"A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials."

Glenn Greenwald reports:

As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the U.S. Government (which is why it's the "establishment media"): the U.S. itself long condemned waterboarding as "torture" and even prosecuted it as such, only to suddenly turn around and declare it not to be so once it began using the tactic. That's exactly when the when there occurred, as the study puts it, "a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboading." As the U.S. Government goes, so goes our establishment media.

None of this is a surprise, of course. I and others many times have anecdotally documented that the U.S. media completely changes how it talks about something (or how often) based on who is doing it ("torture" when the Bad Countries do it but some soothing euphemism when the U.S. does it; continuous focus when something bad is done to Americans but a virtual news blackout when done by the U.S., etc.). Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate: media outlets such as the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word "torture" for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government officials announced it should not be called "torture."

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task. READ MORE