NYT public editor Clark Hoyt on word usage at the Gray Lady in relation to the uncomfortable topic of CIA torture of terror suspects.

From the NYT:

A LINGUISTIC shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.” (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to “torture.”)

The choice of a single word involved separate deliberations in New York and the Washington bureau and demonstrated the linguistic minefields that journalists navigate every day in the quest to describe the world accurately and fairly. In a polarized atmosphere in which many Americans believe the nation betrayed its most fundamental ideals in the name of fighting terror and others believe extreme measures were necessary to save lives, The Times is displeasing some who think “brutal” is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think “brutal” is too loaded. ...

“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said (Jill) Abramson (managing editor for news), who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word. From rare use now and then, it had gone to being the preferred choice. The result of that decision was this top headline in the printed paper of April 17: “Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation.”

That offended Daniel Pilon of Solon Springs, Wis., who said he agreed that the article described brutality but did not want The Times making that judgment for him. “Presenting the facts and letting the reader decide how to characterize what happened would be more in the spirit of objective journalism,” Pilon said. He said The Times should have dropped all adjectives in this case.

I asked Deborah Tannen, an author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, what she thought of a suggestion like Pilon’s. “The search for words that are not in any way evaluative is hopeless,” she told me. “All words have connotations.” ...

I have read the Justice Department memos — by turns clinical about inflicting pain and oddly solicitous about diaper rash. It is a disquieting experience. Reporters and editors need to leave moral and political judgments to editorial writers and readers, but they cannot be so detached that they appear oblivious to the implications of the facts.

The Times should strive to tell readers exactly what a given interrogation technique entails, as Shane does with waterboarding. But that is not always practical, as in a headline. When the paper needs a short description, the word brutal is accurate and appropriate, whether you think the acts were justified or not.

Addendum

I had an exchange on Twitter with @rrh (aka Rob Hyndman). Here's the text of a long response I sent:

I think it was useful for Hoyt to give some of the behind-the-scenes reasoning on how the Times chooses to word stories on highly controversial topics such as torture.

For a definition of torture, the start of any debate on semantics, I would go with the UN's OHCHR:

'For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.'


URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm

From that definition, virtually every 'harsh' or 'brutal' technique used by the Bush administration to interrogate suspected terrorists would constitute torture.

The Bushies knew that. They were trying to evade legal responsibility for those act of torture -- stress positions, sleep deprivation, water-boarding -- by defining them as not-torture.

Now, what to do about that as a journalist?

As an editorialist or columnist, you have the freedom to call bullshit.

As a reporter/news editor, you are much more constrained in how you can present things.

Show vs. tell works best in those cases -- where possible.

From Hoyt's column:

"(NYT nat. sec. reporter Scott) Shane said that, *when there is space* [emph. mine - BD], he tries to say exactly what waterboarding is: 'water poured over the mouth and nose to produce a feeling of suffocation.'"

But there's the rub: There's not always space.

When you condense and choose a noun or adjective on a loaded topic such as torture, someone's going to squawk.

You can't ignore that as a mainstream outlet, but neither should you live in fear of being honest versus not offending.

In the United States, the debate has been complicated by the politics of fear in the post-9/11 era. That reality probably affected news coverage, especially in the immediate years after the attack.

Fortunately, the climate appears to be shifting with the election of a new adminstration.

For the hell of it, here's a quote by Sen. Patrick Leahy to then-U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales about Maher Arar:

"It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon for human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured."

Or, one would hope, to conduct torture itself.