A study (4/10) by Harvard students discovered that waterboarding was commonly called torture by major newspapers--right until the United States was found to be practicing it. The study looked at coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal.

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, "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."

The Harvard research has been widely discussed, which is certainly a good thing. Michael Calderone at Yahoo! has even managed to get the Times to respond, with a spokesperson for the paper saying that the Times "has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading." Whatever that means.

It's important to note for the record that the Times was called out on this in real time by FAIR. After one of the first major Times pieces addressing U.S. torture practices (5/13/04), we issued the Action Alert "'Harsh Methods' Aren't Torture, Says the New York Times," which pointed out:

The May 13 article, headlined "Harsh CIA Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogation," described "coercive interrogation methods" endorsed by the CIA and the Justice Department, including hooding, food and light deprivation, withholding medications, and "a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."

The article took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture: "Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees."

The Times actually responded, with public editor Daniel Okrent more or less in agreement with FAIR's position.  When he asked Times editor Craig Whitney about the failure to call torture "torture," he replied, "Now that you tell me people are reading things into our not using 'torture' in headlines, I'll pay closer attention."

FAIR also pointed out in its response to the Times that the failure to use the term torture was only part of the problem:

And FAIR's complaint was not simply that the Times did not use the word ''torture'' describe these interrogation methods (such as prolonged submersion), but that it quoted without rebuttal administration assertions that this was not torture, and seemed to echo these assertions in the reporters' own voice.

FAIR's magazine Extra! pointed out (5-6/08) that the term "waterboarding" seemed to come into play only in order to find an appropriate euphemism for what papers previously called "torture":

Indeed, a search of newspaper archives reveals that until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing. Meanwhile, the technique now known as "waterboarding"--in which the person being tortured is actually drowning, aspirating fluid to the point of being unable to breathe--had previously been called "water torture," or simply "torture," by the media.

In a Smirking Chimp piece (5/29/09) averring that "Everyone Should See Torturing Democracy"--the delayed documentary that "recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy" and "also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power"--PBS' Bill Moyers spells out the larger consequences of the fact that "in all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all":

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay into a "wedge issue," as noted on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.

According to the Times, "Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles."

Moyers gives us the upshot: "No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning." See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’: Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald; "Torturing Language: Definitions, Defenses and Dirty Work" (7-8/05) by Jacqueline Bacon.

Giving us a glimpse at "a large part of what was left on the editor's floor" from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org's Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of "the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word 'torture'":

I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction about calling certain practices "torture," but when the Bush administration began to use them, the word was suddenly off-limits, or only used in the most circumspect way ("a practice which critics of the administration call 'torture,'" for instance). A good example can be found in reporting about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, on which the Times played an essential role. The Khmer Rouge's waterboarding was "torture." But Bush Administration waterboarding is just an "enhanced interrogation technique." What’s behind the distinction? It's a blend of fear and hypocrisy.

To Horton, the reality is that "the Times policy enables torture"--here's his quote from a 1945 George Orwell letter on the matter:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.... I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

Horton says "the Times needs to make that moral effort,"calling their "failure to do so... alarming." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to 'Waterboarding': Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald