Leen's take, which you offer us, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Webb's story did not deliver. This is not the lesson I took a

Leen's take, which you offer us, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Webb's story did not deliver. This is not the lesson I took away from this story. For me, Marc Cooper summed it up better in this comment, made after Webb's death (apologies for the ads): http://www.laweekly.com/news/gary-webb-rip-2139247 http://www.laweekly.com/news/gary-webb-rip-2139247 The national media had a chance to pursue this story, but they chose to dismiss it. My hometown paper, the LA Times, led the charge -- this was back when it was a decent paper and a worthy companion to the NYT and the WP. It was as described in Marc's piece: they decided to fact check Webb's piece and focus on the every possible gotcha in a very long -- too long -- series. Rather than trying to advance the story, or document what parts were true. (It did not help Webb's case that self-promoting nuts like Maxine Waters were taking the story even farther.) And is it not a scandal that one arm of the US government was prosecuting drug crimes as if they were important, and another was studiously looking the other way?