A Tortured Explanation

Double G latches on to a new Harvard study that strongly suggests the Village media redefined torture away from waterboarding once it became clear we were doing it to terror suspects.

As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the U.S. Government (which is why it's the "establishment media"): the U.S. itself long condemned waterboarding as "torture" and even prosecuted it as such, only to suddenly turn around and declare it not to be so once it began using the tactic.  That's exactly when there occurred, as the study puts it, "a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboading."  As the U.S. Government goes, so goes our establishment media.

None of this is a surprise, of course.  I and others many times have anecdotally documented that the U.S. media completely changes how it talks about something (or how often) based on who is doing it ("torture" when the Bad Countries do it but some soothing euphemism when the U.S. does it; continuous focus when something bad is done to Americans but a virtual news blackout when done by the U.S., etc.).  Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate:  media outlets such as the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word "torture" for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government officials announced it should not be called "torture."

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task:  once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term.  That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary. 

And thus torture became just waterboarding which became "enhanced interrogation techniques" instead because the Bushies said so, and the Village followed right along.  It made it even easier for Obama and Eric Holder to say "Hey let's not look backwards at this" and swept the whole thing under the rug, despite the fact we tortured suspects.

That would not have been possible without a compliant media, and this study more or less proves it.