The Failures of Post-9/11 Media

By Laura Barcella, AlterNet. Posted January 2, 2006.

Kristina Borjesson knows well what can happen to journalists who push too hard to expose government secrets.

The award-winning reporter-cum-media critic was actually fired from her job at CBS after digging too deep -- and refusing to shut up -- about what caused the 2001 crash of TWA flight 800. In her acclaimed 2002 book "Into the Buzzsaw," Borjesson chronicled her forced exile from mainstream media and encouraged other banished reporters to share their stories, too.

Now she's at it again. In October, Borjesson released "Feet to the Fire" (Prometheus Books), a strapping collection of 21 interviews with the country's most influential TV, newspaper and magazine journalists. Her subject at hand? The impact of muddled intelligence -- and White House spin -- on mainstream media's desultory reporting of the lead-up to Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.

What might be different today if the press hadn't swallowed so many administration lies, hook, line and sinker? Is it the media's responsibility to report what the people need to know, or what the government wants us to hear? And which -- if any -- journalists got their war reporting right?

With an arsenal of questions like these, Borjesson aims for the heart -- and the top -- of the "media elite," brain-picking notables such as Ted Koppel, Ron Suskind, John Walcott and Christopher Hedges.

And with Bush's approval at recent all-time lows, his administration marred by a succession of increasingly Orwellian scandals, Borjesson's timing couldn't be better.

AlterNet spoke with Borjesson via telephone about the power and prejudice behind the "free press."

Why and how did you decide to do this book?

Kristina Borjesson: Actually, it's a logical extension of my last book, "Into the Buzzsaw," which looked at the problems big investigative journalists have. It was important to me to tell people who these [journalists] were. It's important to me that the American public knows who the good journalists really are and the lengths they go to bring the important stories to the public.

Here we are in this amazing era of profound crisis. Particularly pre-war, I was watching television and reading the news, and when it was announced that we were going to war with Iraq, I was wondering why no one was really holding the administration's feet to the fire and asking loudly and often, "Why are we doing this, and why is nobody presenting information that reflects reporting is really digging into this?"

Then when we went off to Iraq, I felt like I needed to understand how this country's top journalists interact with this country's leadership at a time of crisis, to figure out what went right and what went wrong. I decided to pick journalists who were covering areas that I thought were most germane to that period -- whether it was people covering the White House [or] covering the war -- national security intelligence reporters, which is where the rubber met the [road], because the reasons for going to war were ostensibly based on intelligence.

The bottom line for me is to try to examine the best journalists out there, and see what it is about them and how they go about doing their work. And in the course of it, I just exposed a lot of stuff.

Were you shocked or scared by anything you learned over the course of your interviews for "Feet to the Fire"?

The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation's top messengers about why we went to war. [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren't clear about it, that means the public wasn't necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don't think the American people are clear about it.

The other thing that I found interesting was looking into why their reporting didn't get the kind of traction it should. The best reporters were from Knight Ridder. This is not according to Kristina; this is according to all the other top reporters that I spoke to. The reason why their reporting didn't get traction was because their reporting wasn't on television, and while they have a huge audience of 11 million readers during the week, they're not in the power centers of this country, meaning that they don't have a presence in New York or Washington.

Again, what does that say? It's not as if there aren't other bright reporters in television. If you look at the two power newspapers, the New York Times -- most famously, or infamously, their key reporter was Judith Miller. And Walter Pincus [of the Washington Post] was doing all this great reporting, but it was ending up on page 17.

It's what I said about "Buzzsaw" -- people who are on the major radar don't do the kind of reporting that people below that radar do. The question is to look into why. The more powerful the news outlet is, the more visible it is, the more attention it attracts from people who, either inside or outside, want to suppress that reporting.

The other thing that was very clear in the pre-war phase is that the relationship between the White House (the executive branch) and the public, and the executive branch and Congress has changed profoundly. Walter Pincus mentioned that.

Laura Barcella is an associate editor at AlterNet.

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