by Eric Martin
Will Bunch is highly quotable in discussing the recent report that shows just how thoroughly "toilet trained" the media has been in its on again, off again - contingent - willingness to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture:
On the one hand, waterboarding is torture.
On the other hand....
I'm sorry -- there is no other hand. Waterboarding is torture, period. It's been that way for decades -- it was torture when we went after Japanese war criminals who used the ancient and inhumane interrogation tactic, it was torture when Pol Pot and some of the worst dictators known to mankind used it against their own people, and it was torture to the U.S. military which once punished soldiers who adopted the grim practice.
And waterboarding was described as "torture," almost without fail, in America's newspapers.
Until 2004, after the arrival of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their criminal notions of "enhanced interrogations." For four years -- in what would have to be the bizarro-world version of "speaking truth to power," waterboarding was almost never torture on U.S. newsprint. Then waterboarding-as-torture nearly made a mild comeback in journo-world, until perpetrators like Cheney and Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo began the big pushback, when American newspapers bravely turned their tails and fled.
The sordid history is spelled out in a significant new report by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (you can read it as a PDF file here). The report notes:
From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
The report also notes that waterboarding had constantly been referred to as torture by newspapers when other nations did it, but when the United States did it in the 2000s, it was, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, not illegal. The study proves scientifically something we've been talking about here at Attytood since Day One, about the tragic consequences of the elevation of an unnatural notion of objectivity in which newspapers abandoned any core human values -- even when it comes to something as clear cut as torture -- to give equal moral weight to both sides of an not-so-debatable issue (not to mention treating scientific issues like climate changes in the same zombie-like manner).
Never before in my adult life have I been so ashamed of my profession, journalism.
There's already some good analysis of the report out there from the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer, who writes:
As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a "controversial" matter, and in order to appear as though they weren't taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo's formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the "think" part of the equation so they could be "fair" to both groups.
The irony that Serwer notes -- and I completely agree -- is that in claiming they were working so hard not to take "a side," the journalists who wouldn't call waterboarding "torture" were absolutely taking a side and handing a victory to the Bush administration, which convinced newspapers to stop unambiguously describing this crime as they had done for decades prior to 2004. It's a tactic that has continued to this day. It's the reason why Cheney-- who'd been nearly invisible when he was in power -- and Yoo were suddenly all over the place beginning on Jan. 21, 2009, because they were desperately trying to keep framing this debate as the newspapers had, that their torture tactics were a public, political disagreement, and not a war crime.
And tragically, they succeeded. They were America's leaders, they tortured, and they got away with it. And newspapers and other journalists drove the getaway car.
Actually, it's worse than that.
Not only did our major establishment media outlets completely abdicate their ethical obligation to speak truth to power (or, in this case, merely call a spade a spade), and instead willingly adopted Orwellian euphemisms designed to soften the edges of vile criminal behavior, but our leading newspapers regularly give valuable column space to the architects of the criminal policies, as well as their dedicated advocates, apologists and dissemblers, such as John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg.
Not content to merely drive the getaway car, the establishment media has seen fit to put up some of the war criminals - and their cheerleaders - in plush flop houses with a regular stipened.
On the other hand, Dave Weigel used some intemperate language to describe Matt Drudge on an ostensibly private email list, and that was simply too much for the august Washington Post to tolerate.
They have standards after all.
in order to appear as though they weren't taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood.
This is called "argument to moderation", and it's a logical fallacy.
The common current-day political application of this is called "moving the Overton Window", where an idea previously considered beyond the pale is introduced in the interest of making other, less drastic options acceptable, at least in theory.
Here's my contribution.
Gonzales, Feith, Yoo, Addington, Bybee and Haynes should immediately be seized and surrendered to the Spanish courts to answer charges brought last year by Judge Baltazar Garzon.
Overton Window moves both ways.
Posted by: russell | July 01, 2010 at 11:08 AM
it wasn't just newspapers, of course. NPR went along with the newspeak, too.
yet another reason i won't donate.
U!S!A!
Posted by: cleek | July 01, 2010 at 11:35 AM
Great post Eric, I like the line about "flophouses."
This always makes me wonder how the collusion/fawning of the news organs was different during different wars. Is it peaking? Or is the outcry against it just more audible now because of the internet?
Posted by: Julian | July 01, 2010 at 11:35 AM
Unfortunately, Obama and Holder have more-or-less legalized torture by failing to prosecute either the order-givers or the order-followers.
The OLC does not interpret law for the United States, that's the Supreme Court's job. Its opinions are valued because it performs good analysis, but its opinions must stand alone -- advice from the OLC should provide legal protection only to the degree that that advice is a good-faith interpretation of the law.
Posted by: elm | July 01, 2010 at 11:42 AM
Torturing suspected terrorists polls very well in America.
What else do you need to know?
Posted by: alphie | July 01, 2010 at 12:34 PM
elm, reprehensible as it is that the current administration has not moved forward on war crimes prosecutions, it isn't quite the same as legalizing them (even "more-or-less). Nobody has passed a law, or issued a formal legal opinion (not counting the legal shills in the last administration), saying that torture is legal.
Last I heard, war crimes are part of the select group of offenses for which there is no statute of limitations. Which means that there is still the opportunity for a future US government (or even this one, eventually) to do what needs to be done.
Posted by: wj | July 01, 2010 at 01:22 PM
wj: My fear is that Obama, as credible reports have indicated, has been permitting/authorizing torture at black sites in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and thus will never really investigate/prosecute same.
Posted by: Eric Martin | July 01, 2010 at 01:35 PM
Eric: If he has, he better hope Barak Obama doesn't hear about it!
(As Jon Stewart put it.)
Posted by: Nate | July 01, 2010 at 02:03 PM
Eric, I fear you are right, while hoping you (and I) are wrong. But either way, even if the current administration has been co-opted by a failed methodology there remains the possibility of the next one, or the one after that, doing the right thing. I just hope it doesn't take a Nixon-to-China moment; that getting it right doesn't require a President with decades on the theocon right.
Posted by: wj | July 02, 2010 at 09:58 AM