American Media Analysis: When is Torture Not Torture? (Hint: If the US is Involved....)

There has been a fuss over the last week over a study, pursued by students at Harvard University, that found:

"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....By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture....In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator."

Perhaps the most striking finding of the study was that the apparent catalyst for a shift in terminology was the revelation in early 2004 that the US military and private contractors were abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times was so unsettled by the criticism that it put out 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 [waterboarding] vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

Perhaps more provocatively, Keller indicated that the entire Harvard report was an unhelpful distraction: “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

The conclusion of the study:

The results of this study demonstrate that there was a sudden, significant, shift in major print media’s treatment of waterboarding at the beginning of the 21st century.

The media’s modern coverage of waterboarding did not begin in earnest until 2004, when the first stories about abuses at Abu Ghraib were released. After this point, articles most often used words such as “harsh” or “coercive” to describe waterboarding or simply gave the practice no treatment,

rather than labeling it torture as they had done for the previous seven decades.

There is also a significant discrepancy between the point of view offered by news articles and opinion pieces published in these papers. Opinion pieces were much more likely to characterize waterboarding as torture, suggesting that the private opinion of the editors and contributors did not align with the formal face the papers were presenting in their objective reporting.

Yet what caused this change in waterboarding’s treatment over time? Our data does not give any specific reason for this shift, but merely points to the existence of this change in syntax. A piece published by the public editor of The NY Times, Clark Hoyt, suggests that these choices were made deliberately by journalists and their editors, perhaps in an effort to remain neutral in the debate going on in the U.S. If the classification of waterboarding as torture is unclear, Hoyt suggests, then it is irresponsible for journalists to preempt this debate by labeling it as such.

The willingness of the newspapers to call the practice torture prior to 2004 seems to refute this claim. According to the data, for almost a century before 2004 there was consensus within the print media that waterboarding was torture. Yet once reports of the use of waterboarding by the CIA and other abuses by the U.S. surfaced, this consensus no longer held, despite the fact that the editors themselves seem to have still been convinced that waterboarding was torture, often labeling it as such in their editorials.

The classification of waterboarding is not unclear; the current debate cannot be so divorced from its historical roots. The status quo ante was that waterboarding is torture, in American law, international law,20 and in the newspapers’ own words. Had the papers not changed their coverage, it would still have been called torture. By straying from that established norm, the newspapers imply disagreement with it, despite their claims to the contrary. In the context of their decades‐long practice, the newspaper’s sudden equivocation on waterboarding can hardly be termed neutral.

Read the full report....