The Liberal Media is at it again!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/1/10 at 5:10pm

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls. “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.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.
Study: Newspapers stopped describing waterboarding as 'torture' during Bush years

[Unknown User]

Posted: 7/2/10 at 10:52am

George Orwell smiles.

It's also interesting to see how repeated insistence can make a "controversy" over a word. If you say it often enough ("Water boarding is not torture") and have a complicit media to echo it often enough, you can make day night.

[madbrian]

Posted: 7/2/10 at 11:24am

"It's also interesting to see how repeated insistence can make a "controversy" over a word. If you say it often enough ("Water boarding is not torture") and have a complicit media to echo it often enough, you can make day night."

The term 'liberal media' is an example of that. It just doesn't exist.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/2/10 at 11:29am

Liberal Media
Activist Judges
Crammed Down Our Throats


List try to list all the right wing mini-memes!

[madbrian]

Posted: 7/2/10 at 11:42am

Well, there are 'activist judges', but they're the conservatives on the SCOTUS.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/2/10 at 12:17pm

Oh, right, but you when the right wing echo chamber clambers on about activist judges they mean judges that don't toe the line of the Right.