- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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).
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?"
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Don't count on it.
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- Michelle Goldberg is a freelance journalist based in
Brooklyn.
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