More "vivid writing" from NPR ombudsman

(Sorry for the extended lapse between posts -- I was completely off the grid for a few days and I'm still scrambling to catch up with everything I missed.)

So -- NPR Ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard continues on her merry way defending NPR's practice of refusing to call torture "torture." Glenn Greenwald (with whom Shepard has refused to have an interview) continues to be all over this, and Shepard's stance has been widely criticized. She's now done a couple of radio interviews with NPR affiliates and will do another on Talk of the Nation today; she also has up a new posting on the NPR website assuring readers/listeners that "Your Voices Have Been Heard."

This post is so outrageous to anyone who cares about (a) the integrity of the English language or (b) the integrity of journalism that I don't even know where to begin. Let's start here:

"I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things."

To set aside for a moment the absurdity of the idea that calling clear acts of torture by their proper name is to "take sides,"... um, she believes it is not the role of journalists to "characterize things"? Really? What on earth are they supposed to do instead? What would practicing journalism even mean if it were forbidden to "characterize things"? And anyway, terms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" are also a "characterization" of "things" -- albeit a euphemistic mischaracterization.

Shepard goes on to insist that

"instead of using loaded language -- and the word "torture" is loaded -- I advocate that NPR describe interrogation techniques in detail."

Okay, now I happen to agree that the word "torture" is loaded -- but that is because the act of torture is loaded, and loathsome. It is indeed "loaded" to call torture by its proper name because it requires owning up, head-on, to the sorts of abuses Americans have been responsible for. Calling it something else may duck out of that act of acknowledgement and responsibility-taking, but it does not make the truth go away, any more than it would make the historical fact of slavery in America go away if NPR chose to avoid the "loaded" word "slavery" and refer to the practice as "enhanced labor ownership techniques." (Later in the piece Shepard continues to insist, as she did in her last piece, that "torture" is a "coded" term for acts of torture. It's hard to even coherently criticize the logic here -- like trying to explain why someone is wrong when they claim that black is white. "Torture" is not a coded term for torture. It is its proper name.)

Shepard's main argument for continuing to insist that there's some sort of "debate" about what torture "is" seems to come in this section:

"But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security. One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public."

By "responsible people" here, I can only assume she means "the very people responsible for instituting policies that systematized torture."

Seriously -- can she not even manage to cite anyone here who was not an architect of the torture regime as the other "side" in this debate? And why are they due some respect for their obviously self-serving and nakedly reality-contradicting "views"? What is respectable about them? What new insight about the nature of the concept of "torture" have Dick Cheney & co. arrived at, thus upending hundreds of years of historical precedent for what constitutes "torture," that demands we treat this as a two-sided "debate" between serious people?

On a related note, for those who still have doubts about whether US agents "tortured," there have been some amazingly rich and detailed posts in the last few days from Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, and Andy Worthington on deaths resulting from torture. I should have mentioned Wheeler by name in my last post on the different roles of images and documents in anti-torture campaigns -- someone give that woman a medal (or at least contribute to the fundraiser on her website). The ACLU Accountability Project is also incredible.

NPR and the glories of "vivid writing"

There's no improving on Glenn Greenwald's fabulous point-by-point takedown of NPR Ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard's defense of NPR's refusal to call torture "torture." I'm also really happy he linked to this blog I wasn't aware of until now, NPR Check , which has also been writing stellar stuff about this. The blog's creator says he started it up because "it made more sense than yelling at the radio;" as someone who spends an inordinate amount of time doing just that (also throwing pillows at it) I am overjoyed to find it.

So just one thing to add re. my favorite infuriating bit of Shepard's piece:

A basic rule of vivid writing is: "Show, Don't Tell." An excellent example of using facts rather than coded language was a 2005 piece by former NPR reporter John McChesney. It gave meticulous details of tactics used against an Iraqi detainee at Abu Graib who later died.

Ah yes, "Show, Don't Tell." I have lovely memories of my freshman creative writing instructor pressing that advice on us all. Here's the kind of sentence that "rule" is designed to deal with: "John is a big jerk." ("Can you show us John is a jerk instead? What might be some jerky acts readers could see John undertaking?") That doesn't mean that readers' experience will then be somehow damaged if the story also uses the word "jerk." Is Shepard actually, seriously arguing that a piece on torture (one that involves the detainee dying) becomes more "vivid" if it studiously avoids the use of the word "torture"? Is that true for stories on rape, too? Terrorism? Murder? I'm pretty sure that when the writing instructors say "show, don't tell," they don't mean "use smarmy circumlocution tactics to avoid calling things by their proper names," or "employ obfuscating and euphemistic language whenever possible." Good writing -- and we're talking about journalistic writing here, not mystical verse or something -- usually involves using plain English. To stick with our friend John the big jerk, would Shepard think it constituted more "vivid" writing for us to refer to him as "John the tempermentally challenged individual"? Come on. This is proposterous. And for God's sake, "torture" is not "coded language" for torture. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is.

**Update**

Greenwald is continuing to update on this issue, and check out Digby's post on the abuse-of-the-English-language aspect of all of this called "Examining the Runes."

Toughness

As I mentioned, I'm not going to be able to say much about Iran -- what's going on there now involves historical and political dynamics about which I understand just enough to grasp that I actually understand nothing. I simply don't have any expertise in this area of the world. So I've been following avidly but keeping mum.

The unfolding "debate" about the US response is a different issue -- although here, too, I don't know enough about Iran to presume to offer definitive advice to the Obama administration on how they should be reacting to events there, I feel awfully suspicious of all this posturing going on about how Obama isn't being "tough" enough. First of all, I've now seen lots of convincing arguments (from folks that know much more than I do about Iran) that the approach Obama is taking is smart and sound, given that he has to exercise caution about conflating the protestors' cause with "American interference." Second of all, as hilzoy keeps on helpfully reminding us all, even a very basic understanding of the unsavory history of US intervention in Iran ought to preclude some of this absurd fantasy about how the US taking a forceful rhetorical stance might save the day (ahem, John McCain: "We do what we have done throughout the Cold War and afterwards, we speak up for the people of Tehran and Iran and all the cities all over that country who have been deprived of one of their fundamental rights." Right, our excellent Cold War track record in Iran.) And third, to me all this bluster does not sound like it actually has anything to do with Iran per se: it's just the same old schoolyard stuff we've been hearing thrown at Democrats for decades about not being "tough" enough (on crime, welfare queens, defense, terror...), about being girly-men, about speaking French, etc. It's just wrapped around the headline of the week, which happens to be Iran.

Now, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to some of the genuine criticism coming Obama's way, like this piece from Roger Cohen, arguing that Obama needs to be doing/saying more. And I get that lots and lots of Democrats are upset with Obama's caution, too. But, especially because of point #3, I really don't see why the NYT has just chosen to post as the lead article on the website (as of around 10pm tonight) a piece titled "Obama Reluctant to Toughen Stance on Iran." The piece itself, by Mark Lander, is okay, I guess, and informative in a general way about various responses (from Congress, European leaders, etc.) to the situation in Iran. But although it refers to "criticism that Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak out more had broken faith with democracy advocates in Tehran" and "pressure on the White House" from "Congressional Republicans and conservative foreign-policy experts," and although it gives lots of examples of the "tougher line" other people besides Obama are taking, it doesn't actually name one person explicitly criticizing Obama himself for not being "tough" enough, nor give any articulation of what the foreign-policy basis for such criticism would be. (It does, on the other hand quote a number of people, including Henry Kissinger and Karim Sadgadpour, "an Iranian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace," explicitly supporting the administration's approach and explaining why in policy-outcome terms, not John McCain-speak.) The people Lander does quote may be reacting differently from Obama, but they're not criticizing him. (Yes, I understand that plenty of people are. But aside from the references to "criticism" and one quote from an Iran expert that seems to be connected to the uncontroversial idea that Obama may have to shift his stance in the event that a Tiananmen-style crackdown occurs, they're not present in this particular article.) There was also apparently no one from the administration willing to go on the record here, so it's all "officials said," etc.

Anyway, regardless, my real beef here is with the title, which to my ear seems to use this super-charged language of "toughness" to imply that Obama is somehow simply wimping out about Iran when the right thing to do is obviously to be "tough." In American political discourse, the antonym for tough is wimpy, and someone who is "reluctant" to take a "tough stance" is cowering. I'm not saying Lander's piece or the NYT is delibrately arguing this -- just that this seems like a really poor choice of language for the header. And that this is the case regardless of the valid arguments that might be made for/against the approach Obama has been taking so far.

Now I will be mum again.


**Update: The headline has now become "Obama Resists Calls for a Tougher Stance on Iran." This is slightly less objectionable, I suppose -- it implies a debate over the correct policy rather than a wimpy "reluctance" to do the manly thing. But I still think that there's no need to characterize the use of more bellicose language as a "tougher stance." Also, this version of the header reflects the actual content of the article even less than the previous version did -- again, there are no actual people quoted here "calling" on Obama to do anything differently, and explaining why, just general references to "criticism" of him.

Varia

So it has been a crazy week -- for me, in a tiny navel-gazing no-time-to-blog sense, and for the world. I'm not going to now try to jump into Iran-blogging, or catch up on everything I've missed; here are a couple quick points and links.

(1) Andrew Sullivan has been doing a remarkable job on Iran. He might be getting some stuff wrong (as he knows and frequently acknowledges), and he's clearly not getting much sleep, but the Dish for the last week has been exhilerating reading. Eric Martin has a great post up at ObWi (where, by the way, hilzoy has also been posting incredibly thoughtful pieces re. Iran this week) praising Sullivan and articulating how his work this last week has, perhaps, helped "spark empathy and strengthen bonds across what are fraught cultural and political divides" by putting human faces on the too-often demonized Iranian population.

(2) The Washington Post fired Dan Froomkin? Seriously?? WTF???

(3) A note of advice to anyone planning a wedding in a public park: NO, apparently you CANNOT assume that a massive, entirely unannounced construction project won't start up at your wedding site in the weeks immediately before your wedding, when it's way too late to switch location. I recommend friends & family with a really good sense of humor. A very nice contractor happening to be in charge of the project helps too.