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18 Tales of Media Censorship
Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet
April 1, 2002
Viewed on April 2, 2002
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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. Murrow 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 is 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 to 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.
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