Study: Newspapers stopped describing waterboarding as 'torture' during Bush years

Is waterboarding torture? If you picked up a major U.S. newspaper before 2004, the answer would likely be yes, according to a new Harvard University study.

But in the post-9/11 world, when the practice of immobilizing and virtually drowning detainees became a politically charged issue, that straightforward definition grew murky. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, examined coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and found a noticeable shift in language concerning 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 study noted. But the study found that things changed in the years when “war on terror” became part of the American lexicon.

The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times “called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles." That’s 1.4 percent of the time.

The study also noted a disparity in how newspapers defined waterboarding when the United States employed the practice versus its use by other nations — in the latter instance, newspapers more readily called the practice torture.

But the New York Times doesn’t completely buy the study’s conclusions. A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading.”

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “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. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, a self-described conservative who became a prominent critic of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies, called attention to the Harvard findings Wednesday. (Even though the study was published in May, it only began getting serious attention from online media sources yesterday. A link to the study bounced around Twittter and several prominent liberal bloggers, including Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, American Prospect’s Adam Serwer and FireDogLake’s Marcy Wheeler, all weighed in).

Yahoo! News reached out to Sullivan for his response to the Times statement, and not surprisingly, he didn’t agree with the paper’s reasoning. “So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says,” Sullivan said over email. “In any dispute, their view is not: What is true? But: How can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further.”

Sullivan criticized the Times for “ceding the meaning of words to others, rather than actually deciding for itself how to call torture torture.” Referencing George Orwell's famous term for press manipulation under totalitarianism, Sullivan added that in changing a word “as not to offend,” the Times “knowingly printed newspeak in their paper — not because they believed in it, but because someone else might.”

In Sullivan’s opinion, historians will look back at the Times’ role in legitimizing torture by “euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it.” Those responsible for the decision, he said, “should resign.”

— Michael Calderone is the media reporter for Yahoo! News.

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