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The Emperor's New Clothes
(or, Gary Webb was Right)

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom called America, there lived a great, dark, secretive Emperor. The Emperor went by many names, most of them three-letter acronyms. The Emperor was heard of by many people, but rarely seen or even, for that matter, talked about in polite society.

One day, an enterprising reporter named Gary Webb found out a great secret. The Emperor had no clothes! At first, Webb could not believe it. But he checked source after source after source, compiling hundreds of pages, several boxes full of trial testimony, court dockets and eyewitness reports which proved indeed that the Emperor was naked as a jay bird.

Gary Webb's employer, the San Jose Mercury News, published a three-part series in which the paper boldly proclaimed, in loud headlines,

This made many uncomfortable. After all, they trusted the Emperor. Could he really be going around the country, however furtively, buck naked? Why no, chimed the Washington Post. Curiously, the reporter who printed the first rebuttal was also reported to run around naked, sometimes in the company of the Emperor. But the people were not told of this, unless they followed odd newsgroups on the Internet.

Show us your sources, cried Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. After all, Webb and the San Jose Mercury had presented hundreds of records documenting the bare facts about the Emperor. Of course we have sources, replied the Post, Times and the other Times. They don't have names, but we guarantee they exist, just like we can guarantee the Emperor's clothes exist. And since we aren't showing you otherwise, you have to believe us.

Now the people were puzzled. Whom to believe? Few of them could conceive that the Emperor was running around with no clothes! Surely that would have made the front page of the Enquirer, or at least an episode of Hard Copy! How could it be?

As the days and months went by, despite any tangible evidence to prove Webb's sources were wrong, the myth grew. The Emperor has clothes! He has beautiful clothes! Anyone who says otherwise is an Oliver-Stone-conspiracy-nutcake.

Now, the San Jose Mercury got nervous. After all, not one of the publishers had ever seen the Emperor for themselves. How could they know that Webb was right? Perhaps the Emperor really did have clothes, and they were just gauze thin. That would explain it, right? He could appear to be unclothed, although he really wasn't. Slowly, the San Jose Mercury became persuaded by the arguments of unnamed sources. Some found it curious that the San Jose Mercury could be persuaded that the Emperor was clothed by unseen sources, yet ignore the testimony of his nakedness from named, tangible sources. Perhaps the Emperor, having, after all, a reputation to protect, had himself paid a visit to Jerry Ceppos. Of course, the Emperor would have been fully clothed for that visit. Once Ceppos saw that the Emperor was clothed once, it was an easy leap to say his best reporter had been mistaken. For Ceppos, at least, it was an easy leap. Not so for the many who followed the story in the Mercury's online forum.

One man in particular watched the spectacle, shaking his head. I told them back in 1985 that the Emperor had no clothes, but none would listen. Heck, I broke the original story! And so he had. Robert Parry, along Brian Barger of the AP had written of the Emperor's stark acts over 10 years earlier.

But most of the people did not pay attention. They flipped the channels on their tv sets and listened to their talk radio shows. When Webb's story first broke, they looked at each other and said oh yeah, I knew all along the Emperor had no clothes. That's not new. But after the Post, the Times, and the other Times weighed in, the people looked at each other and said oh how comforting, the Emperor does have clothes. How fun it is to be wrong. How silly I was to think that the Emperor had no clothes.

But then one small child, named Dateline, spoke again the unspeakable.

And there was hope in the Kingdom yet.

The End

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