Customer Reviews

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press

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3 star:		(1)
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There has been much talk about the supposed liberal bias of the media. I find this absurd. The true bias is pro-establishment, pro-free trade (a misnomer if ever there was one), pro-rich, and anti anything that contradicts these. This is a book for those who wonder why, who question authority, and demand truth. I was introduced to a word in this book; to "privish" is to print too few copies to make a book financially viable. I hope that this is not the fate of this book, as it is a true eye-opener. We live in Orwellian times: Peace is War, Truth is ignorance, etc. To know the inner machinations of journalism is a necessary part of being informed. To read the stories of those who refused to lie down is to remember what "fight" means. Don't be a sheep, even if you believe that the saviour of the human race is a lamb.

In various ways, all the submissions in this book prove how the "Free Press" in America is not always so free. With a few exceptions, most of the essays here are by ace investigative journalists who have had their stories crushed by economic or political pressure from the power elite. This has more to do with the elite holding onto power, rather than inaccuracies in the always professional reporting. In recent times, this pressure increasingly comes from corporate media owners. As a bonus, this book also offers several actual investigative stories, including two with hard-to-dismiss conclusions about friendly fire and TWA flight 800.

The high points in this book are the powerful submissions by Monika Jensen Stevenson, covering the preposterous injustices heaped by the US government onto Vietnam POW Bobby Garwood; Michael Levine, covering the mainstream media's complicity in the drug war's ethical and practical failures; and Gary Webb, concerning his travails after exposing CIA drug trafficking operations (the "Dark Alliance" story). All of these stories, and others in the book, were crushed by government pressure in order to protect the power elite. Theory and media watchdog pieces by Carl Jensen and Robert McChesney are also very enlightening.

However, this is an uneven collection with some dismal low points that come close to sinking the overall effectiveness of the book. Kristina Borjesson (the editor) and Jane Akre are unprofessionally bitter in their essays, concerning TWA 800 and Monsanto abuses, respectively - their travails with wimpy editors and official harassment notwithstanding. Severe low points of the book include directionless and self-aggrandizing biographies from Maurice Murad and April Oliver, while Karl Idsvoog's piece is little more than a windy sales pitch for his media consulting firm. But overall, if you can stomach some bitterness and inconsistency, this revealing book will both damage your respect for the modern journalism business, but give you faith that there are still courageous journalists out there who are striving for the truth. [~doomsdayer520~]

I highly recommend this book to both those who read the news and to those who report it.

As an already extreme skeptic of American news sources, I thought this book would be more entertaining and not so much informative for me. It is actually more informative and shocking than I ever expected.

This book not only provides information you may never have heard before about some high profile news stories, it tells how this information was obtained and the price journalists paid to report it, or try to report it. It has varied views from varied journalists regarding their take on the American media today.

Its an easy book to read, as you can't stop turning the pages, but the stories it tells are not pleasant. As you read this book, you discover that too many media companies use news as a tool to earn higher advertising revenues and manipulate the public, not inform. Our right to a free press is in jeopardy, except for a few courageous, die-hard journalists. After reading it, you wonder how this book ever got published.

As a professional journalist, who studied under Fred Friendly at the Columbia U. School of Journalism, I find this the most important (and in light of recent 9/11 FBI revelations, timely) book about American journalism in many years. I read through its 381 pages in just a few days, amazing since I'm not an especially fast reader. I could hardly put it down.
Why?
-First, these are great tales written by great writers.
-Second, these are accomplished pros and their experiences span a wide range of media outlets and topics.
-Third, this book makes a pusuasive case both that investigative reporting is essential to an informed American public & the survival of American democracy *and* that it is being sabotaged, by either intention or default, by media companies that (I deduce) are so profit-driven and risk aversive that they can barely be considered as practicing serious journalism.

Anyone who is bored by this book is either sleep deprived, on a controlled substance, or is predisposed against it. After reading this book, it became evident to me that it is now up to journalists ourselves to defend our work and democracy. We are truly America's last hope for an informed public.

If you, like myself, have stopped watching TV news, and question the reason any article appears in the print media, this book is for you. Here are the news stories that were deliberately withheld. Here are the important stories written by true heros that this country seems to be looking for.
I considered myself well informed until I read this book. I am grateful to all who contributed to its content.
This book should scare any thinking adult into taking their citizenship and future seriously enough to pay careful attention and take some action.

Borjesson's "Buzzsaw" is a collection of well-researched insider stories from journalists who sometimes had to fight insurmountable odds to tell the truth. Because these are heroic tales from survivors, the book is a real page-turner from beginning to end.

These heroes fought (and most are still fighting) deep behind the newspaper banner pages and out of sight of the cameras - fought to give you the facts on various stories. Most of these people have paid a very high price for their dedication to the truth. These are the stories about the stories - and information that powerful vested interests preferred that we not hear about. Reason enough to read this book.

If you are at all interested in how the news gets "processed" on its way to your eyes and ears you have to read these stories. That process is currently impaired. In the land of the free press our media got sold to commercial interests and that is the story that we now urgently need to understand. Like the air we breathe, the media is somewhat tranparent. But even if it gets polluted slowly and imperceptibly we will still suffocate.

Borjesson brings tales of the possibility of fresh air.

A democracy depends on a well-informed citizenry and therefore an unbiased watchdog in the media. Universally, survival depends on clear minimally distorted perceptions of the world.

As a design engineer myself, I can assure you that no system is perfect. But after you better understand the news process problems scrupulously detailed in this collection, you may realize like I did that you must do something about it yourself. Thankfully we still live in a nation where we can effect improvements.

Continued ignorance may be bliss, but it is not safety.

The eighteen essays in this book will dismay even those who have watched investigative journalism co-opted on TV by talking heads and road accidents or who look up from a newspaper story with more questions than answers. The contributors are distinguished career journalists, most of them award winners, most of them gung-ho about journalism - until their run-in with the buzzsaw of corporate or government displeasure. They may not persuade you (though most probably will) but they will make you think.

Taken individually the essays are emotionally charged, well-organized exposés of blunders, greed, incompetence and ruthlessness. Taken as a whole the book paints a depressing picture of the state of big, mainstream media. Expensive investigative journalism is the first to go in a corporate climate where profit stands above the public's right to know. Beholden first to the bottom line, media giants are also swayed by advertising dollars, government intimidation and fear of lawsuits. And the book paints a disturbing picture of the lengths our government and corporate giants are willing to go to quash negative stories.

Most of these stories are familiar: the investigation of TWA flight 800, the CIA and drug running/ assassinations/ incompetence, civilian Koreans massacred by US troops, MIAs in Vietnam, and the election of 2000. On the corporate side there's rapacious DuPont, bovine growth hormone, and the state of psychiatric hospital care.

Which story is the scariest? Well, everyone eats so Monsanto's push to get bovine growth hormone into all our milk comes to mind. Jane Akre details the process (i.e. the longest test for long-term human toxicity lasted 30 days on 30 rats - and although the FDA was told there were no adverse effects, one third of the rats suffered cysts and lesions) and then the demise of her story, orchestrated by Monsanto lawyers and abetted by her station's new owners, Rupert Murdoch.

Or how about Michael Levine's (former DEA undercover operative, turned author and journalist) surreal but all too believable piece on long-term CIA involvement with politically expedient drug runners and killers, which segues neatly with Gary Webb's piece on CIA collusion with Contra drug dealers who introduced vast amounts of crack to gangs in South LA who then spread it to the rest of the country. Remember that one? Discredited? Gary Webb tells how and why and he's very believable.

But the saddest, most chilling story of all is the case of returning Vietnam POW Bobby Garwood who was vilified and court-martialed in 1979 as an enemy collaborator because his story conflicted sharply with the government line that all POWs and MIAs had been accounted for. Writer Monika Jensen-Stevenson spent 20 years working to clear Garwood's name and her account of our government's deliberate, well-orchestrated destruction of a loyal, traumatized soldier would be hard to believe if it wasn't so well-documented. Memorial Day 1998 Garwood was embraced by three Medal of Honor winners and honored at the Vietnam Memorial but, though network cameras were present, the occasion never appeared on the news.

Kristina Borjesson offers a comprehensive piece on the investigation of TWA flight 800, the Paris-bound plane that exploded off Long Island in 1996. You don't have to agree with her conclusions to be convinced of an investigation thoroughly botched by FBI incompetence, turf wars, government spin and outright lies.

Some of these essays get a boost from the revelations about FBI and CIA bungling revealed since September 11. But why did it have to take an event so horrific to make news out of what so many already knew?

The essays are well-written and buttressed with loads of facts and sources, many of them checkable by interested readers. Names are named, which in itself is unusual for today's news stories. Each essay is prefaced with a short, impressive biography of the writers, many of whom have written books about the stories that consumed their careers. Many lost their jobs; some, like April Oliver, the CNN producer whose nerve gas story was famously retracted, had their reputations destroyed.

This is a book for anyone interested in what goes into a well-researched investigative story, for anyone who thinks it can't be true if it doesn't make the news, and if it does it is, for anyone who wonders why some stories never get legs (the state of our food, the state of our prisons), for anyone who wonders why some stories won't go away (OJ, Monica), for anyone who's noticed that soft interviews with government officials and elected representatives have apparently replaced hard digging, for anyone who would like to be better informed about the world.

If you're like me, perennially skeptical about conspiracy theories and "unsubstantiated" claims, you're in for a shock. I used to blame the dumbed-down American media on a "dumb public" - I said, "we're getting what we asked for." Now I see that this idea was not just arrogant and supercillious (I knew that already!) - it's also dumb, and dangerously misinformed.

This is an exceptionally brave and candid book in which over a dozen award-winning journalists detail a shocking, and rapidly growing, pattern of media censorship in America. It's an excellent introduction to the state of information - and misinformation - in America today, and helps explain why, in the midst of an information flood, the American public is unaware of the deeper picture of government and corporate corruption.

You get the stories straight from the journalists who wrote them, how reporters had to fight for years to get some of the biggest investigative reports of the 1990's into the press - and how many of them lost their jobs in the process.

Into The Buzzsaw shows how corporations and the federal government use the legal system to blackmail the media into silence, and how the consolidation of media ownership and the quest for profits has nearly obliterated the media's service of the public's need to know. The book explains, with detailed examples, how mainstream, respected journalists and editors go out of their way to discredit colleagues for daring to expose taboo information.

For instance, one author is Gary Webb, who wrote the San Jose Mercury News story about the CIA's sale of pure cocaine in LA, which preciptated the national crack cocaine epidemic. You've heard that the story didn't "hold up under scrutiny", right? A BIG lie, perpetrated by the "respectable media".

We're being taken a for a ride folks, and not toward where we want to go. Read this book, and begin to wake up. But, fair warning; it will make you very angry.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Nearly every chapter is written by a journalist who had dug deeply into a story that posed a threat to the government and/or the media establishment, and they relate in chilling detail how their efforts to bring their stories into the light of day were suppressed. In large measure, these are chronicles of disillusionment and betrayal: many of the writers talk about how they went in with high ideals, believed their editors would back them up, etc. They found out otherwise. The book's subtitle is completely accurate: our so-called free press is a myth. (And anybody who still believes that nonsense about the "liberal media" should read this book cover-to-cover.)

Every chapter is a case study, but a common thread runs through them all: namely, just how immensely difficult -- even career-threatening -- it is for a journalist to try and get something into print when it conflicts with the "official" or "accepted" version of events. What the book so vividly demonstrates is exactly how the "news" is manipulated by those in power -- from editors and publishers desperate to avoid anything that casts a shadow of doubt on their parent corporations, to government officials who simply lie through their teeth, to the great majority of journalists themselves. Regarding the latter, the book makes it abundantly clear that most are merely "reporters" in the literal sense of that term: they simply "report" what they are told by their "sources" as gospel truth, even though the latter are often government officials who are just spreading the official line.

Although the total effect of the book is certainly depressing on one level, I should also note that the book is really excellent reading. Although this is a risky metaphor, given the subject, the effect is something like a whole collection of "60 Minutes" exposes between hard covers. The difference here is that it's the media itself, and those who feed it lies and disinformation, that are being exposed.

What also makes this book so valuable is that most of the essays were written post-9/11 -- so not only do they take into account the aftermath of that terrible event, but also remind us how now, more than ever, it's important to be skeptical of what our leaders are telling us.

This an extremely frightening book.

What scared me most is the fact that not only most of the contributors are respected journalists, but all the contributions are extremely well documented and precisely, seriously presented to the reader.

It has nothing to do with any "conspiracy theory" book. All the information inside is very valuable in itself, but it also serves as a clinical description of the sorry state of the american media. Since all the accounts are written in the first person, you share all the difficulties of these reporters who commited that completely unusual sin: they actually did their job properly.

The story of the involvement of the CIA in the emergence of the crack epidemy in L.A. was particularly shocking. But most of the stories are equally amazing. DO read this book.