Into the Buzzsaw: Leading journalists expose the myth of a free press
Edited by Kristina Borjesson
Prometheus, 2004
453 pages
REVIEW BY SIMON TAYLER
"I have sympathy for friends who work in the corporate media. It's a terrible burden to be setting the agenda. They have to mull their statements carefully before they speak. They didn't ask for that power". So says journalist and contributor Philip Weiss.
Give me a break.
The title of Borjesson's book promises that it will cut through the myth that the US media is "free", and the list of accolades and awards that shout at you from the back cover suggest that the book is going to actually deliver. Sadly, it doesn't. At times it's fascinating, at times horrifying, and sometimes very informative. But there's enough confusion, gaps in the argument and just plain drivel interspersed with the good bits to make it a rather frustrating experience overall.
There is, for example, a fascinating article by Catherine Dennett entitled "The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context". It's an article that takes up the part played by the powerful Rockefeller family (and their assorted hangers-on in Washington) in the conquest of Latin America and the Arab world, the role of oil in Western interventions in Arab affairs, and how the media routinely ignore both.
The problem is that Dennett doesn't really explain just how the media missed this crucial context to the "war on terror" and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. More importantly, she doesn't explain why.
Dennett also undermines the title of her own essay by citing numerous journalists who do exactly what she demands of them. Widely published reporters such as Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Michael Moore and Seymour Hersh receive honourable mentions for not missing the context at all.
To get to this article, however, you first have to wade through the text of a speech by former MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield starts out by wondering aloud whether the process of "embedding" journalists in military units during the invasion of Iraq was "just another element of propaganda from the American government".
If "embedding" is propaganda (and does anyone really doubt it?), then it seems to have worked on Banfield. Less than a page after her reluctant question, she argues that "we" did a lot of good things in invading Iraq. (Banfield makes it clear that "we" is an all-encompassing term; since "we" did the toppling of the Hussein government and handing out of food parcels, there is no distinction between the media and the army in which they were embedded.)
But while "we" might have overthrown a dictator and delivered some food aid, it appears that much of Iraq is rather "thankless" for their liberation. This, Banfield insists, is just because the Iraqis don't have a very good image of "us".
And the reason for this? Well, the Hussein government spread all sorts of nasty propaganda about "us" through a newspaper ...
The ironies, whilst delicious, are lost on Banfield completely.
There are better articles in the book. Gerard Colby details his experiences of "privishing" (ensuring a book disappears by cutting it's production and publicity); Gary Webb and Michael Levine outline the refusal of the media to accept that much of the drug trade has been bankrolled by the US government, Robert Port recounts how Associated Press sat on the investigation of the massacre at No Gun Ri during the Korean War. The Bobby Garwood case, the theft of the 2000 US presidential elections, questions over the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 and the gutting of the investigation into Monsanto's bovine growth hormone Prosiliac are in here too, and they make for some enthralling reading.
But even with the inclusion of these (often excellent) articles, the book is a confusing and contradictory patchwork of overlapping or competing ideas. Only the final two chapters, written by Carl Jensen and the ever-reliable Robert McChesney, attempt to put together any sort of coherent picture of what might be causing the problems in the media. It's only McChesney who attempts to analyse the poor quality of media output in terms of the ownership structures and inbuilt biases that produce the outrageous content of the modern mainstream media companies.
For those wanting to get the low down on why the story of the No Gun Ri massacre disappeared, or what happened during the 2000 US presidential elections, this book will be invaluable. But if you're serious about cutting through the myth of the free press, or understanding how the corporate media works, you'd be much better off reading something else — perhaps authored by John Pilger or Noam Chomsky.
From Green Left Weekly, July 26, 2006.
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