This article The Other Torture Debate by Arthur Brisbane is worth reading to help understand how a journalistic ‘aspiration’ for an appearance of impartiality can lead to very poor decisions.
In what I saw at the time as a prime example of the thin end of the wedge, the NY Times seemed to adopt the Bush administration’s Geneva convention-dodging, legalistic and semantic ‘one rule for the USA and another for everyone else’ sophistry — brought to you the same people who dreamnt up ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enemy combatant’ to skirt the very laws they’d sworn preserve, protect, and defend.
It made the NY Times look like it bought the Cheney deceit and, naturally, came in for criticism and people like Glenn Greenwald pulling the legs off their silly argument and (shudder) inconsistency — one of the arch crimes of news and publishing.
