From the Spring, 2009 issue of Wilder Voice, v.4, i.7
Glenn Greenwald has a scathing response to the NPR Ombudsman's equivocating explanation for their decision to replace the word torture with the euphemism, harsh interrogation techniques.
I must say that I sympathize, to a degree, with NPR's position. As Ombudsman Alicia Shepard writes:
It's a no-win case for journalists. If journalists use the words "harsh interrogation techniques," they can be seen as siding with the White House and the language that some U.S. officials, particularly in the Bush administration, prefer. If journalists use the word "torture," then they can be accused of siding with those who are particularly and visibly still angry at the previous administration.
I have no doubt that it must be uncomfortable for journalists to say piss people off--especially as no matter what they do, they will be accused of partiality.
Nevertheless, they need to grow a pair and call a spade a spade. After all, by virtually any principled standard, our government engaged in torture. After all, as Greenwald notes, the same "harsh techniques" we used have been called torture by both major news networks and the US Government. So it is a redefinition of the word torture to claim that, somehow, what we have done falls into a gray area.
Once again, our media is mistaking perception for reality, and engaging in the basest sort of semantic relativism. It's hard not to enjoy the irony that those who benefit from this relativism--the Right--are the same who claim that one of the biggest problems with our culture is the loss of a belief in some sort of objective, non-socially constructed truth.
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