Into the Buzzsaw Reviewed



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December 16, 2002

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
A Compilation Edited by Kristina Borjesson

Reviewed by ...


... Shira Feldman

"I shouldn't be surprised that [this story] is not about the news business, but the news business."
-Jane Akre, investigative reporter

If you thought Americans' First Amendment right to a free press secures us informative, reliable, or even newsworthy news--think again. Journalism today, as Kristina Borjesson and other reporters demonstrate in a new compilation, is a weak and ineffectual thing, fluttering wildly in gales of corporate and federal disapproval, buckling limply beneath network greed or apathy or laziness. Though many Americans have long suspected that the networks' nightly offerings represent a communicational junk-fest, caloric and unwholesome, most Americans remain unaware of its worst transgressions: media self-censorship has barred our access to some of the most important, compelling stories of our time (examples to follow); and the criminal fervor with which the media executes this non-disclosure is, itself, a violent transgression against American freedom. Borjesson and other respected journalists carefully delineate instances of this worrisome phenomenon in her exposé, Into the Buzzsaw.

The accounts in this book, authored by eighteen experienced and well-regarded reporters (Pulitzer Prize, Emmy, and Murrow award winners among them), together forge an exhaustive and convincing argument. Each article details the author's personal experience with censorship of a pet story--each news story groundbreaking within its own right, eye-opening and scrupulously researched--and the often-devastating aftermath of network antagonism. Many of these news stories, taken independently, would rattle even the most hardened observer:

In the book's first chapter--aptly inaugurating its pageant of disgraces--author Gerald Colby introduces us to the concept of "privishing": the illegal practice of "privately publishing" a troublesome book, to stifle it so that it reaches no audience. The publisher acts without the author's awareness or consent, reducing the print run so that the book cannot profit "according to any conceivable formula," refusing to do reprints, and choking off all advertising and promotion. Colby discovered this practice when his own exposé on the powerful Du Pont family (offering revelations like the family's profiteering in WWI and smuggling munitions to the Nazis in WWII) was "privished" under pressure from the Du Ponts themselves. Despite the rave reviews garnered by the book, it sunk without a trace. Legal efforts to regain rights to the book failed, as it became clear that the attorneys and judges assigned to the case resided snugly in the Du Ponts' pocket. To this day, all of Colby's subsequent books, equally controversial, have been "privished," although he continues to research and write.

A Tampa Fox station assigned husband-and-wife news team Jane Akre and Steve Wilson to investigate rBGH, the largest-selling dairy animal drug in America. rBGH is a hormone injected into cows to increase their milk productivity. However, it is known to cause medical problems in cows. rBGH-enhanced milk is also suspected to stimulate the growth of cancerous cells in humans. The drug's longest toxicity test lasted ninety days on thirty rats, and produced discouraging results, which were then concealed by Monsanto, the drug's producer. Nevertheless, it was approved by the FDA. Fox pulled its heavily-advertised four-part series after receiving intimidating legal threats from Monsanto. Akre and Wilson, the reporters who broke the story, were terminated for their too-expert investigative skills, and are currently suing Fox under a state whistle-blower act. They have been out of work since being fired.

CBS News sent reporter Maurice Murad to Iraq in 1995, five years after the Gulf War, to document the suffering and famine caused by U.N. sanctions. They asked that he particularly emphasize coverage of the widely-reported 500,000 Iraqi children dead of starvation. Yet despite visits to city neighborhoods, the countryside, and even the malnutrition ward of a children's hospital, Murad (who was familiar with the effects of starvation, having covered the Ethiopian famine in 1987) could find no evidence of food shortage, famine, or even undernourishment, anywhere in Iraq: "On any given day there would be more cases in any New York City hospital." Murad concluded that the much-cited food crisis was merely a political fiction produced by Saddam Hussein to get the sanctions lifted. Despite this revelation, to this day, American news outlets (such as the New York Times) continue to publish the erroneous figure of 500,000 Iraqi children dead of starvation.

Kristina Borjesson, in the book's showcase piece, describes her encounter with the "buzzsaw" of institutional resistance during her investigation of deadly TWA flight 800: "The buzzsaw is what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions--be they corporate or government--want kept under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling. Your phone starts acting funny. 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." Borjesson's research focuses on hints indicating friendly fire as a possible cause of the crash. In spirited tones, she describes the torturous, serpentine paths she followed her leads, through thickets of government stealth and ineptitude; chasms of network indifference and ill will. An expert witness Borjesson landed was dropped; CBS relinquished evidence from the crash site without her knowledge. Next, Borjesson herself was relinquished (fired) by CBS. Finally, her investigative special (to be directed by Oliver Stone) was dropped after a gossipy dressing-down in the popular press. Throughout, Borjesson's very responsible work succeeds in raising some intriguing questions about the disaster, but the rat's maze of misinformation in which she frustratedly scrambled for years, ultimately occludes any sound or satisfying conclusions.
CBS producer Helen Malmgren describes a documentary she produced about a North Carolina psychiatric hospital (part of Charter Behavioral Health Systems, the nation's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals), which was rumored to provide appallingly incompetent health care. An undercover reporter--wearing an eyeglass camera wired to a jock strap recorder every day for two months--taped such horrifying abuses as children manhandled and injured during their treatment; doctors lying on patients' medical forms; and a nurse committing fraud. This footage actually saw the light of national airtime--a rare happy ending for Buzzsaw. However, the pre-emptive legal efforts required to get it on-air were truly extravagant, demonstrating the unprecedented lengths to which media companies must now go, in this litigious world, to safeguard their work from judiciary persecution: "Editing that piece was a torture, a months-long hairsplitting session with our lawyers about what to leave in, what to leave out," says Malgrem. "I realized that when our lawyers screened the footage, they didn't see images of people. What they saw were potential lawsuits, flitting back and forth across the screen."

In 1998, J. Robert Port, a reporter for the AP wire service, uncovered shattering eyewitness evidence about a 1950 Korean War incident: U.S. warplanes and U.S. soldiers had deliberately gunned down four hundred South Korean civilians, including women, children, babies, and old men. He had unearthed documents showing that entire army divisions were told to kill civilians on sight. Despite abundant evidence and witnesses backing up this compelling story, AP management balked, backpedaled, panicked, and even demoted Port to a computer repairman--anything to avoid running this controversial, politically sensitive bombshell. More than a year and much editorial strife later, the AP finally published the story of "The Bridge at No Gun Ri." The story went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting--the only investigative Pulitzer in AP's history. However, before that publication took place, writes Port, "I, the editor who had launched the project, nurtured it, and become its relentless proponent within the AP's executive news staff, found myself out of a job. My position and my department were dissolved."

In 1998, April Oliver produced the well-known Tailwind story at CNN, which reported that Special Forces in Vietnam had used deadly sarin nerve gas in a secret operation to rescue prisoners held in Laos. During the course of her work on Tailwind, Oliver generated great controversy, endured venomous criticism, and was personally targeted by the military in a "disinformation campaign" to smear her character. Ultimately, CNN fired her. She quotes one CNN manager as saying, "[let's] kill this [story], drive a stake through its heart and bury it--so it's gone." "A strange position for a newsgathering operation," Oliver wryly observes. Oliver brought suit against her former employers, who settled after a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reconfirmed what she had reported in a sworn deposition.

Monika Jensen-Stevenson bears witness to a public spectacle of misinformation, defamation, and unfair allegations intended to ruin the reputation of a ruined man. She has spent many years reporting on the case of Bobby Garwood, a 14-year POW in Vietnam, who, when returned in 1979, was charged as a traitor in the longest court-martial in U.S. history. Though Garwood was innocent, his return created an ethical quandary for the U.S. government, contradicting its 1973 declaration that no POW's were left alive in Vietnam. (Instead of investigating this brusque pronouncement, the media had accepted it verbatim. In reality, thousands of POW's remained in Vietnam, ignored and forgotten by their own government.) Garwood--imprisoned in 1965 and sustaining an unwavering faith in the American government--had been trying to alert his countrymen to his existence for years by slipping furtive notes to Western visitors. Most of these notes, which landed with the U.S. government, were discarded. One note luckily landed in the hands of the BBC, and the resulting media furor freed Garwood. However, once he was finally home, the government chose to discredit him and his implicit threat of exposure, by accusing him of collaborating with the enemy. The resulting court-martial, ignoring any absolving facts and offering a strangely distorted version of reality, "came back with a minor but nevertheless punishing verdict." After all of Garwood's undeserved suffering in Vietnam, this case permanently finished his good name and destroyed his financial and legal status. Throughout this furor, the media consistently failed to present an accurate or even fair portrait of Garwood, but simply acted as an organ for government purposes.

In the toughened, gritty voice of 25 years undercover, retired DEA veteran Michael Levine writes compellingly about the media's role as a "shill" (or decoy) for a bogus, hyperbolic drug war that, he asserts, only serves to increase the flow of drugs into America. The "drug war," according to Levine, is merely a front enabling the CIA to clandestinely prop up certain unsavory foreign regimes, or to destroy legitimate ones, for its own classified purposes: "Every country and national leader that the CIA and the State Department wanted to slander was headlined as 'U.S. Sources Say (fill in the blank) Poses New Narco-Trafficking Threat.' Foreign leaders and nations whose images the CIA and the State Department wanted to keep clean were headlined as '(fill in the blank) New Anti-Drug Efforts Win Trust of U.S. Officials.'" For example, Levine discloses, Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll for almost two decades, exporting drugs with impunity into the U.S., when DEA agents (unaware that the general was off-limits) raided his complex in a needless bloodbath. Within months of this "grotesque atrocity," writes Levine, "media coverage had omitted Manuel Noriega's true history and reputation with the CIA and DEA, and had turned the event into a major drug-war 'victory.'"

On a related theme, Gary Webb chronicles his newspaper's (the San Jose Mercury News) rapid retreat from its supportive stance on his 1996 story detailing a link between the CIA, Latin American guerrillas, and L.A. street gangs. Webb's article disclosed that the CIA had, from the early 80's to the early 90's, sold cocaine to the Crips and Bloods--inducing drugs to course like blood within the veins of L.A. minority neighborhoods--and funneled the profits to Nicaraguan Contras. This drug ring, Webb alleged, played a critical role in fueling and supplying the first mass crack cocaine market in the United States. After publication, the story encountered major (and strangely emotional) criticism from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, though these organs could not detect a single factual error in the story. However, criticism from these powerful outlets caused the smaller paper's editors to back away from the story, disavow it, and run a very public apology for its "shortcomings" and "egregious errors." Webb resigned his post with the paper shortly thereafter. The story's merits, however, were vindicated by publication on a still-nascent internet, where it won enormous popularity on a grassroots level and inspired political activism.

These, and the other accounts composing Into the Buzzsaw, fully convey an appreciation of the dark and dull state of mainstream journalism today. Cowed by powerful interests, fawning over official authority, and devoid of intellectual curiosity or questioning spirit, it spawns dissidents and malcontents--journalists who do not believe in its establishment mentality--like offspring. Many of them have published here. And the very existence of their stories, the un-shushed resolution of their voices, stands as a kind of antidote to the book's disheartening theme. The stories prove, in the words of contributor Michael Levine, that "there was some hope in the media. It was not monolithic. While it was, by and large, controlled by easily frightened and manipulated people of little courage, there were editors, producers, and journalists out there who were still willing to risk taking a moral stand against the criminal and/or criminally inept exercise of power."

This is not to say that Into the Buzzsaw is flawless. Because it includes eighteen pieces independently authored by eighteen individuals of varying narrative dexterity and time commitments--there are some duds. Few, but present; roving and unfocused. Even the deserving majority, because embracing a disproportionate contingent of individuals with serious bugs up their butts, serve as the occasion for some major grandstanding and venting. For example, Borjesson's article contains a self-designated "Enquirer segment" in which she "names [the] names" of fellow journalists who are "backbiters." Greg Palast relates that his paper was "ready to throw me to the dogs" and shares an encouraging note from his editors: "We are now going to spend hundreds of thousands on some f---g meaningless point you are trying to make. I hope you are happy." To a certain degree the entire book is informed by a sense of resentment; the volume represents a fellowship of the disenfranchised, therefore, it would naturally offer an "outsider's" perspective. A dominant emotion in Into the Buzzsaw is anger, and denouncing opponents has always been the most satisfying by-product of having one's say. The resulting, inevitably emotional tone detracts somewhat from argumentative balance. But the contributors' personal involvement does lend their accounts an impassioned immediacy that a more academic, disinterested approach would lack. And there is enough solid, provable evidence here to keep even the most disgruntled philippics convincing.

More exasperating than tone, however, is a contextual pitfall: the book is greatly repetitious. Because the authors clearly did not consult one another before snapping open their laptops, they tend to cover the same intellectual territory, making similar points, using similar examples. One almost feels one has to revert to a mental Point A every time one turns the page. For example, the contributors feel they each have to offer a brief history of journalism. They invoke the names of Seymour Hersh (who reported the My Lai Massacre), Woodward and Bernstein (the Watergate investigators), and the Food Lion case (a trial whose verdict boded ill for investigative news), as often as Allah in a morning muezzin. And they decry journalistic complacency so often they could turn it into a marching hymn. (David Hendrix: "Reporting a spokesman's comments is not reporting; it's becoming the spokesman's spokesman." Philip Weiss: "The mainstream media solemnly and stoically report the government's assertions, over and over. They simply cannot entertain the possibility that the government has lied to them." Michael Levine: "Whatever 'credentialed government spokespeople' say (usually some public affairs officer) is the story. [Typical newsies] are assigned to be reporters, not investigative journalists." Greg Palast: "Snoozy editors and reporters are content to munch on, digest, and reprint a diet of press releases and canned stories provided by officials and corporate public relations operations.")

If the authors had condensed their points, eliminating the repetition--if they had, for example, collaborated in issuing a joint report on media censorship--they would have cut the verbiage by half. Golden nuggets of salience are adrift here in an ocean of blab.

This weakness, however, doubles as one of the book's principal strengths: the same point repeated ad infinitum reveals an undeniable pattern. The same observation made over and over, though clearly lacking any planned prototype, establishes a paradigm. If one believes these authors' narratives, there can remain no question about the disturbing loss of journalistic freedom in America today. The disparate, yet repetitive, voices of the contributors merge into a sort of Greek chorus of admonishment, warning us of the consequences if we continue to lose our precious freedom of speech. The sound is both frightening and, in its clamor, encouraging.


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