Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the guests on nine TV news programs during the week
of December 7 through 14: ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the
Nation, CNN's State of the Union and Situation Room,
Fox's Fox News Sunday and Special Report, MSNBC's
Hardball, NBC's Meet the Press, and PBS's News Hour.
Of the 104 guests on these programs, 53
of them indicated whether they supported or opposed the “enhanced
interrogation techniques” described in the report. Thirty-five of
them (66%) supported the CIA's actions, while the remaining 18 (34%)
were opposed. While some progressive critics worried that the networks would
give equal time to torturers, they probably didn't anticipate that
the “liberal” media would present more advocates of torture than
opponents by a two-to-one margin. (Of course, most of those who
supported the CIA's actions usually also claimed that they did not
constitute “torture.”)
Sixty-five of the 104 guests were journalists, most of whom remained neutral. The second largest group
was 35 current and former government officials. Nine CIA officers
were among them, seven of whom defended their agency's practices. Of
those who were political partisans, 19 were Republicans and 7 were
Democrats. Four of the Democrats spoke against torture while the
others had no opinion. Sixteen of the Republicans favored the CIA's
actions and three opposed them. For more details on what was actually said, see this report.)
Of course, the most prominent
Republican guest was former VP Dick Cheney, who said the report was
“full of crap.” As Glenn Greenwald noted, Dick Cheney should be
in prison rather than having his ass kissed by the Sabbath gasbags (my
language, not his). So far, the only person to be jailed over the
CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who helped to
expose it.
While the perpetrators of torture had
many opportunities to defend themselves, torture victims were seldom heard from. Their only voice was indirect. Two lawyers representing torture victims, Joseph Margulies and Meg Satterthwaite,
were invited to participate in the discussions.
Given this kind of media coverage, it's not surprising that in a Pew Research Center survey of 1001 Americans conducted December 11-14, 51% said the “CIA's
interrogation methods” were justified, 29% said they were not
justified, and 20% had no opinion. Were they effective in preventing
terrorist attacks? The Senate Report concluded they were not, but
56% of respondents thought they were effective, 21% said they were
not, and 16% didn't know. The public was almost evenly divided on
whether the Senate Report should have been made public. Forty-three
percent thought releasing the report was the wrong decision, 42%
thought it was the right decision, and 15% had no opinion.
It seems that a lot of Americans are O.
K. with torture. They just don't want to know about it.
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