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Handling Hot Potatoes
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Into The Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press Edited by Kristina Borjesson |
They don’t tell you this in journalism school, but sometimes the hardest part of investigative reporting isn’t tracking down the story, it’s getting your editors to run what you’ve found out. Ask Robert Port, formerly the special assignment editor of the AP, who had the budget and the freedom to send bird-dog reporters chasing leads all over the world.
Acting on information from a stringer in Korea, Port sent a researcher to the National Archives back in 1998 to look for evidence of whether U.S. soldiers were involved in the massacre of 400 civilians seeking shelter under a bridge at the start of the Korean War. Two days later his man came up with a radio message to the 1st Cavalry Division sent by one of its commanders. It said: “No refugees to cross the front lines. Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children.”
“In the life of an investigative reporter,” writes Port, “there come certain awful, lonely moments of realization . . . when you stumble upon something you know in your gut . . . is not just news, but terribly important news.”
The resulting story, about the massacre at No Gun Ri, dominated headlines for weeks, and in 2000 it won for the AP a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Nowhere in the citation, however, was mention made of Port. Nor, in the accompanying press release, was there any indication that, according to Port, the AP had held the piece for over a year while he wrangled with his superiors to get them to release the story. Or that ultimately Port had become such a pest, the way he tells it, that before the story ran the AP president, Lou Boccardi, relegated him to a side-line job in the newsroom and abolished his investigative unit altogether. Terminally embittered, Port quit the wire service. Today he is a reporter for the New York Daily News.
“I had been forced to accept a sad reality of the American news business,” he writes. “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 AP’s Boccardi disputes Port’s vision. “The AP’s conscience is clear,” Boccardi told CJR in November 2000.)
Port’s struggle to get out the story is one of the more compelling tales from Into the Buzzsaw, a compilation of eighteen cases assembled by Kristina Borjesson, a free-lance TV producer, wherein reporters complain about how their efforts were cast aside by supervisors too blind, too venal, or too cowardly to print the truth.
Each story is a decidedly one-sided account, with no notice given to the possibility that, as with the AP, the bosses might well have a different tale to tell. In subject matter, they range from the author Gerald Colby’s lament that monetary advances for his investigation of U.S. financial interests in Latin America began to shrink the closer he got to looking at the Rockefeller family, to the TV producer Monika Jensen-Stevenson’s complaint that CBS’s 60 Minutes refused to adequately support her investigation into the charge that the Pentagon had grossly understated the figures involving MIAs from the Vietnam War.
Some of these apparent management failures had to do with a seemingly debilitating lack of nerve. In the AP case, while Port’s staff was gathering background on the massacre story, CNN’s Peter Arnett had come out with the now infamous “Tailwind” story, which alleged that during the Vietnam War a Special Forces unit had used Sarin nerve gas in an operation to rescue POWs held in Laos. The accusation ultimately collapsed for lack of hard evidence and, Port believes, caused jittery editors at the AP to fear their Korean exposé might share a similar fate.
Other news organizations stand accused of chickening out in the face of expensive lawsuits. In 1997, for example, Fox News refused to run a report compiled by Jane Akre, an investigative reporter and anchor of WTVT-TV, its outlet in Tampa, Florida, which in essence charged that a hormone manufactured by Monsanto Chemical that increased milk production in dairy cows had been hastily approved by the FDA without its having fully examined reports that the drug could also stimulate the growth of cancer cells in humans who drank the milk. After Monsanto threatened libel action, Fox turned the story over to its lawyer, Carolyn Forrest, who had it revised according to her own journalistic lights. “Virtually everything Monsanto said was allowed to stand without refutation, even when we knew and documented certain claims to be flatly false,” writes Akre, whose perseverance got her fired from the station.
Although her original version never got on the air, Akre ultimately prevailed. In an unusual lawsuit, the first of its kind filed by a journalist under Florida’s “Whistleblower” act, she contended that Fox had retaliated against her for refusing to participate in “illegal” activity. The illegality here consisted of Fox’s forcing her to sign off on a documentary that flouted FCC rules requiring TV journalists to report stories honestly and work in the public interest. In its effort to “take no risks,” she writes, “Fox threatened us with our jobs every time we resisted the dozens of mandated changes that would sanitize the story, and fill it with lies and distortions.” The jury agreed, and awarded her $425,000 in damages.
In all they endured for the sake of principle, Akre and Port certainly deserve comfortable seats in journalistic heaven. Many of the other complainants in Buzzsaw, however, don’t seem quite so convincing; and some of them come off as annoyingly self-righteous. Greg Palast, for one, says he abandoned working as a reporter in the United States in favor of the British press after he couldn’t get anyone to publish his “groundbreaking exposés known for stripping bare abuses.” As a free-lancer, he says, he was ignored by mainstream news organizations when he offered to sell them a story saying the Florida secretary of state had succeeded in knocking black voters off the rolls just before the 2000 presidential election. He did, however, market his scoop to the Web magazine Salon, at which point the story was picked up by the major media. So what’s his beef? one might ask. That big-time editors ignored entreaties by a free-lancer, then changed their minds when he got their attention? As evidence of what the book’s press release says is the “awesome depth and breadth of censorship in America today,” Palast’s experience doesn’t seem quite to hack it.
Other examples in her book, particularly those involving the
CIA, are so dense and filled with innuendos and unanswered questions
as to be believable only with a great degree of prior willingness.
We get another run-through by Gary Webb of his spurned allegation
that the CIA was responsible for urban drug addiction by helping
the Contras sell major amounts of cocaine to the Crips and the
Bloods of Los Angeles. As everyone now knows, Webb’s newspaper,
the San Jose Mercury News, apologized to readers for running the
piece without better substantiation and demoted Webb to the suburban
Cupertino office.
Webb likens his experience to what was going on in 1938 when fascist
governments intimidated the press into ignoring the truth. “Unfortunately,
we have reached that point,” he writes, a judgment that adds
to his list of shortcomings a penchant for overstatement. And
as far as the CIA charges go, there’ve been no major developments
in the case since to prove his paper did him any wrong.
Then there are the journalists consumed with the TWA Flight 800 case, Borjesson among them, who take up about a quarter of the book explicating their theory that the plane was brought down with a missile fired by mistake from one of several warships they say were closer to the crash site than the Pentagon is willing to admit. Again, to the casual reader there’s no way to tell truth from wishful reporting here, forget imagining what a tremendous task it would require to prevent every sailor on an Aegis missile cruiser, as well as their friends and spouses and the B-girls they’ll be comporting with in the next port of call, from whispering a word that they’d been involved in the biggest Oops event of the twentieth century.
And in the end, where exactly is the censorship? Everyone knows all about the friendly fire theory, those eyewitnesses who think they saw something streak into the plane. One story after another emerged from the firmament, was responded to, had its shelf life in the public consciousness, then got slotted back to the level of believability people felt it deserved.
The press does a lousy, incomplete job of covering a lot of important
things that people should know a lot more about than they do.
Corporate control over government agencies comes immediately to
mind. But, with the exception of the Monsanto case, that category
of stories didn’t make it into Buzzsaw, one of the failings
that renders the book more than just a little beside the point.
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