“Shadows of Liberty” presents the true story of today’s disintegrating freedoms within the U.S. media and government that they don’t want you to see. The film takes an intrepid journey through the darker corridors of the American media landscape, where global media conglomerates exercise extraordinary political, social, and economic power. The overwhelming collective power of these firms raises troubling questions about democracy. Highly revealing interviews, actuality, and archive material, tell insider accounts of a broken media system where journalists are prevented from pursuing controversial news stories, people are censored for speaking out against abuses of government power, and individual lives are shattered as the arena for public expression has been turned into a private profit zone. Will the Internet remain free, or be controlled by a handful of powerful, monopolistic corporations? The media crisis is at the core of today’s most troubling issues.
The film begins with three journalists whose careers were destroyed because of the stories they broke: Roberta Baskin, whose scoop about Nike sweatshops didn’t sit well with CBS when Nike became a co-sponsor of the Olympics; Kristina Borjesson, another CBS reporter, whose job lasted precisely one week after the network spiked her investigation into the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996; and Gary Webb, whose story linking U.S. support for Nicaraguan Contras and the epidemic in crack cocaine was trashed by The New York Times and the Washington Post. (His story was true, but Webb lost his job and eventually killed himself.)