NPR censored an essay they asked Barry Eisler to contribute.  The topic was “favorite thrillers” and Eisler had chosen 1984 by George Orwell. It’s telling which elements of the essay NPR found so objectionable they needed to censor them.

NPR Editor, Miriam Krule, says that she edited parts of the essay because they were “too political.” In his blog post, Barry includes the paragraphs NPR found objectionable:

As prescient as Orwell was about events, though, I believe his purpose wasn’t so much to forecast the future, which might take many forms, as it was to describe human nature, which is immutable. So no, we don’t have quite the kind of organized Two Minutes’ Hate depicted in the novel, but it’s impossible to recall the populace turning on our NATO ally France before our misadventure in Iraq, or more recently on our NATO ally Turkey over the Gaza flotilla incident, and not remember the scene in the book where a crowd instantly and obediently redirects its hostility from Eurasia to Eastasia. It’s impossible to watch pundits like Tom Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol—who were wrong about everything in Iraq—still being taken seriously as this time they agitate for war with Iran, and not imagine the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Truth sending the historical record down the memory hole for incineration. And it’s impossible to look at people who can’t see the obvious parallels I just described and not see Party members vigorously practicing their doublethink, by which they have “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Most of all, we have the language—the “newspeak”—Orwell predicted. No, there’s no Ministry of Truth, but such an institution would anyway seem superfluous given that The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all now refuse to use the word “torture” to describe waterboarding, beatings, and sleep deprivation of prisoners, adopting instead the government-approved phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” (as Chris Hayes of The Nation has observed, this is like calling rape “unilateral physical intimacy”). Even NPR, alas, has banned “torture” from its reporting. Escalation in Iraq is a “surge,” prisoners are “detainees,” assassinations are “targeted killings,” and the 60,000 barrel-a-day ongoing undersea oil eruption is nothing but a “spill” or “leak.” As bad as it is, imagine how much worse it might be if Orwell hadn’t warned against it.

It seems obvious to comment on the irony of NPR censoring an essay about 1984 and parallels to today’s establishment media censoring coverage of the United States government. Beyond ironic, it’s sad.

Recommended Reading

You can read Barry Eisler’s post (“Ministry of Truth”) both on the Barry Eisler blog and on Fire Dog Lake, where there is a healthy comment thread going.

You may also want to read about Barry Eisler’s background, which includes three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

For more background information on NPR’s censorship, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s post about NPR banning the use of the word “torture” to describe…torture.

Glenn Greenwald writes today about a disturbing interaction he had with the Washington Post, trying to follow up on their coverage of the WikiLeaks / Bradley Manning case.

In its coverage of the case, the Washington Post quoted from chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, in which Manning allegedly confessed that he leaked video footage of American forces killing a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency.

Greenwald inquired with Ellen Nakashima, the journalist who bylined the stories for the Post, whether the Post has full chat logs and if so, whether they considered publishing them.

Instead of a reply for Nakashima, Glenn received this reply from Kris Coratti, “Director of Communications” for the Post:

Hi Glenn, I was passed along your e-mail. Thank you for your question — we don’t discuss the details of our newsgathering.

Thank you again,

Kris Coratti

Well, that’s odd.

The media is usually the one clamoring for transparency, but here’s a case where they are anything but transparent. To me, it doesn’t sound like Glenn is demanding the full chat logs. However, if there is a reason why they can’t be released, he would like to know what that reason is. (I would too).

It’s an important matter. Now that Private Bradley Manning has been charged and is facing a military trial, the public would like to evaluate whether there was foul play in securing Manning’s alleged confession. Since the alleged confession was given in the alleged chat logs, having a full transcript of the logs, rather than the segments cherry picked by the Post, would be helpful.

Why would the Post want to hide facts, especially to the point of not even offering an explanation as to why they are keeping the facts secret?

Isn’t their role as a newspaper supposed to be digging for facts and knowledge on behalf of their readers?

Perhaps corporate media, in particular and seemingly especially institutions like the NY Times and the Washington Post, regard facts as quite secondary to their mission.

In an upcoming blog post, I’m going to talk about an old court case where the Washington Post actually fought for the right to make stuff up in news stories.  Sounds ridiculous. Sounds like hyperbole. I wish it was.

Recommended Reading

For an excellent piece on the Wiki Leaks / Bradley Manning case, I recommend this video at Democracy Now. It includes commentary by Glenn Greenwald and also Daniel Ellsberg.

I also recommend Glenn Greenwald’s post on his run in with the Washington Post as well as his in depth coverage of the Manning case.

And for reference, here is the Washington Post article in question.

In 2004, the NY Times changed how it refers to water boarding in news stories. As the graph above shows, for nearly 70 years, the Times referred to water boarding as torture and then all of a sudden, stopped doing so.

The graph and insight are from an April 2010 study by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

What more did this study find and what does it all mean?

The Kennedy School’s study, Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media, examined how the four most widely circulated US newspapers characterized water boarding pre and post 9/11.

Which newspapers were studied?

The study included the four US newspapers with the highest circulation:

• USA Today
• Wall Street Journal
• New York Times
• Los Angeles Times

What time period was studied?

• 1881 – 2008

Where did the data come from?

The Harvard researches used a combination of the following sources to compile data:

• Proquest Historical Newspapers Database
• LexisNexis
• Archives at nytimes.com

What was the methodology used?

• The above sources were searched for the term “water boarding” and synonyms, e.g. “water cure,” “mock drowning,” etc.
• Unrelated items were eliminated, e.g. stories about municipal water boards
• Stories were classified were coded to different categories based upon review:
  • torture
  • implying it’s torture
  • others calling it torture
  • negative treatment
  • softer treatment
  • no treatment
  • misc

What were the findings?

• New York Times:
  • 1901 – 1925: referred to water boarding as torture 12% of the time
  • 1931 – 1999: referred to water boarding as torture 85% of the time
  • 2001 – 2008: referred to water boarding 1.4% of the time
    • in 2 out of 143 articles
• LA Times:
  • 1902 – 1917: 3%
  • 1918 – 1934: term not mentioned
  • 1935 – 2001: 96%
  • 2002 – 2005: term not mentioned
  • 2006 – 2008: 5%
    • in 3 out of 63 articles
• USA Today:
  • doesn’t have a long history of reporting on water boarding
  • first mention is 2004
  • 2004 – 2008: 0%
    • in 0 out of 18 articles
      
• Wall Street Journal
  • only 2 mentions of water boarding prior to 2005
    • one referred to it as torture, the other didn’t
  • 2005 – 2008: 1.6%
    • 1 out of 63 articles

The above findings were for news stories.  The Kennedy School Study also looked at editorials and op-ed pieces.  Here, different results were found.  For example, NY Times opinion pieces referred to water boarding as torture roughly 50% of the time both before and after 2002.

The country responsible for water boarding heavily influences how it was characterized in news coverage:

In the NY Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the U.S. using waterboarding against an individual called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. Yet when the U.S. was the perpetrator, only 7.69% (16 of 208) articles said or implied that waterboarding was torture.

Similar results were found for the LA Times.

What is the historical basis for considering water boarding torture?

The study references American law as historically considering water boarding to be torture and provides these examples:

For example, Court Martial of Major Edwin F. Glenn, Samar, P.I., April 1902 (reprinted in Leon Friedman, THE LAW OF WAR: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY, 814 (1972));

Case against Masatoshi Sawamura (U.S. Military Commission, Yokohama, 14?29 April, 1947) (Sawamura was convicted of violations of the laws and customs of war for, inter alia, water torture of American prisoners of war, and was sentenced to 30 years hard labor);

United States of America v. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata, and Takeo Kita (U.S. Military Commission, Yokohama, 1 28 May, 1947.

NARA Records, NND 735027 RG 153, Entry 143 Box 1025); Evan Wallach, Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts, 45 COLUM. J. TRANSNAT’L L. 468 (2007).

What does all this mean?

Growing up, it was ingrained in me that newspapers are arbiters of fact. While editorials and op-eds can naturally express opinions, journalistic ethics requires news stories to omit opinion and stick to facts.

The Kennedy School study implies that the US media rejects these rules.  It shines a spotlight on how American newspapers use news stories to reflect the opinions and interests of their owners.

What are those opinions and interests and why would the owners at the Times and the other papers studied want to purposely misrepresent facts? It’s hard to say. Most likely, it’s simply that these papers and their owners are part of our country’s power structure, and they consider accusing the US government of torture to be subversive of that power structure. To them, facts are secondary, to the extent that they matter at all.

This conclusion – that major American news sources, including and perhaps especially the NY Times, consider facts irrelevant – is born out by a variety of observations, and it’s to those observations that this blog is dedicated.

Sometimes misrepresentations have dangerous consequences. The title of this post, “Is the NY Times complicit in torture?” was chosen to be controversial and thought provoking, but it’s also a serious question.  If the Times accurately covered the US government’s use of torture, would an accurately informed public be outraged? Would they be outraged enough to demand the perpetrators be brought to justice and the practice stopped? I hope so, but sadly, they weren’t given that chance.

Recommended Reading

For excellent coverage of this topic, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s post on the torture study.  Glenn has also previously documented NPR’s (sadly) similar policy forbidding the use of the word torture when describing (the US government’s) use of water boarding.