The Info Web

AP

The Associated Press was the news service whose reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger broke early stories on Contra drug trafficking that were suppressed by editors.

1846 · New York City

The Associated Press (AP) was the news service whose reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger broke early stories on Contra drug trafficking in the 1980s. Their groundbreaking reporting was suppressed by editors who sat on the story for weeks, heavily edited it, and ultimately spiked it.1

Suppressed Reporting

Robert Parry, one of the AP reporters who wrote the story on Contra drug connections, said his editors sat on the piece for weeks and edited it heavily, only to spike it at the last minute. The suppression of the AP's Contra-drug story in the 1980s foreshadowed the media establishment's treatment of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series a decade later. The AP's failure to publish its own reporters' findings allowed the government to maintain its denial of Contra-connected drug trafficking for years.2

  1. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Ch. 27. ↩
  2. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Ch. 27. ↩

Find a path

Full finder →

Find a chain of links from this entry to another.

FromAP

    Local network

    Search or select an entry to see how it connects to AP.

    Options

    An interactive diagram of AP's connections, drawn on a canvas and explored with a pointer. The same connections are listed as links in the Connected and Mentioned-in sections below.

    Loading connections… Select to explore · double-click to open
    How to read the graph
    Colour shows the entry type or cluster
    • People
    • Organizations
    • Programs
    • Events
    • Concepts
    • Places
    Node size

    Larger = more mentions across the vault.

    Connections

    A link from one entry to another.

    A name mentioned in an entry without a direct link. Toggle these with “Inferred”.

    Highlights

    Gold rings mark entries mentioned across several clusters.

    Orange rings mark your selection.

    Tags