Book Excerpt: A Graveyard of Truthtellers
In corporate media, you might get fired for telling the truth.
This post is an excerpt from my 2023 book Red White & Blind: The Truth About Disinformation & the Path to Media Consciousness. This specific excerpt comes from Chapter 12: Your Views Are No Longer Needed, which highlights a dozen journalists who were fired, forced out, or otherwise silenced for telling the truth. This excerpt includes three of those 12 profiles.
These types of firings and demotions certainly continue to happen today, particularly with the 2024 presidential campaign now fully underway.
A Graveyard of Truthtellers
The pages that follow constitute a small collection of the journalists who have been fired, demoted, forced out, banished, or canceled by corporate media organizations for covering the news in ways that ran counter to dominant narratives. It turns out, if you tell the truth in the corporate media about the buildup to a war or about an unfavored presidential candidate, you might be fired.
Legend has it that Mark Twain quipped to a dogged reporter the following in 1897: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Here, the word graveyard is “greatly exaggerated.” While most of these journalists are blackballed permanently from positions in corporate media organizations, they didn’t vanish altogether as journalists but, in fact, rose again as truthtellers. Today, many lead fruitful lives of journalistic integrity at alternative and independent news organizations.
Ed Schultz (MSNBC)
Fired for covering Bernie Sanders
With a popular, long-running show on MSNBC, the host of “The Ed Show” had become an increasingly powerful progressive voice in corporate media by the spring of 2015. His show had been running for six years at that point in prominent time slots and routinely beat CNN in the ratings, where it frequently ran opposite Anderson Cooper’s show.
In May of that fateful year, Schultz flew to Burlington, Vermont and became the only television host from any of the major networks present when Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for president in front of 3,000 supporters on the banks of Lake Champlain. Schultz interviewed Sanders at his home as well.
Schultz was preparing to air both the announcement speech and the in-person interview on his MSNBC show when he received an urgent call from Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC.
Griffin spoke in no uncertain terms. “You’re not covering this.”
Schultz responded that it was a historic moment, that it was a major presidential announcement, and that they had footage and access no other network had. Their coverage would be unique and of great public interest.
“I don’t care,” Griffin repeated. “You’re not covering this.”
Schultz didn’t acquiesce quietly. But none of the footage ever appeared on MSNBC.
Schultz was one of very few corporate media hosts at the time covering labor issues. A throwback to an earlier era, he interviewed union leaders and labor-side economists. The Sanders announcement and the personal interview were not aired, but Schultz, nonetheless, covered Bernie Sanders in the weeks that followed until his show was canceled about a month later.
In an interview in 2018, months before his untimely death, Schultz gave his side of this story. His frank opinion was that both Griffin and MSNBC Chairman Andrew Lack were “connected at the hip with the DNC.”
They didn’t want anybody in their primetime or their lineup supporting Bernie Sanders. They were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. And I think it was managed. And 45 days later, I was out at MSNBC… The fix was in with the mainstream media. The fix was in with managing the news and shutting down Bernie Sanders… The fix was in early on to deep-six Bernie.[1]
The case of Ed Schultz reveals both determination and a hint of desperation on the part of MSNBC. When the normal tools of narrative management aren’t sufficient—and in this case with the rise of Sanders and independent media, they clearly weren’t—the establishment media uses the more transparent clubs of censorship and termination.
Krystal Ball (MSNBC)
Fired for not supporting Hillary Clinton
A rising star on MSNBC, not yet thirty years old, Krystal Ball came to the network having already run for office. Ball brought a fresh perspective and personal experience from witnessing the declining fortunes working class people faced during the Obama years while she lived in East Liverpool, Ohio.
In 2014, as a host of the show The Cycle, where she had been a host for three years, she delivered a powerful and prescient monologue concerning Hillary Clinton. The 2016 election was around the corner, and hearing Hillary Clinton’s platform of, in essence, “no change,” Ball urged Clinton live on MSNBC not to run for president. “We’re now at a moment of existential crisis as a country. We’re recovering slowly from the Great Recession, but as we pick our heads up at where we’re heading, we don’t like what we see… Don’t run, Hillary. Don’t run.”[2]
Shortly after the monologue aired, she was called into her boss’s office to explain her perspective.
“After that, every time I was going to do another monologue on Hillary Clinton, I had to get it approved by the president of the network. That’s not a normal thing.”[3]
Ball’s show was canceled in the summer of 2015, shortly after Ed Schultz was fired by the same network. MSNBC, it appears, was cleaning house to prepare for the 2016 primaries.
“I would do these MSNBC pieces on inequality, or the plutocracy, or Piketty, or how I thought Hillary Clinton was going to lose, and it felt very lonely”.[4]
Fortunately, she has survived and kept her conscience intact. Ball now has a successful daily news show outside of corporate media, Breaking Points, which is part of the Balanced Media Diet I recommend in the next chapter.
Gary Webb (San Jose Mercury News)
Fired after reporting on CIA drug running
One of the few journalists on this list who actually is in a graveyard is Gary Webb, a classically-trained, tough-nosed, old-school investigative reporter. Webb was hired off the street by the Kentucky Post in 1978, cut his teeth in its small newsroom, and built a career by moving on to successively larger papers. He won a Pulitzer Prize for a groundbreaking series on government corruption and landed jobs at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then the San Jose Mercury News.
In the 1990s, he penned probably the most explosive—and most famous—investigative newspaper series of its decade, “Dark Alliance.” He died in 2004 of a mysterious gunshot wound that was labelled a suicide.
“Dark Alliance” was a three-part series published when he was at the Mercury News in 1996, and it revealed a great deal. The CIA had supported the Nicaraguan Contras in a 1980s right-wing coup against the socialist Sandinistas; the CIA had done this by facilitating crack and cocaine importation into the United States. Most stunning of all at the time, this imported cocaine had been a primary driver of crack cocaine abuse in inner cities like Los Angeles, which in turn led to the “War on Drugs” and draconian government drug laws that criminalized and imprisoned a generation of mostly Black men.
Webb wasn’t the first to write about the CIA colluding with drug smugglers, or even the first to look into how they colluded with the Nicaraguan Contras. Much of “Dark Alliance” was not, in fact, new information. The Iran-Contra Scandal had already exploded on the American political scene, revealing many of the Reagan administration’s worst deeds and disclosing the media’s lies to the American people about “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua. Those “freedom fighters” were, in fact, composed primarily of death squads and paramilitary troops armed with Iranian weapons and funded via cocaine money. The power of Gary Webb’s writing lay in his narrative style, how he told the story in vivid but simple terms, explaining how drug running funded covert operations. He was the first to disclose in a national paper where the drugs ended up once they arrived on American shores.
Webb’s series broke ground in one other way, as well, a harbinger of the New Enlightenment. As Nick Schou recounts in Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb:
“Dark Alliance” was the first major news exposé to be published simultaneously in print and on the internet. Ignored by the mainstream media at first, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through cyberspace and talk radio. It sparked angry protests around the country by African-Americans who had long suspected the government had allowed drugs into their communities. Their anger was fueled by the fact that “Dark Alliance” didn’t just show that the Contras had supplied a major crack dealer with cocaine, or that the cash had been used to fund the CIA’s army in Central America—but also strongly implied that this activity had been critical to the nationwide explosion of crack cocaine that had taken place in America during the 1980s.
It was an explosive charge, although a careful reading of the story showed that Webb had never actually stated that the CIA had intentionally started the crack epidemic. In fact, Webb never believed the CIA had conspired to addict anybody to drugs. Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the Contras were dealing cocaine, and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop them. He was right, and the controversy over “Dark Alliance”—which many consider to be the biggest media scandal of the 1990s—would ultimately force the CIA to admit it had lied for years about what it knew and when it knew it.[5]
Whether or not the CIA had deliberately dumped addictive and illegal drugs into urban communities—surveys found that about 25% of Black people in those communities did believe this—what was perhaps most interesting about the entire “Dark Alliance” scandal was what happened to the career of this thorough, principled journalist after the series of articles was published.
Within two months, the Los Angeles Times,[6] New York Times,[7] and Washington Post[8] all swooped in to defend the CIA and attack Webb’s industrious journalism. As if in a coordinated attack, these prestigious publications slung wide-ranging hit pieces at Webb, his sources, his past reporting, and his personal life. It was clearly an attempt to discredit him. Meanwhile, pieces appeared that defended the CIA. For its part, the San Jose Mercury News backed away from the piece rather than defend their journalist. They exiled Webb to a small regional bureau until he quit, and no other newspaper thereafter ever hired Webb. The man’s career effectively came to an end. His life was ruined all for making the unforgivable mistake of reporting the truth in a way that contradicted a dominant narrative. His reporting sneaked through the filters of systemic bias one time, but no further.
Reflecting on his career shortly before his death, Webb sagely acknowledged his naivete to Kristina Borjesson in her book Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, which chronicles censorship in corporate media:
If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests... And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job… The truth was that in all those years I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.[9]
[1] Dore, Jimmy. “Ed Schultz Death: What MSNBC Won’t Tell You.” Jimmy Dore Show, July 7, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVTtJge__8
[2] Kilpatrick, Connor. “Krystal Ball is the Anti-Rachel Maddow Bernie Fans Have Been Waiting For.” Jacobin, December 19, 2019. www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/krystal-ball-rising-the-hill-msnbc
[3] See Kilpatrick, above.
[4] See Kilpatrick, above.
[5] Schou, Nick. Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. Nation Books. New York, New York. 2006. pp8-9.
[6] Schou, Nick. “Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes For “Tawdry” Attacks.” LA Weekly, May 30, 2013. www.laweekly.com/ex-l-a-times-writer-apologizes-for-tawdry-attacks
[7] “The New York Times Wants Gary Webb To Stay Dead.” The Nation, October 10, 2014. www.thenation.com/article/archive/new-york-times-wants-gary-webb-stay-dead
[8] “WPost’s Slimy Assault on Gary Webb.” Consortium News, October 18, 2014. www.consortiumnews.com/2014/10/18/wposts-slimy-assault-on-gary-webb
[9] Borjesson, Kristina. Into The Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose The Myth Of A Free Press. Prometheus. New York, New York. 2004.
In corporate media, you might get fired for telling the truth is indeed the case and not to be minimized. However, consider the form of censure meted out to journalist truth-tellers in Gaza.
These truth-revealing journalists were censored and suppressed blatantly. However, the blatancy is apparent only to those few of us discerning enough to question authority.