Bill Keller of the New York Times weasel-words around the Kennedy School study confirming that the Times and other mass-circulation dailies did not use the word “torture” to describe waterboarding when it became apparent that the Bush administration practiced it.

This of course does not add anything to what we already know, but it is a remarkably candid manifestation of the editorial cowardice of the mainstream media when confronting the power it is supposed to challenge.  The issue of waterboarding was never, as Keller puts it, a “political dispute” — it was and is a matter of law, and the law has never been ambiguous.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

In an e-mail message on Thursday, Mr. Keller said that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, “including senior officials of the Bush administration,” insisted that it did not constitute torture.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and human rights advocates as a form of torture. Nobody reading The Times’ coverage could be ignorant of the extent of the practice (much of that from information we broke) or mistake it for something benign (we usually use the word ‘brutal.’)”

Brian Barrett handles some fake and harmless homemade weapons. He saw his “toys” displayed prominently at a press conference Tuesday where police claimed the ends were wrapped and ready to be doused with gas. (VERONICA HENRI/Toronto Sun)

As you may have heard, Toronto police on Tuesday displayed a cache of “terrorist” weapons seized during the G20 summit.  Turns out that some of the more prominently featured weapons were in fact toys seized in an arbitrary search and seizure the day before the summit began.

Read the whole story here.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International joins the growing ranks of civil liberties advocates calling for an inquiry, and Amy Miller describes being taunted with threats of rape while in detention (video after the jump).

Continue reading →

On the importance of children’s literature and early education Frye had this to say in 1980 when he gave the Leland B. Jacobs lecture (entitled ‘Criticism as Education’) at the School of Library Service, Columbia University:

In a book published over twenty years ago, I wrote that literature is not a coherent subject at all unless its elementary principles could be explained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old. Since then, Buckminster Fuller has remarked that unless a first principle can be grasped by a six-year-old, it is not really a first principle, and perhaps his statement is more nearly right than mine. My estimate of the age at which a person can grasp the elementary principles of literature has been steadily going down over the last twenty years. So I am genuinely honored to be able to pay tribute to an educator who has always insisted on the central importance of childrens’ literature.

Glenna Sloan’s The Child as Critic is a wonderful expansion of this idea.

So it’s appropriate, for this and other reasons, that Frye’s name be given to the new K to 8 school in Moncton.

Some Harvard students have produced a comprehensive study to show that, pre-9/11,  the New York and the Los Angeles Times and other high-circulation dailies unequivocally referred to waterboarding as torture.  Once the story of the Bush administration waterboarding detainees broke in 2004, however, not so much:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

Frye cites Orwell on the social degradation of language in “The Primary Necessities of Existence”:

Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure.  By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together.  Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction.  This is the kind of thing George Orwell was talking about, not just in 1984, but in all his work on language.  The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.  The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking.  It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness. (CW 12, 747)