Aligning Darkness with Conspiracy Theory: The Discursive Effects of African American Interest in Gary Webb's “Dark Alliance”

Abstract

Gary Webb's “Dark Alliance” series chronicles a drug ring that stretched from inner-city Los Angeles to the Nicaraguan Contra army. Frequently identified as a conspiracy theory in mainstream press coverage, Webb's work evoked widespread African American support. The mainstream media largely dismissed Webb's conclusions and portrayed the Black community as gullible conspiracy advocates. Using Foucault's concepts of the discursive formation and the discursive effect, the academic and public discourses surrounding the conspiracy theory are analyzed, and the discursive effects of the charge of conspiracy theory are considered in relation to the reporting of a large African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel.

KEYTERMS:

• African American media
• conspiracy theory
• Dark Alliance
• Gary Webb

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Seoul, Korea, 2002. This article is based upon my thesis. I thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Margaret Zulick (Wake Forest University) and Dr. Eric K. Watts (Wake Forest University), as well as unnamed reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

As Thomas Farrell (1993) wrote, the “rhetoric of conspiracy and paranoia poses one of the more direct challenges to the integrity of appearances. For in this discourse, what presents itself as public, visible, knowable, and benign is a lie” (p. 40).

For an exploration of conspiracy discourse in Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural, refer to David Zarefsky (1984). For an examination of the rhetoric of Senator Andrew McCarthy refer to Thomas Farrell's (1993), Norms of Rhetorical Culture. Earl Creps (1980) offered an analysis of Attorney General Palmer's defense of his raids of suspected ‘Reds.’ The conspiratorial rhetoric of religious and political figures can be found in Richard Hofstadter's (1967) work. For the master conspiracy of the John Birch Society, refer to Charles Stewart (2002).

In Creps's (1980) examination of conspiratorial texts, he noted that the rhetoric of Attorney General Palmer (anti-insurgent conspiracy) bore few similarities to the rhetoric of a conspiratorial explanation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (anti-institutional conspiracy) (Hall, 2005). These discrepancies forced Creps to reconsider his hypotheses so that the two separate types could be treated as the same rhetorical genre.

Young et al. (1990) introduced the “neologism ‘conspiratist’…in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ and the awkwardness of repeatedly using ‘conspiracy proponents’” (p. 89).

By discrediting the Mercury News story, “elite news media effectively stated that they needed to be presented with virtually incontrovertible evidence of CIA guilt before they would even consider launching a serious investigation” (McChesney, 1997, p. 63). Herman (1997) stated that “the media failed to reproduce or give a reasonable summary of the content of [Webb's] series” and instead treated the story with “the knocking-down-a-straw-person approach” (p. 31).