No more torture? Oh noes!

Read Digby's post on the media's response to Obama's executive orders. Note particularly the part where she catches Chuck Todd desperately trying to figure out a way to square the orders with a world in which we still torture people.

Todd: There are still some loopholes. Those who are worried that somehow there isn't going to be a way to get intelligence out of them... for instance, while there is a mandate, one of these executive orders says that the Army Field Manual is what needs to be used to decide how to interrogate these folks, there is also going to be an allowance by this new commission to come up with a protocol to deal with intelligence, you know detainees that are detained from the intelligence battlefield, not necessarily the actual combatant, you know, one that would be soldier to soldier.

Now the administration says this does not mean they will invite new methods of interrogation back into the fold, but like I said Andrea, you could go through here with a fine tooth comb and could find plenty of loopholes that would allow certain things to happen.

That's of a piece with, for instance, this lamentable article over at Politico and, I'm sure several others. I can think of a few ways to understand this phenomenon, none of which are really incompatible with the others. But here they are.

First, there's Digby's point--that these people just sort of like torture:

But regardless of his intentions, it's clear that the media has decided that he's trying to have it both ways. I'm sure that's very reassuring to them --- they all love torture and indefinite detention (except for themselves and their friends, who "suffer enough" if they are simply publicly embarrassed.) But if Obama's intention is to send a clear signal that America is not going to torture and imprison people in violation of the law and the constitution, the media that's supposed to convey that view isn't getting the message.

And, inasmuch as many in the media have spent the last several years apologizing for torture, or defending torture, or arguing that torturers should face no penalties, they have some interest in making torture seem normal. Once the extremely popular new president says it verboten, their reams of op-eds and blog posts suddenly put them at odds with the new establishment and that's just not acceptable to a lot of mainstream media figures.

Second, there's a more reductive argument--that media is a business, and that these people believe their relevance hinges on their ability to report the news as a series of dramatic events. If it's not a story without scandal and conflict, then it's no surprise that, right now, they're sowing unfounded doubt about Obama's first actions in office. After all, "Obama pleases base, faces little opposition from Right", isn't as sexy as "Obama pulling a fast one on base," so why not pretend there might be some truth to the latter.

Last--and this is my favorite--there's an interpretation that falls out of Daniel Hallin's model, as made famous recently by NYU's Jay Rosen. If you haven't seen it before, it's a rendering of the universe of political perspectives as a series of concentric spheres. Some of those perspectives have simply become conventional wisdom--"Kennedy was a great president", for instance--which puts them into the "sphere of consensus" where they are either ignored, or stated uncontroversially, because they're just assumed to be correct. Outside of that, there's the "sphere of legitimate debate". That's where big media eats its lunch. It's where national controversy resides. It's where climate change denialists and environmentalists have tussled with each other for years now. It's what gives us "he said, she said" journalism. And, more to the point of this post, it's where torture advocates and torture opponents have been pitted against each other since the Abu Ghraib photos were leaked to the press.

The outmost sphere, if you couldn't have guessed, is the "sphere of deviancy". It's where you'll find ideas and arguments that sit at odds with those in the "sphere of consensus". If you ever saw these views represented in the press, it was for the purposes of mocking them or dismissing them out of hand. One of these views, at least until recently, was that Bush officials should be investigated and prosecuted for torture.

It's important to understand, though, that the edges separating the spheres are somewhat porous, and, crucially, journalists are among the elite few with the power to move a borderline view out of its old sphere and into a new one. They didn't see Barack Obama coming. To hark back to the primaries for a moment, they didn't count on him being "ready on day one".

Like Obama said in his inaugural address: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them." And with it, certain ideas--ideas about torture, and rendition, and secret prisons--have begun to shift from their old spheres--the sphere's the establishment has grown accustomed to--into new ones. This has happened without the assent of the people who enforced the old status quo, and it's no surprise that they now seem restless about it.

I'm sure there's more. Feel free to send thoughts along. But any of these analytical frameworks will, I think, improve your understanding of the media's behavior in the coming days and weeks.