"It's Not Torture When America Does It"

I've read a number of blog entries recently wherein the writers are castigating the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for waffling on referring to waterboarding as "torture" once the news broke that the CIA was waterboarding prisoners, with the express authorization of the Bush Administration. The information that those papers declined to call waterboarding "torture" is set out in a study that was done by a number of students at Harvard and published by the Harvard Kennedy School.

The study is not very long and it is available in PDF format here. Take the time to read it for yourself.

The study also looked at the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Predictably, the WSJ never referred to waterboarding as torture, unless another nation did it. Neither did USA Today.

The track record of the reporters and news editors of both the NY Times and LA Times is pretty consistent: When other nations waterboard people, it is torture. When the United States government waterboards people, then it isn't torture. To the LA Times' news staff, waterboarding was torture, except during a period of the Philippine Insurrection (when US Army soldiers waterboarded insurrectos) and after 2003. The NY Times' news staff began referring to waterboarding as torture in the 1930s; there was a dip in their so categorizing waterboarding as torture during the Vietnam War and then, like everyone else, after 2003.

The opinion pieces at both papers, since 2002, tend to sort of to refer to waterboarding as torture, but clearly referring to the practice as torture didn't take hold at the LA Times until the Bush Administration was very much a flock of lame ducks.

The study gives the readers of the mainstream media a clear reason to distrust their coverage, especially when the story is about government practices.[1] Hypothetically speaking, everyone would find the practice of having sex with young lambs to be repugnant. But it seems clear that if government were to engage in lamb-fucking, that the news staffs of the NY Times, the LA Times and USA Today would then describe having sex with lambs as maybe "ethically dubious" or "harsh treatment of livestock."[2]

I deliberately used the term "mainstream media" in the previous paragraph, for I have no doubt that if the authors of the studies expanded their work to cover every major city newspaper in this country, along with the newsweeklies and the broadcast/cable news operation,[3] they would find the same pattern.

Waterboarding is not the only example. If you were to read back over the coverage of the time four years ago when Dick Cheney allegedly downed a few beers and then, in fact, shot another man in the face with a shotgun, you will find no shortage of news stories that referred to the shooting as a "peppering". If you were to accidentally shoot another person in the face while bird hunting, any press reports would have no problem calling it a "shooting".[4] But the rules are different for powerful government officials.

It was once a maxim that the only way a reporter should look at government is "down". It is clear from the Kennedy School study that reporters and news editors have transformed the idea of "objective reporting" into functioning as stenographers for the government (though moreso when the government is run by Republicans, I suspect). The entire McChrystal Affair came about because McChrystal and his staffies ran into a reporter who was not playing the role of a government mouthpiece; there are plenty of reporters who view being a government mouthpiece as their job description (I'm looking at you, Laura Logan).[5]

Those reporters are falling down on the job. If all they are going to do is act as hagiographers to the powerful, then why do we even need the First Amendment? The press has been "dining out" for far too long on the efforts of a a few reporters for the Washington Post 37 years ago (the Watergate scandal). They need to stop admiring those reporters and start performing like them. or they do this country no good if they are as diligent and energetic as a stenographer from Pravda or TASS.

[1] I will presume that the same pattern applies to the practices of American corporations. It certainly applied to the RC Church until a critical mass of child-abuse cases broke through to the Boston Globe in the 1990s.
[2] The WSJ would have no problems with lamb-fucking only if a Republican administration was doing it.
[3] My comment in FN2 goes for Fox News, as well.
[4] You'd also be charged with some crime.
[5] Predictably, the reaction of the Pentagon was to crack down on reporters' access to top officials, not to have a serious talk with the brass about loyalty and deference to civilian authority. "Shooting the messenger" is still in vogue at Fort Fumble.