Awaz Apni

On this . Chris Hayes was on MSNBC the other day discussing torture. Melanie Breault has a good summary at The Nation: "Imagine for a moment our country elected a bunch of people who thought rape should be legal…" This is what Nation Washington editor Christopher Hayes asks us as guest host of The Ed Show. He says that the pro-rape people know that just coming out and promoting rape would not be accepted by the general populous. So instead, they get everyone to call it "unilateral, physical intimacy." But Hayes knows, "this is not a neutral phrase, this is propaganda." Hayes uses the same argument for the pro-torture euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques." He refers to a Harvard University study that compares how the media described the practice of waterboarding before the Bush administration and after. From the 1930s to the early 2000s, the New York Times called or characterized waterboarding as torture, 82 percent of the time. From 200...

Found this at Huffingtonpost : If you've ever had the funny feeling that the media has largely bent over backwards to normalize and legitimize the practice of waterboarding once the United States started doing it, guess what? You've had good reason! It's all laid out in a new study from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government , highlighted today by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon . Here's the abstract from the Harvard Study: The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s 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 c...

In torture news today, there's a study out demonstrating what those following the issue already knew: that editors decided not to use the word "torture" for Bush-era torture policy, despite using that word in the past when other nations used torture.  In Andrew Sullivan's words, they failed to tell "the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English." I am generally sympathetic to Adam Serwer's speculation about the causes for this failure , which center on the media's institutional norm of  even-handedness rather than on, say, the media's institutional norm of cravenness.  But (and I think Serwer agrees): that's an explanation, not an excuse.  I don't have much to add here.  This was a clear, serious, disastrous failure by the New York Times and other newspapers and broadcasters.  I believe the Times has a new "public editor;" it seems to me that this issue is by for the most important item for that agenda....

In torture news today, there's a study out demonstrating what those following the issue already knew: that editors decided not to use the word "torture" for Bush-era torture policy, despite using that word in the past when other nations used torture.  In Andrew Sullivan's words, they failed to tell "the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English." I am generally sympathetic to Adam Serwer's speculation about the causes for this failure , which center on the media's institutional norm of  even-handedness rather than on, say, the media's institutional norm of cravenness.  But (and I think Serwer agrees): that's an explanation, not an excuse.  I don't have much to add here.  This was a clear, serious, disastrous failure by the New York Times and other newspapers and broadcasters.  I believe the Times has a new "public editor;" it seems to me that this issue is by for the most important item for that agenda....