The Dish

A reader writes:

As a woman and a mother I am deeply offended by your reader's suggestion that Sarah Palin ought to be given privacy about whether she really gave birth to Trig because "women lie about pregnancy/birth/parentage all the time." Give me a frickin' break. If a woman lies to her mate about whether she's carrying his child, that's between them. But if Sarah Palin lied about giving birth to Trig and then goes around talking about his birth in her book and in speeches, that's a public matter.

"E]ven if you prove what is likely true – that she is lying – it is neither unique nor crazy." Well, it may not be unique to fib about a pregnancy, but it is crazy to build an entire political identity on what even this reader thinks is almost certainly a lie.  If Palin can blatantly lie about something this big, and keep lying and embellishing the story, then how could we possibly trust her in public office? This is why it matters to voters.

I am sick and tired of this sexist bullshit. She's a politician. She made it part of her identity.  It's fair game.

Amen. Another adds:

The crux of the controversy about the Trig/Palin issue is quite simple. If Trig is her biological son she should offer proof. PERIOD.

She should do that so that she is worthy of a position of influence within our society. If she can’t do that because she has lied and lied and lied about the circumstances of Trig’s birth and has not only lied, but has exploited the lie to further her personal ambition, then quite simply she has no place in our society that demands trust and accountability. PERIOD.

There is no gray here. The media giving her this ‘so-called’ pass is abhorrent. There are no ‘passes’ here for lying and exploitation just because she is a woman. None at all.

But you think the NYT will re-examine its own on-faith elaboration of Palin's story? Not if the powerful don't want it. I reiterate my commitment to publishing in full any evidence that Palin provides to prove that her story does make sense. I want to be proven wrong. I have begged to be proven wrong. It is insane that the MSM won't clear this up – out of the same cowardice that led them to their Orwellian circumlocutions about torture.

Mercede responds to Bristol's Facebook musings:

I am also NOT on food stamps! And that was an unnecessarily ugly thing to say.

I should add that this is not always on one side of the political equation. This story – about a gay journalist infiltrating a private therapy group in order to out and expose a conflicted minister – is just as disgusting a violation and should not have been published, in my view. Why? Because if a twelve-step group's confidentiality is violated, then all bets are off. No hypocrisy was involved. But if the paper also offered a reward for others to infiltrate such counseling sessions in order to persecute gay ministers, it would be at the Breitbart level. The rest I leave to Rod:

If this had been an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and a reporter had gone there with the agenda of outing a pastor who preached teetotaling, but who privately struggled to stay sober, wouldn't you be appalled — not at the pastor, but at the reporter? The idea that the Cause, whatever the Cause, justifies destroying the basic rules of civilized life, and with it a man's character, is barbarism.

David Frum fears that Paul Krugman's doubts about the strength of the recovery are justified. But David is not convinced that a second stimulus is the answer:

If Krugman’s direct government expenditure is not a very good policy answer, his dire economic warning remains a haunting policy question. What can we do to accelerate economic growth and job creation? For those of us on the free-market side of the debate, the question is even more haunting: What’s our countervailing idea? And if our countervailing idea is tax cuts, what is our reply to the obvious rebuttal that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect through the whole of this crisis, seemingly without effect?

Is it due to disease?

An amazing admission from a NYT spokesman:

“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. 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.”

But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such – and by the NYT in its news pages as such – for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right.

So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. 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.

So if anyone wants to get the NYT to use a different word in order to obfuscate the truth, all they need to do is make enough noise so there is a political dispute about a question. If there's a political dispute, the NYT will retreat. And so we now know that its core ethos is ceding the meaning of words to others, rather than actually deciding for itself how to call torture torture. Orwell wrote about this in his classic "Politics and the English Language." If newspapers will not defend the English language from the propaganda of war criminals, who will? And it is not as if they haven't made this call before – when they routinely called waterboarding torture. They already had a view. They changed it so as not to offend. In so doing, they knowingly printed newspeak in their paper – not because they believed in it, but because someone else might.

This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country.

When historians look back and try to understand how the US came to be a country that legitimizes torture, the New York Times will be seen to have played an important role in euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it. The evidence shows conclusively that there is not a shred of argument behind the dramatic shift in 2002 – just plain cowardice.

In my view, the people who made that decision should resign. They have revealed that they are nothing but straws in the wind – in a time when moral clarity and courage were most needed.

A reader writes:

They fetch.

Ambinder gets his hands on a copy of al Qaeda's first English-language magazine. Massie follows up:

Ambinder says the US is a little worried by AQ's publishing ambitions, not least because they're aimed at native English-speakers. And perhaps they're right. Nevertheless, this sort of caper also makes AQ seem somewhat ridiculous and, really, rather like a kind of terrorist version of Alan Partridge or something.

Adam Serwer's take on the cowardice of the American press differs from mine:

I think it’s actually the conventions of journalism that are at fault here. As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood.

But this doesn't work because the NYT had already decided, as the entire world did, that waterboarding was torture. It actually changed its own established rubric to placate Cheney. And yes, it would mean that the president and vice-president – who have publicly admitted to waterboarding – are war criminals not just in a rhetorical sense, but in a legal sense. To suggest otherwise is to knowingly publish untruths – and to take a position against one's own paper. This is not fairness; it is incoherence and cowardice in the face of power. Joyner actually thinks this is a defense of the NYT: 

To have insisted that the U.S. Government was engaged in torture when the leaders of said Government adamantly denied that what they were doing constituted torture and most citizens supported the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismissed as buffoons those worried about poor widdle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have not only been taking sides in an ongoing debate but taking a very unpopular stand.

Well, no newspaper should ever take a "very unpopular stand," should it? What the fuck happened to the notion of newspapers telling the truth in plain English, regardless of public or political pressure? That's what the press is supposed to do; it's why it exists in a democracy; and it is especially important that it do this when confronting the truth would indeed be unpopular. That's when we need the press the most. And it's when the NYT and much of the MSM simply ran for cover.