Flexing the Power of the Press

By Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet. Posted April 23, 2002.

Kristina Borjesson never expected to write an exposé of the business she'd devoted her life to. A 20-year veteran of mainstream journalism, she was a successful insider who produced for the country's most well-regarded news shows, including Frontline and 60 Minutes. Working with industry stars including Dan Rather, she'd won one Emmy and had been nominated for others. She said she imagined spending the rest of her life "going around the world, doing the stories, doing documentaries, having a great time and putting out important information."

As she writes in her book "Into the Buzzsaw", "Trust me, never in a million years did I ever imagine that I'd find myself in my current position as some kind of rebel trying to take on America's journalism establishment. I was reared a member of Haiti's Morally Repugnant Elite‚ and educated, for the most part, in private institutions, including Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Not a thing in my frankly elitist background prepared me for this experience."

The experience she's talking about is her excommunication from mainstream journalism for digging too deep on the TWA 800 story, which she'd been assigned to research for CBS. Like the other reporters whose stories she collected in "Into the Buzzsaw," she essentially lost her job for doing it too well.

In Borjesson's case, doing her job meant challenging the government assertion that TWA 800 crashed due to a mechanical malfunction. During her investigation, she found increasingly compelling evidence that the plane had been hit by a missile and that there were military maneuvers happening in its vicinity that were later covered up.

Collaborating with other reporters including The Press Enterprise's David Hendrix, she collected proof of official lies. Scientific tests showed that a residue found inside the cabin had the same ingredients, in the same proportions, as rocket fuel (the National Transportation Safety Board said it was glue). The FBI claimed that traces of explosives found in the cabin resulted from a spill during a bomb-sniffing exercise on the plane, but Hendrix and Borjesson later proved that the exercise had taken place on a different aircraft. The two had documents that were smuggled out of the hangar where the official investigation was taking place, including "a copy of the downed plane's debris field that undercut assertions that the center wing tank was the site of the initiating event‚ that caused the plane the explode." They had dozens of eye-witness interviews disputing the government's story, and experts who said the witnesses' descriptions were consistent with a missile.

Borjesson, who had pushed to present her information on CBS, was fired from the network, as was Paul Ragonese, the law enforcement consultant she had worked with. Astonishingly, Ragonese was replaced by James Kallstrom, the very FBI agent who had consistently tried to thwart Borjesson.

"When I was tromping around the halls of CBS saying, "Why aren't we covering this?'" I had no idea why they didn't want to do a story, because I had received all these documents from a senior investigator inside Calverton [airplane hangar]," she says. But her information was contradicted by "official sources," and, as she says, "the buzzsaw was getting ready to hack me up."

Almost overnight, she became a journalistic pariah -- something that also happened to other reporters whose stories appear in Into the Buzzsaw. Had she known what was to come of her zeal, she says, "I don't know if I would have had the courage to do it. I was just doing my job."

Although initially lots of publications had reported on the possibility that TWA 800 was hit by a missile, after a few months of furious spin by the FBI, Pentagon and NTSB, journalists who refused to dismiss this theory were themselves dismissed as conspiracy kooks. Kallstrom told the AP, "The real facts are glossed over by the likes of [Oliver] Stone and others who spend their life bottom-feeding in those small, dark crevices of doubt and hypocrisy."

After years on the inside, it was both shocking and galvanizing for Borjesson to find herself marginalized in this way. "It causes a shift in paradigm for you. It really rocked my world and changed my reality forever," she says.

Her book examines how such marginalization happens. One important element is other reporters, who often gang up on dissenters like her and Gary Webb, whose exposé about the CIA's role in the crack epidemic was denounced in The New York Times, The LA Times and Washington Post.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »