{"id":27384,"date":"2010-09-14T10:12:35","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T15:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=27384"},"modified":"2013-12-05T03:51:59","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:51:59","slug":"media-treatment-of-waterboarding-is-it-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/09\/14\/media-treatment-of-waterboarding-is-it-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Treatment of Waterboarding: Is it Torture?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an analysis of the language newspapers used to describe waterboarding, four Harvard students — Neal Desai, Andre Pineda, Majken Runquist, and Mark Fusunyan — discovered that the use of the word torture significantly declined after the Bush administration began contesting its definition as such (read the full paper here<\/a>).\u00a0 The figures below, for the New York and the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, shows that in the last decade the newspapers switched from calling it “torture,” to using descriptors (they call it “softer treatment” and include adjectives like “harsh,” “controversial,” or “aggressive”), or simply calling it waterboarding (“no treatment”).<\/p>\n

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According to BoingBoing<\/a>, the executive editor of the New York Times<\/em>, Bill Keller, argues that to use the term “torture” would be to take sides.\u00a0 The authors of the study argue that the reverse is true, especially given that the change coincided with the Bush administration’s dismissal of waterboarding’s definition as torture.\u00a0 They conclude:<\/p>\n

The status quo ante was that waterboarding is torture, in American law, international law, and in the newspapers\u2019 own words.\u00a0 Had the papers not changed their coverage, it would still have been called torture.\u00a0 By straying from that established norm, the newspapers imply disagreement with it, despite their claims to the contrary.\u00a0 In the context of their decades\u2010long practice, the newspaper\u2019s sudden equivocation on waterboarding can hardly be termed neutral.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an analysis of the language newspapers used to describe waterboarding, four Harvard students — Neal Desai, Andre Pineda, Majken Runquist, and Mark Fusunyan — discovered that the use of the word torture significantly declined after the Bush administration began contesting its definition as such (read the full paper here).\u00a0 The figures below, for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,253,129,85,133,309],"class_list":["post-27384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-violence","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27384"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59762,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27384\/revisions\/59762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}