The mainstream media didn’t vilify Webb because they were in bed with the CIA or anything like that, they vilified him because they were jealous that he had the story of the decade, and they didn’t.

The CIA was caught with their pants down over the story, but used the blatant jealousy of the more mainstream media to give quotes denying bits and pieces of the story, but never commenting on the allegations as a whole in any one interview, the larger newspapers then tore into Webb’s reporting and small formatting/factual errors instead of actually looking into the story itself. See, the newspaper Webb was writing for didn’t have a professional editor

Then, almost 10 years after Webb’s story broke, he took a gun to himself.

Holding a gun to the side of your head is not an easy thing, and Webb’s first shot tore through his jaw. That shot may have been eventually fatal without treatment, but it left Webb conscious enough to reposition and try again.

The CIA had almost no role in destroying Gary Webb, not because they didn’t want to, but because by the time they had anything resembling a game plan, the work had already been done for them by jealous reporters from other papers. And the CIA had zero involvement in Webb’s death. Shady government organizations don’t wait ten years after someone’s life has been ruined to kill them. They certainly don’t have that person go around tieing up loose ends and prepping for a suicide for a week or two beforehand, like Webb did.

Webb’s story started as exposing CIA drug smuggling, but the real story is how petty and cruel establishment media can be to an outsider who breaks a story before they can.