The New York Times

That bastion of combative journalism, that champion of just causes, that aggressive institution:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/torture_at_times_hks_students.pdf
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/03/keller/index.html

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate. Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did: by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture.
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"So, Bill Keller, 'the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks' is plainspeak and 'torture' is PC? Got it."
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numerous news articles written by the very same Bill Keller, when he was a NYT reporter, in which he applied the Tendentious P.C. term "torture" to interrogation techniques used by the Soviet Union despite the fact that the Soviet government insisted that such techniques were not "torture" under the law. He used the term "torture" for other foreign governments as well, despite those government's denials. As the site notes: "In his own foreign reporting, Keller didn't bother to clutter his stories with the obvious -- and irrelevant -- denials by Soviet and South African government officials that they were engaged in torture. He used his own judgment to recognize torture for what it was."

This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
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The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Originally posted by adam warlock
That bastion of combative journalism, that champion of just causes, that aggressive institution:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/torture_at_times_hks_students.pdf
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/03/keller/index.html

[b]In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled wa ...[text shortened]... ng, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

[/b]

Originally posted by adam warlock
In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, ...

The New York Times reported on the vigorous debate about whether waterboarding is or is not "torture" and did so in full, consistently and very frequently.