Free Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou Page A

stronger editor, I would have told Gary to talk to some other prosecutors,” Herhold says. “That kind of innate sense of fairness didn’t come naturally to Gary. He was a crusader.”
    In 1994, Webb wrote a series of articles about a failed effort by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to revamp its aging network of mainframe computers. In the wake of “Dark Alliance,” the New York Times would raise the series as yet another example of Webb’s one-sidedness. The stories involved the fact that the DMV had spent millions of dollars on software that was supposed to solve the agency’s legendarily inept record keeping. But the software had failed to noticeably improve the DMV’s database. Webb had blamed the DMV fiasco on a corporation named Tandem Computers, Inc., which had written the software program; his reporting implied that Tandem had intentionally sold the DMV faulty software. After his stories were published, James Treybig, the company’s founder, complained to Webb’s editors about the story, and took out a two-page advertisement in the Mercury News refuting his coverage point by point.
    A second reporter, Lee Gomes, investigated Treybig’s complaint. Gomes came to the conclusion that Webb had gone into the story seeking to prove that Tandem was responsible, and had left out any information that showed otherwise. In fact, Gomes says, Tandem had done the bestit could and the software had failed thanks to a complex array of unforeseen technical challenges. Gomes ultimately wrote a memo to his editors saying that one of Webb’s stories was “in all its major elements, incorrect.” A state audit later cleared the company of wrongdoing.
    Now a San Francisco-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal , Gomes says that he wrote a lengthy story providing a full account of the DMV fiasco, but the Mercury News refused to publish it. Part of the reason for that, he says, is that his story was long and complicated. “But institutionally, the Mercury News wanted to circle the wagons,” Gomes adds. “There wasn’t an institutional interest in getting the opposing story.”
    Years later, when the New York Times interviewed Webb about Gomes and the Tandem controversy, Webb argued that Gomes was simply jealous because he had missed the story himself. “Whenever his reporting was challenged he always launched ad hominem attacks on people who challenged him, and he did that to me,” Gomes says. “I thought he was a completely dishonest reporter. I didn’t have a lot of respect for the guy and I think he’s an example of everything a reporter shouldn’t be.”
    â€œGary was smart: he knew how to dig and how to use public records to get great stories,” says Dawn Garcia, a former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle . Garcia became the Mercury News ’ state editor shortly after Herhold transferred out of the job in 1990. Now deputy director for Stanford University’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, Garcia says Webb, like a lot of investigative reporters, was passionate about hisstories. “But he sometimes didn’t see other points of view,” she says. “I worked to help guard him against those instincts. That was one of my roles as his editor. I also learned pretty quickly that he had a temper and some editors did not like working with him.”
    At the time, Webb appeared to be languishing at the Sacramento bureau. Between the birth of his daughter, Christine, that year, and his difficult relationship with Herhold and other editors, Webb experienced his first bout of clinical depression. “It wasn’t huge early on,” Sue says. “He was just kind of moody, but after Christine was born, he started getting really depressed. It was a lot of pressure to have a baby, a two-and-a-half year old kid, and a six-year-old. We were both pretty