Jay Rosen
in new post echoes my views in not being so impresed with NYT finally admitting U.S. torture under Bush was indeed torture. Of course, Bill Keller was main culprit.
A term like “enhanced interrogation techniques” starts with zero currency, extreme bloodlessness and dubious origins.
A lot to overcome. In the years when the Times could not pick between
it and torture — 2002 to 2014, approximately — it seemed that its
editors and reporters were trying to re-clarify what had been made more
opaque by their own avoid-the-label policy decision. Thus the appearance
of do we have to spell it out for you? phrases like “brutal
interrogation methods,” meant to signal: this was really, really bad.
So bad you might think it amounts to…
Torture.
So for the fruits of avoiding a label the Times becomes a force for
fuzzing things up. Early in a public reckoning with acts of state
torture it decides it cannot call it that. Wrong side of your Orwell
there, mister editor. To report what happened you have to first commit
to calling things by their right names. Somewhere in a fog it helped to
create the Times lost sight of that.
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