Friday, July 02, 2010
America’s major daily newspapers were happy to call waterboarding torture last decade if the interrogation technique was used by a country other than the United States. But the newspapers “almost never” referred to the method of simulated drowning as torture if the story was about the Bush administration’s use of it, according to a research paper from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
A review of stories published by The New York Times found the newspaper called waterboarding torture only 1.4% of the time. The Los Angeles Times was only slightly higher at 4.8%. The Wall Street Journal came in at 1.6%, and USA Today never called it torture.
But if waterboarding was used by another country, The New York Times called it torture in 85.8% of its stories, and the Los Angeles Times in 91.3%.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media (by Harvard students, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University) (pdf)
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