You've probably heard about the new study from Joan Shorenstein Center finding that until 2002, waterboarding was called torture [pdf] across the board, but that changed starting in about 2002.
One of the newspapers the study focused on was the New York Times.
News articles that considered other countries or individuals committing waterboarding were far more likely to classify waterboarding as torture than articles that dealt with the U.S. using waterboarding.
In the NY Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the U.S. using waterboarding against an individual called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. Yet when the U.S. was the perpetrator, only 7.69% (16 of 208) articles said or implied that waterboarding was torture. Just 0.8% of the articles (1 of 133) dealing with the War on Terror where the U.S. was the perpetrator said or implied that waterboarding was torture.
A Times spokesman gave Michael Calderone this incredible justification
"As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture," a Times spokesman said in a statement.
"When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture."
So a rose is a rose until someone calls it a dandelion, for the purposes of a political point. The Gray Lady only prints what's fit not to "take sides" over in a political dispute, creating, as Calderone puts it, "a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives." And a factual contradiction between reality and Bush administration spin.
This is a very telling quote, because it shows just how easy it is to manipulate newspapers into exactly what they're being constantly manipulated into--taking political sides by appearing not to take political sides. All you have to do to dispute a known physical or legal fact is to... dispute it. If you want to say that oil helps pelicans grow, you can just say it; the mere act of saying it will make it "disputed," rendering the New York Times powerless to say flatly whether it is true or not. If it's policy to not call a lie a lie in the name of "balance," then the most basic function of that newspaper goes out the window.
New media has been calling this aspect of the traditional media out for as long as we've existed, but seeing it there in black and white, and on the issue of torture, is particularly jarring. It's so craven of the Times to use this balance argument specifically to defend the practice of no longer calling waterboarding "torture" when it was at no prior time in the last hundred years a point of dispute.
It's not newspapers that are dying. It's the entire point of newspapers' existence, which is to be a source of information. Apparently now being a source of information is specifically frowned upon if that information will make one party or another feel bad, all in the name of neutrality. It's neutrality without responsibility, the epitome of "he said, she said" journalism. And it's not neutral in a case such as this one, because waterboarding is torture and because torture is illegal.
There aren't a lot of black and white issues in our political discourse, but this one is. Torture is torture. Waterboarding is torture, no matter who conducts it. Our media--just like our government--does us no favors by ignoring that ugly truth.