> Meanwhile, mucking round in the toxic dump behind the EPA or following
> the trail of bio-hazard bags leading away from NIH or FDA isn't
> encouraged. Besides all that kind of news work costs money and doesn't
> make money. Ads make money, news costs money.
>
> Reporting the pre-spun news doesn't violate journalistic ethics of
> objectivity since the media are just reporting what was said.
[snip]
> If I got beat up by cops, I wouldn't tell a reporter that the
> police abused me. I'd say they beat the holy shit out of me. When I
> read later that ``...victim claimed he was abused by police...'', is
> it objective reporting or spin? I call it spin.
>
> The underlying implication to words like `abuse' cover anything from
> using bad language and rough handling to getting slapped around.
>
> The word `abuse' doesn't imply systematic use of brutal handling,
> frequent beatings, calculated humiliations, disorientation techniques,
> electric shock, hostile interrogations, and murder.
I think I am basically in agreement with you. I would add that, when it comes to politically charged subjects like this, "objective language" doesn't exist. Both "abuse" and "torture" have emotive/political charges, which may, to borrow electrical language, may be positive or negative depending on one's politics, but never zero.
The mainstream media want to appear "neutral," but of course that is a desire fated to be eternally unsatisfied. One could approach it by simply describing the specific actions: this particular American soldier or civilian beat, raped, shocked, jumped on, etc., this particular Iraqi person. But even with these specific terms, of course, there is the question of whether these acts were justified, and politics enters at that point. And inevitably, general terms like "torture" or "abuse" need to be used at some point, whereupon politics again enters.
It would help if journalists simply agreed to concede that "news" is 99% political, but the myth of "objective journalism" persists.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt