Media and Waterboarding
AMONG the news media’s many failings, none may be more pernicious than the persistent confusion between fairness and moral indifference.
Regular readers of Regarding Media may recall that the late Edward R. Murrow delivered about the best possible judgment on this confusion’s impact, when he decried a faux notion of journalistic fairness that is willing to concede “the word of Judas equal weight with that of Jesus.”
It’s the kind of he-said-she-said news coverage that would have reported the Sermon on the Mount this way: “On a mountainside in Galilee today, a popular young rabbi argued that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’ Other religious authorities, however, pointed out that if God did not want the rich to fleece the poor, he would not have allowed them to behave like sheep.”
This week, Americans were treated to their latest rehearsal of this phony fairness in the coverage of U.S. Atty. Gen.-designate Michael B. Mukasey’s attempts to win Senate confirmation. President George W. Bush hopes to replace the haplessly sycophantic Alberto Gonzales with the former federal judge from New York, but the nomination is in trouble because Mukasey refuses to tell members of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee whether he believes waterboarding is torture and, therefore, illegal.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are insistent that any discussion of the issue is precluded by the exigencies of national security and the war on terror. Cut to the core of their real argument, however, and it boils down to the naked assertion that whatever the president says is legal is legal — including torture, which isn’t torture, if the president says it isn’t.
As the Washington Post, which has done more than any other news outlet to bring to light this administration’s construction of a secret gulag where torture is routine, reported this week: “Waterboarding generally involves…
Legume Sam:
Whenever I teach media interpretation, I have my students read Chapter 10 of Mark Pedelty’s book War Stories, in which the American journalistic ideology of “objectivity” is exposed.
The key elements of an “objective” news story are these: make a fetish out of fact, report “both sides” of the story without distinction as to who is right and who is wrong, frame the story as a “sheriffs versus outlaws” parable in the manner of an Old West movie, always grant credence to the State Department and go wherever they tell you to go, and report statistics in passive mode “200,000 people died” as opposed to “X killed 200,000 people” in order to allow “important” sources to appear blameless.
Too bad War Stories is out of print; you’ll probably have to look it up in your local college library.
Oh yeah, lest I forget: War Stories was an ethnography of journalists covering the war in El Salvador in the 1980s. (Yeah, instead of writing an ethnography of the war, Pedelty used the journalists covering the war as his ethnographic subjects. What a concept, eh?) The climax of the book’s narrative has to do with a NYT journalist named Ray Bonner who exposed the El Mozote massacre and who was subsequently pilloried in the mainstream press and fired from the NYT staff.
5 November 2007, 7:37 pmDeAnander:
speaking as a cranky old feminist, I find all this jesuitical parsing of what is and what is not torture very familiar: it echoes strongly all those desperate masculine explanations of how “it isn’t really rape when…”
in each case it seems to me a fundamental displacement of focus is made, onto the victim rather than the perp. it isn’t really torture if the person doesn’t die, or isn’t crippled, or isn’t permanently disfigured, etc. — the focus being on some “objective” assessment of the victim’s condition or behaviour. it isn’t rape unless she has defensive wounds, etc. this displaces our attention from the perp, and what the perp is doing, and what defines his behaviour.
but seems to me what really defines rape, or torture (and they are not unrelated) is the behaviour of the perp. if you are trying to extort sexual service out of another person without regard for her/his own wishes in the matter, then that predatory and instrumental attitude to another human being is the essence of rape. there may be a spectrum of severity from groping to gangrape, from coercion and nagging to gun-to-the-head, but the perp has a rapist (adjectival use here as in racist or capitalist) attitude, and the programme that he (usually he) is trying to carry out is essentially a rape. it might be less than wholly successful, but the aim is to force or compel another person to service him sexually.
and what really defines torture is bending another person (who is wholly in your power) to your will by use of prolonged pain and terror. or to look at it another way, abusing a position of power over another person to inflict pain on them for purposes of your own, to break their will and destroy their self respect. a man who viciously beats his child until the child repeats some form of words, or finishes everything on its plate, is a torturer. the schoolyard bully who twisted your arm until you cried Uncle and gave him your lunch money was a torturer, albeit an amateur. a breaker of humans, like a breaker of horses: someone who gets his jollies — or his paycheque — by compelling others to obedience by means of pain. (as opposed to a blackmailer or extortionist who uses slightly more subtle means of threat).
given that rape is not only humiliating but also physically painful for the victim, it’s not surprising that rape is used as a form of torture — to break the spirit and bend the will, whether of girls being “seasoned” into prostitution or prisoners being forced to make confessions which may bear very little relationship to reality…
in every case the object is to bend the will and break the spirit, and if we were less concerned with taxonomies of gender and power relations between men (obligatory nod to Levi-Strauss), we might stand back and call this activity “domineering” or “soul-bashing” or Conquista, and perceive it as a unified pattern spanning many modes of expression. we might even see that the unnecessary torture of animals in science and industry is yet another expression of the meme of Conquest, or that the devastation of Appalachia gives some twisted satisfaction to the boys who get to blow the tops off of mountains.
5 November 2007, 8:35 pmStan:
And with that, I’ll take the liberty to again plug Audrey’s excellent audiovisual rendition of the conquest meme.
See this, and pass it along to others. I used it with a women’s studies class at Winthrop University, and it generated a very good discussion among students.
And I’ll be redundant here in pointing out that the favored gambit of capitalists, politicians, rapists, abusive husbands, etc etc… is to transfer victim-status from the oppressed to their privileged selves.
6 November 2007, 6:56 am