Free Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou

honorary fee from the group for a speech on painter’s retirement funds.
    Robinson and Webb figured if they called the contractor who had painted Cortese’s house, word would reach the politician in time for him to come up with an explanation. So Robinson interviewed the contractor while Webb interviewed Cortese. “The contractor spilled, Gary got his interview, and we wrote the story,” Robinson says. That was the highlight of their collaboration. Webb regaled his former colleagues at the Plain Dealer with the story, concluding that California politicians were guppies compared to their Midwestern counterparts when it came to graft. “It was the most fun we had,” Robinson says. “The only thing I like better than corruption is completely inept corruption.”
    During their time together, adds Robinson, Webb displayed an amazing talent for working with documents. “It just seemed like a gift,” he says. “He could pick up a 200-page report and skim through it and focus on one sentence on page 63 that suggested some huge outrage. If there was something buried in a document, I would miss it and Gary would always find it. It was amazing to watch. He was a hell of a reporter.”
    Another quality Webb had that distinguished him from other reporters was his crusading tendency to see the world in Manichean moral terms. “He quickly focused on who the good guys and bad guys were in a story,” Robinson says. “He did not spend a lot of time doubting his conclusions. I think that it can be argued, in retrospect, that he took that to an extreme.” Webb also professed more cynicism about editors than most reporters. He told Robinson that at the Plain Dealer , he had to take his files into his editor’s office and defend every sentence.
    To Webb, Mercury News editors appeared far less demanding; they seemed to do little more than check his story structure and spelling. “Webb was probably exaggerating,” Robinson says. “But what strikes me in retrospect, is that if you are forged as a reporter in an adversarial editing setting, if you are used to your editors reining you in and ratcheting you back, you probably push things as far as you can.”
    One of the Mercury News editors who hired Webb, Scott Herhold, also supervised his work at the Sacramento bureau. He grew to regret it, saying that if he knew Webb had been sued at the Plain Dealer , he wouldn’t have hired him. “I didn’t know about the lawsuits,” he says. “We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us. We probably didn’t do our due diligence on the problems he had there.”
    â€œI actually didn’t like Gary that much,” Herhold adds. “He was a very nasty guy.” Herhold recalls that when the paper’s management asked him to bring down the length of news stories, he wrote a memo to his writers asking them to cooperate, and Webb wrote a “long, nasty letter” to his boss that ridiculed his letter. “He didn’t tell me about it first,” Herhold says. “He was a nasty guy who played around your back.”
    Herhold edited Webb’s stories for a year. The experience was “very painful,” he says. “Gary needed a very strong editor, and I tried, but I don’t think I was his match. I was still new as an editor. I don’t think I knew enough to ask Gary to make the requisite phone calls to make his stories more fair.”
    A typical example, Herhold says, was Webb’s story about then-Attorney General John VanDeKamp, who was engaged in a bitter race for governor. Through a public records act request, Webb obtained a list of cases VanDeKamp haddeclined to prosecute. “Gary did a big, long piece about all these cases and the nut of the piece was that VanDeKamp was a wimp,” he says.
    The story’s timing helped Dianne Feinstein beat VanDeKamp in the 1990 Democratic primary. “If I were a