Alicia Shepard continues making her offerings to the thunder god, the American political elite, by adhering to her "belief" that it’s torture when they do it, but legitimate "intelligence gathering" when we commit it. Glenn Greenwald compares her views with reality here.
I have to disagree with Glenn, a rarity:
I’ve been going back and forth on whether Shepard’s deficiency is primarily one of intellect or whether she’s just a hard-core Cheneyite.
I’m now convinced — after her statements yesterday on that show I did with after her — that it’s both. Anyone who can say that what we do is not "torture" because we do it for the right reasons — whereas it’s "torture" when those other countries do it because they’re sadistic and bad — is someone who is devoid of both basic reasoning skills and good motives.
There’s another option. Ms. Shepard needn’t be a Cheneyite or too stupid to know what’s she is spouting is propaganda or both. She could have been hired because she is qualified to be a tobacco salesman: someone who doesn’t care how wrong she is in what she claims, just that it promote her and her employer’s profits.
Traditional media’s choice to give up journalism in favor of transcribing what the government tells them is meant to keep its corporate profits safe. They thereby abandon their readers to the undisputed whims of their government, something as unsafe in public life as it is in private ones. It has spawned atrocities, revolutions, abuse, depression and divorce alike.
I agree with Glenn that attitudes like Ms. Shepard’s, Judy Miller’s and Elizabeth Bumiller’s (and many others) enabled the Bush and now Obama administrations to avoid liability for their excesses – including the need to stop them. If nothing else, it’s based on the misconception that it keeps us "szafe" and that it "can’t happen here".
When they come for Alicia, will there still be a Glenn Greenwald or Marcy Wheeler to complain? Or is she determined to avoid that fate by always being on the side of the accuser?
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thanks for publicizing this outrage.
I can’t believe that any progressives listen to NPR when they should be down with progressive AM radio.
NPR shilled for the Iraq War…and undoubtedly now for the one in Afghanistan, while brilliant hosts like Thom Hartmann, Rachel Maddow, and Mike Malloy continue to broadcast the truth.
Sinclair’s observation explains Shepard and the MSM in general. She is paid not to understand torture and she does not understand it superbly.
Agreed. It’s why I think Glenn is off the mark when he attributes her double standard as a function of intelligence. That’s frustration at her pretending to be jello her critics are trying to eat with chopsticks.
One of David Brooks’ pet phobias, for example, is Democratic technocrats who work for the government. (GOP’ers and those who work for corporations are just fine.) In his view, they’re smart, but not about the right things. And it’s true with regard to, say, McNamara. He was numerically brilliant, but he never understood that the data he was manipulating included human behavior. Like Brooks and Cheney, he never understood that his war was not about our fears and passions, but about those of the Vietnamese. It had nothing to do with dominoes.
I suspect Ms. Shepard is smart, savvy, ambitious, and literate. She is following orders and isn’t “fool” enough to open herself to criticism because she’s a journalist or represents them. That stuff about an open and free press is so 20th century.
She thinks her job is done when she enthusiastically follows orders that monopolistically dictate that “responsible” American journalists don’t say that their government tortures or commits crimes, even when they do. That would be impolite, especially when the accused torturer claims (without verification or proof – “that’s not the press’ job”) that he didn’t torture. It’s even more impolite when her boss or her boss’ boss might have to have lunch or share an airplane ride with an accused torturer. Heavens, how awkward such “reporting” would make life.
That kind of nonsense reporting is possible only when everyone in the schoolyard does it – PBS, the WaPoop, the Times, Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ. It’s a house of cards. Here’s to those nasty DFH bloggers who shake the card table.
Right now I am listening to pure gibberish by some economists on “To the Point” with Warren Olney. “No economist predicted these high unemployment figures.” Yeh, nobody running in your cocktail weenie crowd predicted it. But I recall Jamie Galbraith, Michael Hudson, Nouriel Roubini,….
“Employment is a lagging indicator” Oh, right, don’t include real people in your calculations. Bankers are getting big bonuses so everything is looking up.
Read Trudy Lieberman’s piece on journalism’s coverage of health care called “Groundhog Day”. http://www.cjr.org/feature/gro…..hp?page=al
I sent some commentary (referencing the UNCAT, per wigwam) along with my diary on the matter (http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/6186/) to NPR management today, and placed a phone call notifying as such. I specifically requested a response, and will be following up over the next several days if I hear nothing back.
It’ll be great to hear if they respond and what they say. They’ve pretty much circled the wagons in defense of the indefensible. (Hey, if Obama can do it with trial-free detentions, NPR can do it by not reporting on it.) I would be pleasantly surprised if they do a Blanche Lincoln and rethink their position.
Thanks to the Columbia Journalism Review. The press doesn’t seem to review its own work these days or like those who do – as Dan Froomkin knows well.
“No economist predicted these high unemployment figures” must refer to economists on the moon. Plenty here did, including Nobel laureates. But they are regarded as so shrill, the barkless dogs of the press have trouble hearing them, much less remembering what they said.
I’ve just finished reading Glenn on the Shepard responses and following his links, including the NPR website comments on her column – not a single one favorable to her “tortured” arguments.
This is just pitiful; as many commenteres noted, this is not the NPR we once had. That they have also succumbed to the theory of “journalism” that says journalists don’t make judgments of what is fact is just so sad.
I fear this is generational – they younger ones have grown up taking this attitude for granted; it will be as hard to change this as it was to change the point of view of “journalists” trained and employed during the Soviet Union.
Not all generational, of course – Tim Russert was in my age group, and he was one of the worst. But then, he wasn’t really a reporter, he just dropped into it from politics and didn’t bother getting “trained.”
I think you’re right, part of this is generational, as it is in a similar way with business managers who no longer know how to treat their workers as anything of value. Lying becomes second nature when the primary accepted function is to enable top executives to do whatever they want without repercussion.