San Jose Mercury News organization
also: Mercury News, Mercury, the Mercury, Mercury's, Mercury Center, the newspaper
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Related entities (most co-mentioned)
Gary Webbperson · 10Jerry Cepposperson · 8CIAintelligence service · 7Dark Allianceevent · 6The Washington Postorganization · 4Contrasorganization · 4Los Angeles Timesorganization · 4Dark Alliancebook · 3The New York Timesorganization · 3Los Angelesplace · 3Don Yaegerperson · 3United Statescountry · 3San Joséplace · 2Peter Careyperson · 2Jerry Seppesperson · 2Howard Kurtzperson · 2Carlos Cabezasperson · 1Jonathan Krimperson · 1Ivan Gomezperson · 1Bob Perryperson · 1Fox Newsorganization · 1Cupertinoplace · 1Fred Hitzperson · 1Sergeant Hoffmanperson · 1
Claims (5)
Gary Webb member_of
San Jose Mercury News documented
“The unprecedented attack by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury editors. I was called to a meeting with Cepos and the other editors and told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start working on a written resp…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 24 @ 1:01:30
Jerry Ceppos member_of
San Jose Mercury News documented
“The unprecedented attack by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury editors. I was called to a meeting with Cepos and the other editors and told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start working on a written resp…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 24 @ 1:01:30
Peter Carey member_of
San Jose Mercury News documented
“agreed we should continue developing the story. The best way to answer our critics, they said, is to advance the story. Let's go out and get some more evidence of drug money being sent to the Contras. Let's get more evidence of this drug ri…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 24 @ 1:02:31
Pamela Kramer member_of
San Jose Mercury News documented
“agreed we should continue developing the story. The best way to answer our critics, they said, is to advance the story. Let's go out and get some more evidence of drug money being sent to the Contras. Let's get more evidence of this drug ri…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 24 @ 1:02:31
San Jose Mercury News covered_up
Dark Alliance guest_asserted
“But Cepos wouldn't budge on that issue. Thousands of reprints with the CIA crack logo were gathered up and burned, and a CD-ROM version of the series, which had been pressed and was ready for distribution, were all destroyed. The Post and t…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 24 @ 1:03:26
Mentions (40)
▶ 3:25
the foreword in 2004, that edition of the book. This book has been put out several times. So Dan Simons, this is his words. I began working as Gary Webb's editor on Dark Alliance, the book, in July 1997, about a year after his newspaper ser…
▶ 6:12
But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary. Although they could not find a single factual error, as Gary's then editor at the Mercury News, Jerry Kepos,…
▶ 13:24
The editors of the San Jose Mercury News did not have the strength to withstand the attack, so they abandoned Gary Webb, despite their knowledge that Gary was working on further documentation to substantiate the allegations of the series. H…
▶ 14:32
author's note that Gary Webb wrote. This sadly is a true story. It is based upon controversial series I wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the summer of 1996 about the origins of the crack plague in South Central Los Angeles. Unlike othe…
▶ 23:14
And so they pick whichever ones that they want to arrest based on what assets they have so that they can quote unquote auction them to their buddies. Just thought I'd throw that in. It might, I told her, if I hadn't done it half a dozen tim…
▶ 41:03
Just in case he and the FBI really did think I was a hitman, I introduced myself as a reporter. Why would the Mercury News be interested in this case, he asked. You should have been here two years ago. This stuff is old. I considered tap da…
▶ 1:01:14
Gary Webb seemed not to care. Bob Perry wasn't some fringe reporter. He'd won a Polk Award for uncovering the CIA assassination manual given to the Contras. It was the first reporter to expose Oliver Norse's illegal activities. But what he …
▶ 54:26
Sergeant Gordon, in fact, was no longer even around. He had been promoted. According to Sergeant Hoffman's note, one of the first things the federal agents did was to put Gordon's bombshell search warrant affidavit under seal, which kept it…
▶ 31:31
put the story out there, it would hopefully raise the standards of investigative reporting by forcing the press to show and tell rather than hiding behind faceless sources. The editors agreed it would be a good way to showcase the Mercury's…
▶ 37:20
and exposed the Mercury's investigation in his motion. And now the LA Times was onto it because it was all a setup. I should have known better.…
▶ 6:32
But that was the kind of newspaper the Mercury News was at the time. No topic was taboo. The reason I'd left a much larger paper in Cleveland to work for the Mercury was because its editors convinced me that they ran one of the few newspape…
▶ 8:00
reaction to Dark Alliance, I was gratified but not surprised. They loved it. She was happy. They couldn't wait to get it in the paper. They thought it was important. Groundbreaking reporting. Congratulations. But there was one hitch. They t…
▶ 8:30
But the mercury, it was as if I was asking for the moon, a raise, a shower in my office, or an executive parking place. They're never going to go for four parts, Dawn warned. Yarnold told me I could have as much space as I needed, I reminde…
▶ 11:27
what he produced. Quote, for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Blood street gangs in Los Angeles and funneled millions of dollars in drug profits to Latin America guerrilla army ran by t…
▶ 19:06
That combination, talk radio and the internet, is what saved Dark Alliance from slipping silently below the surface and disappearing without a trace. The internet wizards at Mercury Center, Mark Hall, Donna Yanish, and Albert Poon, had done…
▶ 20:31
But as far as I was concerned, my best protection was for everybody to see everything I found. I had it on paper, and most of it was public record. We scanned as many of my documents as possible into the computers at Mercury Center and uplo…
▶ 21:02
Use net news groups the day before the series appeared, tipping them off about the unveiling of the page. The cyber journalists were as proud as their revolutionary handiwork as I was and wanted to make sure that the net world knew what the…
▶ 21:32
in a whole new kind of journalism. Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia would later write of Dark Alliance, quote, the Mercury News used the web to let intelligent readers review the source material and draw their own conclusion. This step, far…
▶ 23:29
The wires and the switchboard at Mercury News lit up. This place is going crazy, Don reported. The web page had over 500,000 hits in one day. The Mercury News executive editor, Jerry Kepos, called and congratulated me. The TV networks were …
▶ 25:53
Dark Alliance, Hotwire wrote, is making digital and media history. The Mercury News is demonstrating for perhaps the first time how the web and traditional press can fuse to great effect and that there's a chance to break modern media's par…
▶ 31:35
Tom Snyder, Jesse Jackson, Montel Williams. I was on CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, the CBS Morning News. The Mercury printed up 5,000 copies of the series, and they were gone in a matter of weeks. An employee from the marketing department was assigne…
▶ 34:51
that he would expect to see this kind of a story in a magazine like In These Times, not a mainstream newspaper such as the San Jose Mercury News. No one on Kalb's show bothered to mention that Eastland had a history of trying to cover up th…
▶ 43:22
Shortly afterwards, I got an email message from a woman in Southern California. There was a story in the Mercury archives that I needed to see, she wrote, and provided a date and a page number. I sent it to our library and got a photocopy o…
▶ 1:01:30
The unprecedented attack by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury editors. I was called to a meeting with Cepos and the other editors and told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start working on a written resp…
▶ 1:03:26
But Cepos wouldn't budge on that issue. Thousands of reprints with the CIA crack logo were gathered up and burned, and a CD-ROM version of the series, which had been pressed and was ready for distribution, were all destroyed. The Post and t…
▶ 1:17:32
you're sitting on information that supports what I wrote and pretending you're not aware of it. Again, he objected. But again, Seppos recast it, this time as a personal column at Don's insistent, disclosing that I disagreed with him, that h…
▶ 1:19:25
If there was ever a chance of getting to the bottom of the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, it died that day. New York Times, which hadn't found the original series newsworthy, splashed Seppo's apology on the front frickin' page. Howa…
▶ 1:21:30
If Mercury continued pursuing the story and publishing follow-ups, editor John Krim worried in a memo, the editors needed to be ready to deal with the firestorm of criticism. The other way out was to back up, confess shortcomings, take a lu…
▶ 1:22:24
We've got four more stories sitting in a can, and I intend to try to get them in the newspaper. I've been told that we're still running them. Curse called me back a short time later. I just got off the phone with Jerry Seppos, and he says, …
▶ 1:22:53
and I know he's read them because we discussed them. Maybe you misunderstood. Kurt said, they're not notes? No, of course not. They've got a beginning, middle, and end. Those are stories where I come from. The controversy raged for another …
▶ 1:23:20
In Washington, D-Day Joe Madison, who'd been making hay with the story for months, urged the listeners of his 5,000-watt station to call Seppos and demand he print the stories that he was suppressing. Letters and emails flooded in. Seppos, …
▶ 1:24:08
It was a very one-sided discussion. Reading from a prepared statement, Cepos told me that my editors had lost faith in me and I needed closer supervision, which I couldn't get in Sacramento. I needed to regain their faith and their trust, a…
▶ 1:26:46
would be an act of defiance. Reluctantly, I went, spending July and August in the Supantino Bureau under protest. I was assigned such pressing matters of the death of a police horse. To the chagrin of my editors, who were under orders to ke…
▶ 1:27:13
A one-page story with no one's name on it, which reportedly infuriated Cepos. Occasionally, Pete Carey would call with a question or two. He wasn't having much luck cooperating with Carlos Cabrese's statements. He told me he was trying to l…
▶ 2:03
to the Los Angeles Times and, weirdly enough, the Mercury News. Supposedly, having conducted an exhaustive probe from unnamed sources, it had absolved itself from any wrongdoing. Anyone surprised? No. The reporters had no idea what the repo…
▶ 13:03
Once again, the LA Times found nothing newsworthy about it, and the Washington Post concurred. The release three months later of Hitt's 400-page report, filled with horrifying details of the CIA's collusion with drug traffickers, money laun…
▶ 13:32
actually exonerated the CIA and proved that no top CIA official was aware of the contra-trafficking, even though it said exactly the opposite. The lack of any visible public outrage to the CIA's confession that it had worked cheek to cheek …
▶ 17:37
for the miseries they cause. Even if that's all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just because the favorable judgment of history is ultimately what they crave. That's it. So he was completely exonerated in everything he said. And ev…
▶ 6:18
But that history and the U.S. government's failure to take action came under renewed scrutiny last year with a series of published in the San Jose Mercury News, citing more documents and testimony linking those shipments to the outbreak of …
▶ 6:48
protested its innocence. Major newspapers, the Washington Post, New York Times, the LA Times, sided with the CIA, as they always do. In lengthy articles, all three papers attacked the Mercury News of poor journalism, but acknowledged the lo…