Reporters Struggling with Torture Stories

Norman Solomon
Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700
Opinion

For a long time, Americans have been seeing, hearing and reading news stories about torture by some foreign governments. The coverage has often been matter-of-fact, reporting on torture as something abhorrent.

Those news accounts have tended to be much more plentiful and more emphatic when the governments committing the crime of torture have been at loggerheads with Washington. But when the offending regime has been closely allied with the U.S. government (such as Turkey or Chile, for example, two or three decades ago), the coverage has tended to be more sparse and more vague.

Now, the U.S. news media are navigating some different terrain. The documentation is clear: The U.S. government has been torturing people — recently. Justice Department memos, released in mid-April, make that clear. Now what?
Updated: Fri Apr 24, 2009

For a long time, Americans have been seeing, hearing and reading news stories about torture by some foreign governments. The coverage has often been matter-of-fact, reporting on torture as something abhorrent.

Those news accounts have tended to be much more plentiful and more emphatic when the governments committing the crime of torture have been at loggerheads with Washington. But when the offending regime has been closely allied with the U.S. government (such as Turkey or Chile, for example, two or three decades ago), the coverage has tended to be more sparse and more vague.

Now, the U.S. news media are navigating some different terrain. The documentation is clear: The U.S. government has been torturing people — recently. Justice Department memos, released in mid-April, make that clear. Now what?

For the news media, which have been using euphemisms like "harsh interrogation techniques," the current situation is a bit of a sea change.

Is it now "objective" to say that torture was torture? You can sense the discomfort in newsrooms. In the reportorial narrative, a lot of stories are still using adjectives like "harsh," or kicking the descriptor up a notch to "brutal."

In contrast to last year or the year before, the president of the United States is no longer denying that the U.S. government has engaged in torture. In fact, to his credit, Barack Obama is acknowledging that torture happened — and he's condemning it.

This dramatic shift in the presidential stance has made it easy for some journalists to simply describe what happened under the Bush administration as interrogation techniques that the current president has condemned as torture.

But that begs the question of whether journalists must wait for high government officials in Washington to declare that torture is torture before the journalists themselves are willing to do so — without attribution.

Can a journalist be "objective" and call a spade a spade? Or is it necessary to hold back until a top U.S. government authority has stated what should be obvious?

Such questions circle around a misconception that has long bedeviled discussions about what it means to be a professional journalist. The myth is that good reporters don't make judgments — that they tell us what judgments have been provided by people in authority.

But that's stenography, not authentic journalism.

In fact, if you strip away the rationales, you're apt to uncover a rather ugly reality: The news media tend to operate with a high degree of what might be called "pack journalism." The conformity is not complete, but it is pervasive. And the exceptions are, well, exceptional.

Yes, journalists would like to be ahead of the curve. But, as countless firings and dead-endings of careers have shown, being too far ahead of a curve can put the kibosh on a promising journalistic career. Often, inaccuracy is not really the issue; failure to conform is.

Assuming the information is accurate and the judgments are reasonably sound, the difference between being a little ahead of the dominant curve and being out on a hazardous limb is the difference between run-with-the-herd media professionalism or, in contrast, venturing out with a figurative lantern in a fearless quest for truth.

A new administration's decision to release memos has pushed some media outlets over the edge. They're now willing to call torture what it is rather than do "newsroom dancing" with twirls and spins of euphemisms.

But the U.S. government's direct role in torture was evident several years ago, based on solid evidence. Too bad it has taken so many news organizations so long to do the difficult and candid reporting that the public deserves in a democracy.

Norman Solomon is the author of the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been made into a documentary film. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.