Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
edited by Kristina Borjesson
Prometheus Books
In a November, 1992 "Prime Time Live" exposé on illegal practices being carried out by supermarket chains, reporters working undercover at Food Lion outlets documented instances of "... employees repackaging and re-dating fish, grinding expired beef with fresh beef, and applying barbecue sauce to old chicken to mask the smell." Food Lion soon filed suit against ABC News and after a costly court battle, won a $1 symbolic settlement from the news organization. Other news divisions, suddenly afraid of broadcasting stories critical of big business, began to pull inflammatory stories from their programs for fear that they might lose costly and time-consuming cases defending their constitutional right to report. In the end, the case stands as a landmark ruling in favor of corporate interests at the expense of the public good.
This is just one of the stories mentioned in editor Kristina Borjesson's illuminating yet uneven collection of essays, "Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press." With almost one voice the book's essays contend that the modern news business — where the emphasis on the bottom line has almost trumped the traditional sanctity of the byline — has become just that: a business. Given the current spate of media mergers resulting in corporations folding TV news departments into their entertainment divisions, news outlets have in effect become just another form of entertainment. This trend is most evident in local television news programs, which have begun to look more and more like slightly less splashy versions of Access Hollywood than traditional news programming.
Given this backdrop, "Into the Buzzsaw" stands as a timely and unnerving book. The impetus for the book arose when Borjesson, who is an Emmy and Murrow Award-winning investigative reporter, had her own brush with censorship in 1996 when she found herself in the middle of an investigation of the TWA Flight 800 crash off the coast of Long Island.
Assigned to cover the story for CBS, Borjesson quickly stumbled upon a series of red flags that should have tipped off any curious reporter. The fact that the military wouldn't allow the NYPD dive team access to the area for almost three days after the crash, and when they did, only allowed them to search certain areas for remains. Or the so-called "30-knot clip" — a blip on recorded images of radar screens that shows a large surface vessel moving at a high rate of speed away from the area right after the plane erupted in a ball of flames and crashed. In addition, numerous credible witnesses from the Long Island shore who went un-interviewed (or were dismissed when interviewed) claim to have seen something rise from the surface of the ocean and explode just before they saw the plane come apart and plunge into the water.
The final straw came one evening when Borjesson and fellow investigator Kelly O'Meara left some crucial evidence pointing to a government cover-up in the trunk of Borjesson's car. What happened next is the stuff of pulp spy-thriller fare: "The next morning, we went to the car, and O'Meara opened the trunk. Everything was there, except for the TWA 800 documents and O'Meara's computer. The trunk lock itself looked untouched and worked perfectly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these things do happen in the United States of America. I would never have believed it if I hadn't experienced it myself."
There is almost too much evidence Borjesson produces in favor of a government cover-up for the theory to be ignored, including the story of a whistleblower taken to court by the government for sneaking seat samples out of the recovery area which contained chemical traces consistent with rocket-fuel residue, in direct refutation to the government's claim that the residue was simply industrial-strength glue. But Borjesson was not alone. Contributing essayist and 35-year journalism veteran David E. Hendrix also tried to track down what really happened off the coast of Long Island that night, with no more success. In his essay he arrives at the same conclusion Borjesson, O'Meara and a few others who did their homework: In the face of so much evidence showing the likelihood that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down TWA 800, why didn't more journalists chase down the many leads that supported this contention? Simple: Editors were looking for a quick turnaround on the story. They simply accepted the government's version of the story and left it at that. As J. Robert Port says in his essay: "Some of our biggest, most trusted news organizations simply lack the courage, the will or the leadership to consistently do the work necessary to expose the truth about the most controversial subjects in our world... "
The title of the book might give the impression that it's written by what we've come to know as "conspiracy nuts" — but nothing could be further from the truth. The essayists are producers, television anchors, editors at major dailies and award-winning columnists who have had stories killed, their contracts cancelled and have resigned in protest at their superiors' refusal to run factual stories critical of big business and government. They're an angry group, but to their credit they manage to retain an air of professionalism and even-handedness when describing the injustices they and their colleagues have suffered. If there is one fault in the collection, it's in the number of essays, and the quality of a handful of them. Of the 18 pieces included, at least two or three could have been left out as they basically parrot what some of the more compelling pieces have to say, and as such don't really stand on their own legs.
Riveting essays by Michael Levine and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Gary Webb expose the complicated web of diverted funds and outright lies the CIA has allegedly perpetrated by moving drugs into North America in order to fund its jaunts abroad. Levine was on the ground during the early days of the drug war in the '70s and '80s and recounts from personal experience instances where he was told by editors he'd gone far enough in an investigation and that he should back off. Webb, who broke open the story about alleged CIA involvement in the crack epidemic of the '80s in Los Angeles and which soon spread around the country, was eventually sacked by his newspaper because he refused to retract factual information that was in his story when pressure was put on his publishers.
These essays sure won't help you sleep at night, rife as they are with stories of cover-ups, lies, murder and little-known government reports detailing the government's own involvement in major crimes, but they are necessary. They are also very believable. There is an underlying thread of sincerity that runs throughout these pieces that give them an air of authority. At a time when many of our major media outlets have missed stories such as massive corporate fraud being perpetrated against Americans by our largest corporations and seem to accept that our war on terror is going precisely as planned, the book comes as a timely wake-up call to people interested in the truth and in knowing just who is fashioning that truth.
— Paul McLeary (pjmcleary@yahoo.com)
