I'm not sure we'd be a fascist state without the beautiful, beautiful tubes. But the difference they've made is gigantic. Recall this story about Obama's decision to release the torture memos:

Mr. Obama wrestled with the decision into Wednesday night...

One key factor was the online publication last week by the New York Review of Books of an International Committee of the Red Cross account of detainee interrogations [penned by Mark Danner]. The president read the account and concluded "virtually everything that was in these memos was out in the public domain," said the senior official.

Without the internet, would Obama have cared the Red Cross report had appeared in an ultra-egghead publication with a circulation of 140,000? Would he even have known? Likely no to both. As Donald Johnson commented over at Obsidian Wings:

[T]he issue has come much further than I would have ever expected--if you'd asked me in 2001 if the U.S. would torture people in the war on terror I would have guessed we would, but I wouldn't have expected it to have ever reached the mainstream press, except maybe in scattered articles that wouldn't receive much notice.

Schwarz opines that, "in any case, there's no question the Internet will have a deeply chilling effect on the Cheneys of the future," imagining how "during every meeting in which they organize their criminal conspiracies, someone will say: 'What would this look like if it ends up online?'"

the number of people who were interrogated [by U.S. personnel] with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited. It was, of the thousands of people who were captured, it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used.

Instead, Cooper "actually set up Danner's response to Gergen's allegations with...facts and context":

Cooper: Do we know how many people died in U.S. custody? I've read reports of more than 100 or about 100 or maybe about a quarter of those were being investigated as actual homicides....

Danner: I think the rough figure is slightly more than 100 and 30, 29 or 30 were actually investigated as homicides.

But Jacobson also tells how this positivity actually illustrates the lacking state of corporate reportage overall:

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the "fair and balanced" referee.

Cooper's approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context--however absurd it is that this should be unique--is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

Listen to the recent edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)