FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Washington Post’s poll most likely found that a small minority of Americans thought torture was justified after 9/11. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what the Post’s headline said.
National Public Radio, following the lead of the Washington Post, tries to avoid applying the word “torture” in its own voice when covering US torture.
The Senate report revealed shocking, even sickening treatment of the CIA’s captives. But ABC’s focus wasn’t on the US government abuses detailed in the report, but “the fear that its release could threaten American lives.”
The Senate’s report on CIA torture will be released in a matter of days, so why the need to give defenders of torture a platform to excuse themselves in advance?
Ten years later, the New York Times will call torture by its name. But does the paper’s reasoning make any sense?
New York Times columnist Tim Egan rages against college students who dare to have moral objections to the speakers their administrations chose to garnish their graduations with.
Time thinks Mary Jo White will be a good SEC chair because…she approves of torturing Guantanamo prisoners?
Russian troops are massing on the border with Ukraine, set to invade–so say corporate media, relying on unnamed intelligence sources. Plus straight-talking Chris Christie apologizes for straight talk, and the Washington Post’s scoop on CIA torture can’t say the word “torture.”
The Washington Post gets a big scoop about a Senate investigation of CIA torture. But they won’t call it torture.
60 Minutes’ interview with former CIA official Mike Morell was more like a press briefing than an interview with a powerful figure who has never been asked questions by a TV journalist.
The ABC Sunday show This Week had not one but two roundtables this weekend. Right-winger George Will appeared on both of them, because… well, he knows a lot of stuff.
The Obama administration has pursued an unprecedented campaign to prosecute whistleblowers. The fact that John Kirikaou is facing such punishment reinforces the sense that he should be viewed as such a whistleblower, someone who was trying to expose the CIA’s torture practices. But was that really his motivation?
Reporting on the news that President Barack Obama plans to nominate his terrorism adviser John Brennan to be head of the CIA, the New York Times writes that critics had been “claiming that…Brennan had supported, or at least had failed to stop, the use of interrogation techniques like waterboarding.”
That Brennan was a torture supporter is not a claim, though–it’s a matter of public record.
Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3: TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the […]
The answer might depend on which media outlet you rely on. I read the headline at Democracy Now! on Friday: “Justice Dept Drops 99 of 101 Cases Against CIA for Abuse and Torture” The New York Times, on the other hand, offered a different sort of emphasis: “U.S. Widens Inquiries Into 2 Jail Deaths”
If you feel like there hasn’t been enough attention paid to the fact that the democratic movements in the Arab world are undermining the power of U.S. elites to have troublemakers tortured and/or killed, rest assured that Newsweek‘s Christopher Dickey has you covered this week (6/12/11): Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia […]
To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out. Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) […]
USA Today weighs in today (5/10/11) on the argument that U.S. torture of detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was instrumental to tracking down Osama bin Laden. Like other outlets, the newspaper does a pretty lousy job of summarizing the evidence. Under the headline “Raid Renews Debate on Interrogations,” reporter Oren Dorell suggests this starting point: […]
The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush’s torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek fromYale professorStephen Carter (5/5/11): In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source […]
It’s bad enough that corporate media are having such an ill-informed debate about whether torturing some prisoners helped find Osama bin Laden. But considering whom the media invite to this debate, it’s probably not a surprise. Take yesterday’s Sunday shows (please!). On NBC‘s Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to […]
