Yesterday, we made note of a new study from the Kennedy School of Government that found that America's major newspapers, after decades of reliably and accurately referring to waterboarding as torture, suddenly stopped doing so around 2002, when America started waterboarding people like the dickens! Adam Serwer offered this comment on the matter:
As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a "controversial" matter, and in order to appear as though they weren't taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo's formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the "think" part of the equation so they could be "fair" to both groups.
NYT: We Stopped Calling Waterboarding 'Torture' Because The Bush Administration Didn't Approve