Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak Out

by Kristina Borjesson (Editor)

In Into the Buzzsaw, the award-winning expose of investigative journalism, Kristina Borgesson shattered the silence about efforts to quash the public's right to know the truth. In Feet to the Fire, she breaks new ground by offering candid, often alarming conversations with America's most distinguished journalists and news executives, revealing what they really think about the companies they work for and each other, the Bush administration, their pre-Iraq war and war coverage, and much more.Focusing on the post 9/11 crisis period, Borjesson has interviewed ABC's Ted Koppel, Hearst Newspaper's Helen Thomas, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Associated Press President/CEO Tom Curley, Harpers publisher John MacArthur, and many others. This collection of masterful interviews unveils a journalistic environment that rivals any long-running soap opera on television. Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation's most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments.With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.

Genres: Nonfiction

627 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Born in Washington, D.C. Borjesson grew up in Port-au-Prince Haiti, the daughter of a civil engineer and a businesswoman. She has been an investigative reporter for thirty years. She published her first book, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, in response to being censored while investigating the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Buzzsaw won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Media Criticism and the Independent Publishers Award. Her second book, Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11, was an examination of why the nation’s most prominent reporters and news executives failed to verify the reasons given for going to war with Iraq. Feet to the Fire also won the Independent Publishers Award. Borjesson’s third book, The Reptile Club Librarian, is the fictionalized memoir of a man who spent his career working both sides of the law.

Reviews

[Lee Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look at the state of the corporate media in the mid-2000s. An interview with the much-respected Ted Koppel from 2004 really reveals what a part of the problem he is. Practically every statement is a milder version of what the Bush administration was saying around that time. He was convinced there were WMD in Iraq - "absolutely, I believed it." He felt that Bush wanted the media to be in Iraq so they could show them the WMD when they found them; and if only Saddam had cooperated with UN inspectors, Bush would have lost his excuse to invade: "And if after all Saddam wanted to avoid an invasion, the easiest way of doing that would be to say, 'Yes, we have a few tons of weapons of mass destruction. Here, take them out. Look anywhere you want to look.'...I don't think that the United States could have gone ahead with it [the war] then. I really don't....Would have been very, very difficult. But as I say, the problem that I see is those who say, 'We should have given it another six months so that the inspectors could do their work.' At the end of six months, the administration would have said, 'We haven't proved anything yet, all we've proved is that they're well hidden.'"

Which is exactly what happened, of course. He seems to have forgotten, as Bush later did, that the UN weapons inspectors were in Iraq for months before Bush kicked them out. Koppel also repeats the Bush claim that every other intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD.

Reading the interviews with Ron Suskind, Tom Yellin and Thomas Curley, I'm struck by how many people in the corporate media identify with the US power structure. Though highly critical of Bush/Cheney, they also apparently believe that the government is normally run (or was once run) as depicted in our high school civics texts, that voters elect their officials and the elected officials are actually running everything in a straightforward manner.

Suskind actually says, "Look, it is a sacred, solemn duty of the leaders of a nation to explain to the true sovereigns - the voters, the citizens - why we should go to war against another nation. There is a long history of this being a solemn and sober obligation." You have to wonder if Suskind is selling a line of bull, or just terribly naive.

Barton Gellman of the Washington Post claims that his paper did a great job in the buildup to the war, and spouts quite a bit of nonsense: “I’m not that sympathetic to arguments that intelligence should have known exactly what was coming [before 9/11]…I want to emphasize: the public record, and our best efforts to penetrate further, didn’t show that the President was wrong [about WMD], either. The pundits who claim now that they ‘knew’ all along are full of cr*p. They didn’t know.”

In these interviews from 2004-2005, it's fascinating how no one can quite put their finger on why Bush invaded Iraq. Suskind thinks it was because Saddam was an easy target to make an example of. Helen Thomas just says, "I don't know...Someday we'll find out why we went to war." Tom Yellin blames the Clinton administration for not supporting a coup in the 1990s by Ahmed Chalabi (!) Walter Pincus thinks it involved wanting to make Iraq a pro-Israeli democracy. Pincus actually says that this could not be sold to the American people from the beginning because: “You could not and probably should not send American soldiers into another country to establish democracy if US security is not threatened immediately and directly.” Really, Walter? Has he forgotten Panama in 1989?

Pincus, with more perception, says: “When it comes to government, we moved into a PR society a long time ago. Now, it’s the PR that counts, not the policy.” He criticizes the Post for rotating personnel around too much, so that no one develops too much expertise. He also points out how eager the media was to get the war going because a lot of money had been spent getting reporters over to the Middle East and embedded in military units. However, Pincus falls into the same conventional Establishment idiocy at times - the CIA does only what the President tells them: “The lesson is: presidents run everything, and people do what presidents want done.” Of course, Pincus has helped prop up the official story of the JFK assassination, and led the attack on Gary Webb in the 1990s.

David Martin with CBS News actually has his office inside the Pentagon. He’s been there for so many decades, he completely identifies with the US national security apparatus. In his interview, he has never heard of the “Clean Break” document put out by PNAC before 9/11. “The government wasn’t lying to us” about WMDs, he insists. He feels very good about the then-current elections in Iraq, doesn’t think the US wants a long-term military presence there, doesn’t think that Halliburton got its contracts because of Dick Cheney. Martin actually says he believed that Saddam was a threat to the US.

If these people aren't professional shills, then they are in denial because they're too close to the power structure. They are unable to be detached and see things as they really are. They have too much invested in the system, and can't admit that American foreign policy is not about democracy, human rights or “protecting our national security.” Walter Pincus admits that Richard Perle is “a friend of mine” and “I actually like John [Negroponte, director of national intelligence], I’ve known him for a long time.” So they need to perform all of these mental contortions ("Maybe Bush invaded Iraq to prove his manhood or get revenge for his dad") to keep the cognitive dissonance under control. If they can't handle exploring the truth about the Iraq war, it's no wonder they can't even look at 9/11.

John MacArthur and Paul Krugman are much more perceptive. James Bamford is even sharper, understanding the influence of Israel and the Zionists on US foreign policy. Knight-Ridder did stellar work on the Iraq war and get a lot of well-deserved attention here. Juan Cole and Chris Hedges are terrific, and I used to read them all the time back in the day. But no one here fundamentally questions the events of 9/11.

[Mark Lokensgard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because I found Kristina Borjesson's previous book (as editor), Into the Buzzsaw, extremely compelling. Anyone with the courage to look at the forces that actually shape journalism in the U.S. (with some mentions of the UK and Canada) should read that book. I admit I did not finish this book, because while Into the Buzzsaw followed the development/killing off of stories in the media, Feet to the Fire had a format of interviews with journalists conducted by Borjesson. It seemed like with every interview, Borjesson would try to cajole the other journalists being interviewed into taking her view of journalism -- one that I actually agree with -- but not being very successful at it. I got the sense that the journalists being interviewed were not unsympathetic to her project, but they simply weren't going to hand her the acknowledgement and examples she seemed to want. My guess is that only people who follow journalism as a kind of character study, as in wanting to follow what particular journalists say and write as individuals, might be interested in this book.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent interviews with the foremost reporters regarding the debacle the United States created in Iraq after the 2003 intervention. Although it came out in 2005, it is still a relevant piece of information regarding the role of the media and the importance of that. I especially enjoyed the way the interviews were arranged. My only criticism would be that at times it seemed rather repetitive and the interviewer would force her ideas onto the the interviewee occasionally. Overall, an intriguing read.

[LaJuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

an excellent collection of essays from journalists of all levels. the writings discuss how patriotic fervor along with government propoganda that aided the wide dissemination of misinformation that has led to a series of events including the Iraq war...

[David Trautz · Rating 5 out of 5]

She can get anything out of anybody. The interview with Ted Koppel is excellent.

[Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wish i would have counted the number of times a question including the phrase "800-pound gorilla in the room" was posed.

[Pelvis Resley · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Newsworthy" views? Pure
indoctrination! Shills for
the occupation.