Summary
Title: Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
Author: Kristina Borjesson
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1591022304
Pro:
• Exposes the real biases in American news reporting
• Behind-the-scenes accounts of censorship
• Shows why current situation harms the democratic system
Con:
• Some essays are better than others
Description:
• Multiple essays from leading print and TV journalists
• Behind-the-scenes accounts of corporate and government censorship
• Explanations about why the press is not really so “free” in the US
Book Review
Ideally, the answer to the above questions should be “yes,” and that is surely what Americans would like to think is the case. However, most people are completely unaware of what really goes on behind the scenes — if they did, they would be appalled. In her book Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Kristina Borjesson presents a variety of essays from nearly two dozen award-winning print and TV journalists, all detailing the atrocious state of American journalism today.
They cover their own experiences with government censors, government cover-ups, corporate censors, corporate intimidation, editorial preference for entertainment over news, and much more.
How and why has such a deplorable state of affairs developed? Several of the authors agree that a watershed event was the 1997 legal judgment against ABC News. In 1992, journalists from ABC went undercover in a Food Lion grocery story where they filmed how, in unsanitary conditions, old fish were repackaged and redated, expired beef was ground together with fresh beef, and barbecue sauce was put on chicken in order to mask the growing smell.
Food Lion’s response was not to condemn the events and work to improve conditions — the sort of thing one might expect from a responsible and moral company. Instead, Food Lion sued ABC for fraud. Why? Because the journalists had to lie on their job applications in order to get inside the store. Result: a North Carolina jury awarded Food Lion $5.5 million in damages.
Fortunately, an appeals court later overturned this award and exonerated ABC of the fraud charges, but the damage had already been done. Food Lion used the time not to convince the public that they were improving, but instead that ABC had deceived its audience, hoping everyone would forget the damning videotaped evidence. Curiously, Food Lion never tried to bring these charges up in court, perhaps in the knowledge that they were baseless.
Upton Sinclair also misrepresented himself in his effort to get behind the scenes at Chicago stockyards back in the early years of the 20th century. What he discovered led to his famous book The Jungle, not to mention the nation’s first food and drug laws. ABC’s important investigative story led to no such changes, however, and during the 1990s, deaths from E-Coli infested meat only increased. Who gained? Corporations like Food Lion.
Who lost? Everyone else, but especially consumers and news organizations. Today, this lawsuit has become a lodestone for investigative journalism. Editors are afraid of running controversial stories which point towards malfeasance on the part of corporations because they are afraid of getting sued.
It doesn’t matter how true or how well supported the story may be — corporations have deeper pockets than most news departments, which means that they can drive away criticism before it even begins. Of course, even if editors were not afraid of lawsuits, another significant barrier to serious investigations has grown over the years: greater corporate control of the news media. Today, the corporations which might be investigated may just be the ones which own the news departments involved:
- ...the largest ten media firms own all the U.S. television networks, most of the TV stations in the largest markets, all the major film studios, all the major music companies, nearly all the cable TV channels, much of the book and magazine publishing, and much, much more. These firms are obsessed with finding ways to use their media empires to augment their profits.
Does anyone really believe that this level of concentration of media power in so few hands won’t have a negative impact on the variety and quality of news and information the general public will have access to?
