Journal: News & Comment

Hollowed soul

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My plea about Guantanamo Bay last November didn't work, so I've been resisting following up on Amnesty International's recent report about U.S. war prisoners, because I wasn't sure what to say. Fortunately, Tim Bray had no such reticence:

...when the Neilsen-rating results come out there's a loser, and the loser always grumbles about how the methodology is busted and they're really not doing that bad. Similarly, whenever Amnesty International points the finger at some government, that government makes like a losing TV network and whines that the process is broken.

...being better than the gulags isn't good enough. When your Neilsen ratings are bad, you need to run better shows, and when Amnesty gets on your case, you need to stop brutalizing people.

The U.S. administration's policies on and treatment of those prisoners—guilty, evil, or not—are dismaying, and the reaction in the American news media to those who disagree is more so. I said before that what it does is "hollow out America's soul for dubious and short-term ends." I am sad for that, and each day it continues makes me sadder.

Our big scandal in Canada is a government threatened with collapse about money wasted on a corrupt and poorly run PR campaign. By comparison, it's laughable.

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