None Dare Call It Torture

By W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston

An excerpt from When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina.

The context in which the Abu Ghraib story broke was ripe for training public and journalistic attention on what the photos [of the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib] might signify about the conduct of the war in Iraq. Abu Ghraib came to light at a time of increasing public unease about the war. The period before the photos surfaced had been one of the bloodiest of the conflict. Just a month before the story broke, four Americans working for a security firm in Falluja had been ambushed and killed and their bodies burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. That story was covered in the U.S. mainstream press in surprisingly gory detail, reminiscent of the coverage of an incident years earlier involving an American soldier in Somalia that precipitated the U.S. withdrawal from a humanitarian relief mission there.

In this context, simply publishing the Abu Ghraib photos represented significant news content that helped to send public approval of the U.S. military presence in Iraq plunging downward past support rates for the first time since the war began. …[T]his was one of the sharpest drops in wartime approval rates in the last half century. What happened next, however, was even more significant as the Bush administration waged a fierce battle to define and limit the meaning of those images in concert with congressional allies and the conservative media echo chamber. The important element of our story concerns the inability of the press to prominently report and sustain alternative perspectives to challenge administration spin, leaving public opinion management and political accountability in the hands of the government itself. The result of the one-sided battle for information was a sharp reversal of the drop in public approval. Indeed, administration spin appears to have produced the sharpest restoration of support yet measured in the Korean, Vietnam, or Iraq conflicts.

…The drop in public support of the war following the Abu Ghraib story—greater than any single short-term drop in either the Korean or Vietnam conflicts—followed by the acquiescent press coverage… dispels the myth that the press follows public opinion in gauging the boldness of its coverage. The rebound in support for the war to pre-Abu Ghraib levels following the administration’s press management campaign was unprecedented in the history of [these] three relatively comparable wars…, with support levels rebounding even more sharply than the surge of public support following the entry of China into the Korean conflict. And the restoration of pre-photo public approval levels following mainstream press conformity to the administration line indicates that the mainstream press, not the often more independent views found in alternative media sources, is the primary media influence on public opinion. In short, Abu Ghraib did not become a vehicle for a full-fledged, bottom-up cascade of critical news, and instead was told largely as a one-sided, top-down story…

The findings [of our content analysis of news stories that focused on the events at Abu Ghraib], when added to the findings from previous research, suggest that news of provocative events, particularly in the foreign policy realm, is highly constrained by journalistic dependence on government sources and processes to advance perspectives and stories. Yet there is more going on here. Having the digital photos in their possession enabled journalists to break news of gripping events ahead of authorities. Yet despite the initial independence offered by information technology, the story ended up being turned over quickly to government officials to provide the interpretive perspective. This emerged as a general trend in research by Bennett and Livingston, who examined eight years of international stories on CNN. They found that even though new technologies have allowed ever greater numbers of event-driven stories to appear, officials “seem to be as much a part of the news as ever.” Once officials engage with news events, the story frames generated by journalists are then generally “indexed” to the range of sources and viewpoints that reflect levels of official agreement and consensus…

Thus, we attribute the ultimate collapse of the torture policy frame in news about Abu Ghraib to the mainstream press’s well-documented tendency to follow the lead of high institutional authorities and, correspondingly, to have trouble elevating available challenging perspectives when sources at institutional power points fail to corroborate them. The “torture policy” counterframe was pushed out of the news by a deluge of official events that promoted the “isolated abuse” frame, an effect reinforced by a lack of high-level public debate on torture such as occurred much later around Senator [John] McCain’s [anti-torture] amendment. The curious result of these intertwined event-driven and official news management dynamics is a semi-independent press characterized by moments of relative independence within a more general pattern of compliance with government news management…

 …[T]he limits of press independence should not be overstated. The nation’s leading press did break the Abu Ghraib story, and CBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among others, continued to probe the story of U.S. treatment of detainees long after public attention to Abu Ghraib had faded. [As our data show], Abu Ghraib became a significant news story to which considerable resources were devoted. The continued reporting by these leading news organizations over the next year and a half revealed links between the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and those at other U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. And several mainstream publications, such as Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine, published lengthy critical examinations of the larger practical and ethical questions involved in using torture in the War on Terror…

What was lacking, we contend, was the kind of coherent and sustained challenge to the Bush administration’s “isolated abuse” claim that would have created an information environment that might have enabled average citizens (who do not generally read newspaper accounts as closely as we [do in our study]) to assess alternative perspectives more clearly. Put simply, it mattered that the press converged on the “abuse” definition and used the term torture so gingerly, because those basic language choices structured public responses to the story. Even if public opinion still might have sided with the administration’s accounts, and reached closure with the punishment of a few low-level offenders, simply holding up the possibility of torture and even torture policy to public view would have created a different climate of accountability in government. Indeed, this may be the most important reason for an independent press. Exposing the political elite operation in the comfortable isolation of Washington to the harsher images that typified how much of the rest of the world saw U.S. policies in Iraq might have emboldened critics in government to act sooner and differently than they did.

And so, for all the photos and the large body of available evidence suggesting a possible policy of torture laid bare, the appalling images from Abu Ghraib rather quickly became defined as a story of prisoner “abuse.” To this ambiguous abuse label were attached lingering and ultimately unresolved questions, such as whether this abuse was set in motion by mixed signals from officials in the Pentagon…

Excerpted from When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press. © 2007 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.