NYT Front|Back: Porn Plots vs. Detainee Rights

NYT Front|Back, a MediaBloodhound feature that showcases The New York Times' intermittent yet longstanding penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages, rarely makes an appearance on this site anymore. It's brought back from mothballed hiatuses only for the most egregious and absurd examples.

Like this one:

FRONT:

In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record. The critical issue at hand (pardon the expression)? The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly ten percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography! I believe it was Patrick Henry who originally said, "Give me liberty and intricately plotted pornographic entertainment, or give me death." Of course, that was before the edit (fortunately for Henry, he wasn't living in the dawn of blogging). 

Some more excerpts from this earth-shattering piece of journalism:

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” [Wicked Pictures president Steve] Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

In lieu of plot, there are themes. Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses.

[...]

Ms. Samson, for example, said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles, like the character she played in the 2006 movie “Flasher.”

She said she played a psychotic who, because of the way her mother treated her, “had an obsession with flashing and doing things in public.”

“I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson, whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.

“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.

BACK (page A18):

In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights

Apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages.

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts.

Republicans on the Armed Services Committee argued that foreigners now detained on terrorism charges at the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, did not deserve those constitutional protections.

“So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?” Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Aside from this article's banishment to the back pages, the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement. Scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S. after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls "brutal" interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls "torture."

The Bush administration's process that swept up these detainees, ignored due process and embraced, as Dick Cheney famously said, "the dark side" -- which actually meant perpetrating systematic cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners -- should have no foundation of credibility in a country calling itself a democracy.

The closet the article comes to noting the inherent mendacity in McCain's statement is relegated to a sentence in the second-to-last paragraph (incidentally, is this a new Times editorial decision -- "harsh interrogations or torture"?):

Lawmakers and administration officials have already agreed that statements taken through harsh interrogations or torture would not be allowed in a commission prosecution, but several witnesses suggested that the standards still needed to be clearer.

What should be stated clearly in this story, however, is that the exact number of detainees who confessed during torture remains unknown. So claiming these detainees are guilty of crimes without yet knowing if the confessions were obtained through torture is preposterous. A concept about which Kafka was well versed.

Glaringly absent from this article as well is the fact that the Bush administration's sanctioning of torture has endangered the lives of Americans and directly led to this legal predicament, in which some detainees might actually want to kill Americans, but since their confessions were coerced through torture they may go free.

It remains unclear what Constitutional rights will be afforded detainees tried in military commissions. Though the closing paragraph might give you an indication:

Vice Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the Navy's top lawyer, said at the hearing that evidentiary rules should not bar statements taken by soldiers from witnesses questioned under gunpoint on a battlefield. But, he said, those accounts should be weighed differently from statements taken from a detainee six months after his capture.

Key phrases: "battlefield" and "questioned under gun point." Remember all those "dangerous terrorists" rounded up on the "battlefield" during the Bush administration who turned out to be completely innocent, in some cases boys and old men, including this geriatric jihadist, a 71-year-old nearly blind man -- he may have been as old as 78 -- who had to shuffle around Gitmo for nearly five years in a walker before being released in August 2006?

Such context is nowhere to be found in this article either.

Comments

[Brad Jacobson]

Porn Plots vs. Detainee Rights

[lauraa79]

Very informative post, thanks for your good blog...

[donne russe]

Very nicely written. Really makes think. Thanks.