In her review, the Time magazine correspondent poked fun at Scott and Marshall for believing that media timidity had helped the CIA's alliance with drug dealers: "[The [...]
Jan
01
1990
Censored News
Drug Links of Panama's New Rulers
The Bush White House justified the invasion by claiming that overthrowing Noriega was a major victory in the war on drugs. If journalists had reported the backgrounds of the new Panamanian leaders installed by the U.S. invasion, and their connections to drug-laundering banks and drug traffickers, a primary rationale for the invasion would have been shredded. But few journalists scrutinized Panama's "new democrats" from the country's banking and corporate elite. One who did was Jonathan Marshall, editorial page editor of the Oakland Tribune. In a series of editorials, "Panama's Drug, Inc." (1/5 & 1/22/90), Marshall reported the following: PRESIDENT GUILLERMO [...]
