'Torture' Diction Debate Draws In NYT's Keller

Following up on the controversy surrounding a Harvard study that showed a dropoff in classification of waterboarding as torture at The New York Times and other outlets, the NYTPicker blog has taken a look at the work of executive editor Bill Keller during his days as a reporter for the Times. In his Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Soviet Union, Keller used the word “torture” to describe the country’s interrogation techniques. And, the ‘picker says, “His stories never alluded to any questioning of the term by the governments that used the techniques.”