Into the Buzzsaw
http://www.gcforall.org/buzzsaw10pg

Into the Buzzsaw
Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
Edited by Kristina Borjesson, Foreword by Gore Vidal
__________________________________________________________________

The following are excerpts from the fascinating accounts of 18 award-winning
journalists in the book Into the Buzzsaw. All of these writers were
prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major, incredibly
revealing news. Some writers were even fired or laid off. These journalists
have won numerous awards, including several Emmies and a Pulitzer Award.  If
we want to make our world a better place, it's vitally important that we
spread this news across the land.
___________________________________________________________________

Jane Akrehas spent more than 20 years as a network and local TV reporter for
news operations throughout the country.  Most recently, she and her husband,
investigative reporter Steve Wilson, were terminated for refusing to
broadcast a story they knew to be false and misleading.

By February 1997 our story was ready to air.  It attempted to answer some
troubling questions:  Why had Monsanto sued two small dairies to prevent
them from labeling their milk as coming from cows not injected with [rBGH].
Why had two Canadian health regulators claimed that their jobs were
threatened-and then said Monsanto offered them a bribe to give fast-track
approval to the drug?  Why did Florida supermarkets break their
much-publicized promise that milk in the dairy case would not come from
hormone-treated cows "until it gained widespread acceptance" among the wary
public?  And why was the US the only major industrialized nation to approve
the use of this controversial genetically engineered hormone?  P. 40, 41

Station managers were so proud of our work that they saturated virtually
every Tampa Bay-area radio station with thousands of dollars' worth of ads
urging viewers to watch what we'd uncovered about "The Mystery in Your
 Milk." [Monsanto lawyer] John Walsh wrote that some of the points of the
story "clearly contain the elements of defamatory statements which, if
repeated in a broadcast, could lead to serious damage to Monsanto and dire
consequences for Fox News. P. 41. 42

It was not long after our struggle to air an honest report had begun that
Fox fired both the news director and the general manager [of our station].
The new general manager, Dave Boylan, explained that if we didn't agree to
changes that Monsanto and Fox lawyers were insisting upon, we'd be fired for
insubordination within 48 hours.  We pleaded with Dave to look at the facts
we'd uncovered, many of which conclusively disproved Monsanto's claims.  We
reminded him of the importance of the facts about a basic food most of our
viewers consume and feed to their children daily.  His reply: "We paid $3
billion dollars for these TV stations.  We'll tell you what the news is.
The news is what we say it is!"  Steve [the author's husband and coworker]
was firm but respectful when he made it clear we would neither lie nor
distort any part of the story.  P. 43-45

[The Dairy Coalition's director] took great pride in bragging that the Dairy
Coalition had "snowed the station with paperwork and pressure to have that
story killed." Fox threatened our jobs every time we resisted the dozens of
changes that would sanitize the story, and fill it with lies and
distortions. [Fox lawyer] Forest finally leveled with us. "You guys just don
't get it.  It doesn't matter whether the facts are true.  This story isn't
worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to go up against Monsanto."  P.
47, 48

Fox's general manager presented us with an agreement that would give us a
full year of our salaries and benefits worth close to $200,000 in no-show
"consulting jobs" with strings attached: no mention of how Fox covered up
the story and no opportunity to ever expose the facts Fox refused to air.
We turned down this second hush money offer.  We were both finally fired,
allegedly for "no cause." P. 49

The controversy over rBGH has traveled recently to Canada and the European
Union, both of which decided to reject the drug for use in those countries.
P. 61
___________________________________________________________________

Greg Palast writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers of London and
reports for the BBC's Newsnight.  Palast abandoned hopes of working in
America when mainstream press failed to report on his groundbreaking exposes
known for stripping bare abuses.

In the months leading up to the November [2000] balloting, Florida Governor
Jeb Bush and his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, ordered local
elections supervisors to purge 58,000 voters from registries on the grounds
they were felons not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, only a
handful of these voters were felons. The voters were African Americans
(about 54%) and most of the others were white and Hispanic Democrats. Three
weeks after the election, this extraordinary news ran on page one of the
country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country:
Britain. In the USA, it was not covered. It was given big network TV
coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent-on BBC television,
London.  P. 65

The office of the governor [also] illegally ordered the removal of felons
from the voter rolls-real felons-but with the right to vote under Florida
law.  As a result, 50,000 of these voters could not vote.  The fact that 90%
of these voters were Democrats should have made it news because this
maneuver alone more than accounted for Bush's victory.  P. 66

In February 2001, I took my BBC film crew to Florida, having unearthed a
page marked "secret" and "confidential" from the
company the state had hired
to make up the list of names to purge from voter rolls. I took my camera
crew into an agreed interview with Jeb Bush's director of the Department of
Elections. When I pulled out the confidential sheet, Bush's man ripped off
the microphone and did the fifty-yard dash, locking himself in his office,
all in front of our cameras. It was killer television and wowed the British
viewers. We even ran a confession from the company. Newsworthy for the USA?
Apparently not.  P. 72

A group of well-placed sources told my BBC team that before Sept. 11 the US
government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding bin Laden'
s network.  We got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI
and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then
killed by Bush Jr.'s.  The story made top of the news-in Britain.  In the
US, one TV reporter picked up the report.  He was called, he says, by
network chiefs, and told to go no further.  He didn't.  P. 75
__________________________________________________________________

Kristina Borjesson has been an independent producer and writer for almost 20
years.  Among her many accomplishments, she worked at CBS network where she
won an Emmy and a Murrow Award for her investigative reporting on "CBS
Reports: Legacy of Shame" with Dan Rather and Randall Pinkston.

Pierre Salinger announced to the world on November 8, 1996, that he'd
received documents from French intelligence proving that a US Navy missile
had accidentally downed [TWA flight 800].  That same day, FBI's Jim
Kallstrom called a press conference to deny Salinger's allegations.  [At the
press conference,] Kallstrom rattled off a prepared speech, and then it was
time for questions.  A man raised his hand and asked why the navy was
involved in the recovery and investigation while a possible suspect.
Kallstrom's response was immediate;  "Remove him!" he yelled. 
Two men leapt
over to the questioner and grabbed him by the arms.  There was a momentary
chill in the air after the guy had been dragged out of the room.  Kallstrom
and entourage acted as if nothing had happened.  P. 110, 111

The lesson here is that on sensitive stories you can't trust official
sources.  P. 115
__________________________________________________________________

Philip Weiss writes for the New York Observer and has worked for many
national magazines, including Harper's, Esquire, and New York Times
Magazine.

James Kallstrom, then of the FBI, said, vehemently, at a press conference in
1997, that every boat in the area of the [TWA flight 800] crash had been
identified.  Subsequently, government radar data was released showing that
the boat closest to the crash had never been identified and sped away from
the area at more than thirty knots an hour.  Kallstrom was later hired by
CBS.  P. 186
___________________________________________________________________

April Oliver was an international affairs reporter for the MacNeil/Lehrer
NewsHour for five years.  She has won numerous awards for her work in
television.  In 1998, CNN fired her after she produced the controversial
Tailwind report about the US using sarin nerve gas and targeting defectors
in Laos during the Vietnam War.  CNN settled the lawsuit Oliver filed
against her former employers after a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff reconfirmed what she had reported in a sworn deposition.

During my reporting on Tailwind, I received various threats.  Threats to
drag my name through the mud if I opened this can of worms on gas use;
threats that no one would believe me; and a death threat.  P. 216

I am ashamed to say that CNN was a willing accomplice in [the] campaign to
crush the story. CNN management cut and ran at the first sign of heat.  The
heat included everyone from Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell complaining
about the story, to an orchestrated e-mail campaign by Special Forces
veterans on the CNN executive suite.  Ultimately, my co-producer and I were
fired.  Our names dragged through the mud, we were branded journalistic
felons by a Wall Street Journal editorial.  CNN's goal, in the words of one
manager, "kill this thing, drive a stake through its heart and bury it-so it
's gone." P. 217, 218
____________________________________________________________________

Monika Jensen-Stevenson is a former Emmy-winning producer for 60 minutes.
The Vietnam Veterans Coalition awarded her the Vietnam Veterans National
Medal.

Marine Private Robert R. Garwood-14 years a prisoner of the Vietnamese, was
found guilty of collaboration with the enemy in the longest court-martial in
US history.  I first heard of Garwood in 1979.  Wire reports referred to him
as a defector whom the US government was charging with being a traitor.  At
the end of the court-martial, there seemed no question that Garwood was a
monstrous traitor.  P. 225

In 1985, Garwood was speaking publicly about something that had never made
the news during his court-martial.  The Wall Street Journal reported he said
that he knew firsthand of other American prisoners in Vietnam long after the
war was over.  He was supported by Vietnam combat veterans whose war records
were impeccable.  These veterans told a story vastly different from what was
made public during the court-martial and one that was intimately tied to
another 60 Minutes story I was working on-"Dead or Alive?"  The title
referred to Vietnam POW/MIAs. P. 226

My sources included outstanding experts like former head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency General Eugene Tighe and returned POWs like Captain Red
McDaniel, who held the Navy's top award for bravery, had commanded the
aircraft carrier Lexington, and was director of liaison on Capitol Hill for
the Navy and Marine Corps.  With such advocates providing back up, it was
hard not to consider the possibility that prisoners (some 3,500) had in fact
been kept by the Vietnamese communists as hostages to make sure the US would
pay the more than $3 billion in war reparations that Nixon had promised
before his fall from grace.  Particularly compelling was the fact that of
the 300 prisoners known to be held in Laos, not one was released for
homecoming in 1973.  P. 226

Initially held back to ensure the US would fulfill its secret promise to pay
reparation monies, by 1979 American POWs had become worthless pawns.  The US
had not paid the promised monies and had no intention of paying in the
future.  P. 233
_______________________________________________________________

Michael Levine is a 25-year veteran of the DEA turned best-selling author
and journalist.  His articles and interviews on the drug war have been
published in numerous national newspapers and magazines, including the New
York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Esquire.

When President Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1971, there were fewer
than 500,000 hard-core addicts in the entire nation, most of whom were
addicted to heroin.  Three decades later, despite the expenditure of $1
trillion in tax dollars, the number of hard-core addicts is shortly expected
to exceed five million.  Our nation has become the supermarket of the drug
world, with a wider variety and bigger supply of drugs at cheaper prices
than ever before.  The problem now not only affects every town and hamlet on
the map, but it is difficult to find a family anywhere that is not somehow
affected.  P. 258

The Chang Mai "factory" that the CIA prevented me from destroying was the
source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies
and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam.  P. 264

My unit, the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Squad, was charged with investigating
all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York.  My unit
became involved in investigating every major smuggling operation known to
law enforcement.  We could not avoid witnessing the CIA protecting major
drug dealers.  Not a single important source in Southeast Asia was ever
indicted by US law enforcement.  This was no accident.  Case after case was
killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn't a damned
thing we could do about it.  CIA-owned airlines like Air America were being
used to ferry drugs throughout Southeast Asia, allegedly to support our
"allies."  CIA banking operations were used to launder drug money.  P. 265

In 1972, I was assigned to assist in a major international drug case
involving top Panamanian government officials who were using diplomatic
passports to smuggle large quantities of heroin into the US.  The name
Manueal Noriega surfaced prominently in the investigation.  Surfacing right
behind Noriega was the CIA to protect him from US law enforcement.  As head
of the CIA, Bush authorized a salary for Manuel Noriega as a CIA asset,
while the dictator was listed in as many as 40 DEA computer files as a drug
dealer.  P. 266

The CIA and Dept. of State were protecting more and more politically
powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan,
the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government,
Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others.
Media's duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep
quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the
US; second, to divert the public's attention by shilling them into believing
the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were
permitted to SEEN-BY: 5/0 7102/1 7106/20 22