SMRs and AMRs

Monday, April 14, 2014

Still Dancing Around The Word 'Torture'

The Huffington Post | by Jack Mirkinson
Posted: 04/14/2014 6:55 am EDT, Updated: 04/14/2014 7:59 am EDT

In recent weeks, the controversy surrounding the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogations during the Bush administration has been a major media story. From Sen. Dianne Feinstein's dramatic allegation that the CIA had spied on Senate aides as they prepared the report, to the leaking of most of the study's major findings, journalists have had no shortage of new material to sift through.

What's not new is the media's persistent dance around the word at the heart of the entire story: "torture."

Much has been made in the past decade or so about the news business' sudden conversion to euphemism when it came to describing techniques that had been previously universally recognized as torture. One study, for instance, found that major outlets abruptly stopped defining waterboarding as torture when the Bush administration began using it.

That tendency has not abated in recent years, and a look through recent newspaper and television coverage shows that many outlets are still hesitant to use "torture."

(More here.)

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