Lecture: Kristina Borjesson
Into the Buzzsaw, a compilation of journalists' candid revelations about their trade, reads like an anthology of horror stories. Edited by Kristina Borjesson, it's full of cautionary tales about the control wielded over the newsmedia by the government and corporations.
"If members of the general public read this book, or even portions of it, they will be appalled," wrote a Publisher's Weekly reviewer. "The accounts of what goes on behind the scenes at major news organizations are shocking."
The "buzzsaw," says Borjesson, is "what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions—be they corporate or government—want to keep under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling."
Into the Buzzsaw is also about the short attention span of today's audience, and investigative journalism's potential to enlighten the public—and its all too frequent tendency to ostracize it. As American Journalism Review writer Carl Session Stepp noted, "Investigative reporters can be hard-headed, inflamed, over-the-top. They are not always right, but their tenacity and bravado lead to stories that otherwise might never be told." Even so, he conceded, muckrakers are "cultural irritants whose role is indispensable but possibly imperiled."
Despite such controversies, there is no profession Kristina Borjesson would rather be in—and maybe no other line of work big enough to contain her independent notions about journalism and her desire to see the underbelly of the world.
"I'm not going to tell you not to be a journalist," Borjesson told a press ethics class for graduate journalism students in NYU's Science and Environmental Reporting (SERP) program, on Wednesday, October 27, 2004.
For almost 20 years, Borjesson has been an independent TV producer and writer. She was nominated for an Emmy for "CBS Reports: The Last Revolutionary," a film about Fidel Castro, as well as "Showdown in Haiti," a documentary for PBS's Frontline to which Borjesson, who was raised in Haiti, brought an insider's knowledge of the country. Currently, she produces and co-hosts the "Expert Witness" radio show on WBAI in New York and KPFK in Los Angeles, and is writing two books.
Borjesson graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she was threatened twice with expulsion for contradicting her professors.
"‘It is both a flaw and a gift,' Borjesson said, of her desire to dig up whatever information can be dug up. 'It is my great passion, but it also gets me into trouble.'"
In the first case, Borjesson was assigned to cover a boat show but found out about a protest by Haitian boat people being forced to return home. She decided to cover what she thought was the more pertinent story. "I thought my professor would be really proud of my initiative," said Borjesson, "but the professor told me he could kick me out right then and there because I hadn't covered what I was told [to cover]."
The second instance occurred when Borjesson was granted an interview with a Congress woman in D.C. "As a graduate student, I wasn't supposed to take the cameras outside of the city," explained Borjesson, "but it was just too big a break, and when I came back, this professor told me he could kick me out for breaking the rules."
In an assessment written when Borjesson finished his class, the professor who assigned the boat show story noted that she was smart and did good work "but was going to have to learn to play by the rules." Recounting the story with a grin, Borjesson seemed slyly proud of her professor's verdict. Clearly, it was a portent of both her future investigative journalism triumphs—and disappointments.
"It is both a flaw and a gift," Borjesson said, of her desire to dig up whatever information can be dug up. "It is my great passion, but it also gets me into trouble."
It's this tenacity that earned her an Emmy and a Murrow award for "CBS Reports: Legacy of Shame," with correspondents Dan Rather and Randall Pinkston, which aired in 1995. Her first producing assignment with 60 minutes, the documentary looked at the plight of migrant workers in the United States during the mid-1990's. Borjesson and her team examined the health problems and working conditions of migrant workers, as well as the effects of government regulations on their lives. During the year-long project, Borjesson, who speaks Spanish, traced the routes of migrants from U.S. farms to their Mexican roots and back, in order to see, firsthand, what the migrant workers' lives were like.
According to Borjesson, the same tenacity led to her termination by CBS for trying to find every bit of information about the crash of TWA flight 800. By tenacity, she means questioning official accounts that contradicted people who were working on the investigation; digging through rules, regulations, and procedures to find irregularities; and attempting to discern the origins of the mysterious red residue investigators sampled from the seats of the downed plane. It was a sample of that residue, sent to Borjesson by an individual working in the hangar where the wreckage was being consolidated, that led to her firing soon after the FBI said the sample was stolen property from the investigation.
"I am wired to do [investigative reporting]," said Borjesson, "but as a journalist you have to always remember that you are a public servant. If you back down, if you don't try to find the truth, then you aren't doing your job. It's a huge responsibility."
Investigative journalism, Borjesson told NYU's SERP students, requires that a reporter "learn to think like a criminal." By that, she said, she meant questioning everyone, not believing what was told to you even if it was someone who had previously given you good information, and looking for the connections that are not immediately apparent.
Likewise, said Borjesson, spokespeople for government, corporate, and private institutions cannot necessarily be taken at their word. In her opinion, institutions try to show the face they want the public to see. Too often, said Borjesson, mainstream journalism succumbs to "death by official source." In other words, she explained, a journalist simply takes the press release, or attends the news conference, and doesn't ask any more questions.
She advised her audience to do an end-run around official sources. "Get on the ground," she said. "Use [primary] sources. Use 'cutouts' [inside sources who can go where a reporter can't] to help you. But find the people who were there."
Borjesson advised her student audience to talk to people, "to step out of your comfort zone and learn to interview." Journalism, she emphasized, is "experiential, and the greatest journalist is like an ally cat with a college degree." By this, she meant that reporters "have to see the place, meet the person, see how it smells." Extracting the truth from an interviewee, she said, was a craft that must be learned. "Get used to being lied to," she warned. "Learn to discern when smoke is being blown at you." At the same time, she said, "don't act like a judge or an inquisitor" when you're conducting an interview. "You have to make a connection" with your subject, she noted, in order to gain his or her confidence.
When reporting, a journalist must think critically, said Borjesson. Presenting both sides of a story in the name of "balance," with no critical commentary, does the public no service, she believes. In Borjesson's opinion, journalists are taught to find balancing sources in order to construct stories that say, "on the one hand, and on the other hand." The unintended consequence of this approach, she argued, is that the reader wonders, "But who's telling the truth?" In this sort of uncritical balance, said Borjesson, "there's no context, no reporting."
"You all are who should be reporting about 9/11 and the Iraq war," she said, pointing at the class, "because you have not taken to the bad habits of journalism." By this, she meant that journalism students had not learned to present both sides of a story as equally valid, without analyzing the legitimacy of each side's claims.
In the final analysis, she maintains, it's a journalist's job to ask the tough questions. In her book, she makes it clear how easily investigative journalists are discredited. Calling a reporter a conspiracy theorist or a crusader is often enough to make the public stop reading her—and to stop prospective employers from calling. Nonetheless, she argues, if the press is only voicing the government's word about itself, journalists aren't doing their job. In the introduction to Buzzsaw, she writes, "The press is our nation's last line of defense for keeping our leaders honest and our government democratic."