'Into The Buzzsaw' - 18 Tales Of US Media Censorship
By Michelle Goldberg AlterNet April-08-02
Between them, the authors of the incendiary new book "Into the
Buzzsaw," out this month from Prometheus, have won nearly every award
journalism has to give -- a Pulitzer, several Emmys, a Peabody, a
prize from Investigative Reporters and Editor, an Edward R. Murrorw
and several accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists.
One is veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a best-
selling author, another is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
And most of them are considered, at best, marginal by the mainstream
media. At worst, they've been deemed incompetent and crazy for having
the audacity to uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors
committed by government agencies and corporate octopi.
Edited by ex-CBS producer Kristina Borjesson, "Into the Buzzsaw" is a
collection of essays, mostly by serious journalists excommunicated
from the media establishment for tackling subjects like the CIA's
role in drug smuggling, lies perpetuated by the investigators of TWA
flight 800, POWs rotting in Vietnam, a Korean war massacre, the
disenfranchisement of black voters in Bush's election, bovine growth
hormone's dangers and a host of other unpopular issues.
Borjesson describes "the buzzsaw" as "what can rip through you when
you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large
institutions -- be they corporate or government -- want to keep under
wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and
stonewalling. Your phone starts acting funny. Strange people call you
at strange hours to give you strange information. The FBI calls you.
Your car is broken into and the thief takes your computer and your
reporter's notebook and leaves everything else behind ... The sense
of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming."
The majority of the eighteen pieces in Borjesson's book are about
hard-working mainstream journalists, dedicated to the ideals of their
profession, who stumble into the buzzsaw and have their careers and
reputations eviscerated. Though the subjects and personalities
involved are wildly diverse, the stories echo each other in
disturbing ways. Journalists are sent by their bosses to do their
jobs -- in the case of Borjesson, to investigate the crash of TWA
Fight 800 as a producer for CBS news. Sometimes what they find is
impolitic, other times it brings threats of corporate lawsuits.
Suddenly, editors kill the story, or demand changes. In some
instances, like that of TV reporter Jane Akre, who was investigating
the use of Monsanto's Bovine Growth Hormone, reporters are ordered to
insert outright lies in their pieces or face firing. Other times,
like with Gerard Colby's book about the Du Pont family and Gary
Webb's San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA's role in the crack
epidemic, the bosses are spooked after the fact and withdraw their
support from work already published, hanging reporters out to dry.
In the aftermath of Enron, plenty of journalists came forward to
publicly wring their hands about the press's failure to catch the
story before it destroyed the life savings of thousands. Since then,
though, there's been little sign of renewed vigilance towards
malfeasance at other companies, even though many have written that
Enron's business practices weren't particularly unusual. Without
addressing Enron directly, "Into the Buzzsaw" makes it pretty clear
why this is by showing how journalists who took on companies like
Monsanto and Du Pont were abandoned by their own editors and
publishers and embroiled in lawsuits.
When they speak out, buzzsaw victims are usually treated as paranoid
conspiracy theorists. Competing outlets valiantly defend the status
quo -- The New York Times, The Washington Post and the LA Times
launched concurrent attacks on Gary Webb's series, eventually
derailing his career and causing his paper to print a retraction
(though not of any specific facts mentioned in the story). Writing of
this episode in the book "Whiteout," Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey
St. Clair said, "From the savage assaults on Webb by other members of
his profession, those unfamiliar with the series might have assumed
that Webb had made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges, long
on dramatic speculation and short of specific data or sourcing. In
fact, Webb's series was succinct and narrowly focused."
Borjesson was subject to similar attempts at character assassination
by her former peers. After Borjesson was fired from CBS, she was
asked to develop a pilot for a new investigative series to be
overseen by Oliver Stone. She gathered over thirty eyewitnesses who
disputed the official government story, but before production even
started, other journalists started sneering at the project. Newsweek
called Stone the "latest conspiracy crank to delve into the
mysterious crash." Time Magazine chimed in with an article
headlined "The Conspiracy Channel?" The New York Times dismissed
Borjesson's reporting simply because government agencies denied its
truth (never mind they were the very agencies Borjesson was
investigating).
There's something of an X-Files feel to a lot of these stories,
though not in the way that condescending guardians of official truth
think. Rather, their surreal feeling comes from the first-person
experiences of people finding the institutions they've served all
their lives suddenly turning on them. As Borjesson writes, "Walk into
the buzzsaw and you'll cut right to this layer of reality. You will
feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm.
Anyone who hasn't experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don't
know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy
nut."
In fact, that's just what a lot of these writers have been called.
Once a journalist has been tossed out of the inner circle, anything
they write can be smeared as sour grapes or mere ranting. The media
has already branded them unreliable, so their charges are extremely
unlikely to be taken seriously.
A similar thing happens to other progressive media critics. It's not
that the media isn't interested in media stories -- see the blanket
coverage of Tina Brown's foibles at Talk. It's just that few are
interested in critiques that challenge the very essence of
journalists' romantic dreams of themselves as Robert Redford playing
Bob Woodward in "All the Presidents Men." Right-wingers like "Bias"
author Bernard Goldberg tend to get much more attention, perhaps
because their insights don't threaten most journalists' cherished
self-conceptions.
While most alternative press readers are familiar with Noam Chomsky's
scrupulous documentation of the way government lies become the
media's conventional wisdom and with Robert McChesney (who wrote
Buzzsaw's conclusion) and Mark Crispin Millers' analysis of corporate
consolidation, they are routinely written off by those policing the
perimeters of acceptable debate. They hardly ever appear in major
newspapers or on network TV. While not quibbling with their facts,
most media people tar them as alarmists or unrealistic utopians.
Indeed, some of the writers in Buzzsaw say that, before their own
experiences, they were among the scoffers. Webb writes, "If we had
met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender
of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting
raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging
journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like
Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't
work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and
corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?"
But, like most of the contributors to "Into the Buzzsaw," he did his
job too well and the powers that be hurled him onto the other side of
the looking glass. "And then I wrote some stories that made me
realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been," he writes. "The
reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as
I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my
job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written
anything important enough to suppress."
The routine maginalizing of media critics is one reason "Into the
Buzzsaw" is so important. It might be possible to discredit one
erstwhile insider, but to argue that more than a dozen veterans of
organizations like CBS News, CNN, The AP, The BBC and The San Jose
Mercury News are all crazy in exactly the same way would be to engage
in conspiracy-mongering more far-fetched than anything these authors
are accused of. And while plenty of lefty writers have excoriated
media monopolies, rarely has the precise way that corporate ownership
and intimidation warp newsroom values been made quite so explicit.
The value of these testimonies is largely in their minute
accumulation of detail (which occasionally makes for tedious reading
but enhances credibility). Borjesson is especially systematic, laying
out every meeting, every conversation, every contradiction in
government statements.
Some contributors aren't quite so convincing. The book as a whole
would have been stronger without April Oliver's self-serving piece
about her involvement in CNN's Tailwind debacle and subsequent
firing. She doesn't bother to refute the charges made against her or
defend the finer points of her work, which makes her essay seem like
a self-serving screed. But that's just one weak spot in an otherwise
appallingly convincing book, a book that suggests that the truth
about our media-military-industrial complex might go beyond even our
paranoid imaginings.
Beyond the specifics of each story, "Into the Buzzsaw" is about how
the elite sector of the media bestows the imprimatur of truth on its
own interpretations of the world. In the current landscape, of
course, these same outlets largely take it upon themselves to
determine which books should be deemed serious. It will be
interesting to see if "Into the Buzzsaw" gets any play in the outlets
it exposes.
Don't count on it.
Michelle Goldberg is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.
|