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I am aware of Shock Doctrine style arguments and media as corporate or government propagandist arguments. I was specifically trying to avoid those here. For instance, there is no public intimidation reason for not covering admissions that the NSC principals oversaw tortures from the Situation Room. There may be a propaganda argument - that it disrupts the clean and patriotic image of the war on terror or something - and there may be a corporate argument - such stories dampen viewership (except that the issue on that one was the NYT) or make people less likely to spend money, or make them vote for candidates that impose regulations on corporations.
But there seems an argument beyond that, and I think it may have non-nefarious roots - many journalists have personal ties to September 11th victims or were there covering it and feel revenge or fear motives more strongly than the public - and nefarious ones - The NYTimes sometimes is reluctant to talk about things that could lead back to discussions of Israeli misconduct on some subjects, for instance, or they knew and said nothing as evidence of torture mounted, especially before the 2004 elections, when the public could have ended this regime. I also think a lot of columnists are on public record as having dismissed claims that something was brutally wrong, and don't want the scrutiny on their past failures.
Some of my musings were because I was essentially live-blogging on the Taylor v. Ratner debate, I had it going on in the background. Stuart Taylor has an amazing viewpoint, really, to the point of ending up talking about justifiable war crimes, damning the process of trial by jury, all sorts of very strange views, nitpicking waterboarding technique vis-à-vis the Inquisition (he got it wrong) and so forth. He came by these views over the years, which includes over the past 7 years. He has a lot of policy people whispering in his ear as a journalist, he has a lot of affinity for classification and intelligence gathering as a modern journalist, and he has an inordinate amount of fear compared to many. And he basically had a hard time defending himself except by recourse to emotional arguing tactics - doomsday scenarios and the like.
Along with the investigation being called for by Horton and Ratner and others, there ought to be an investigation of 2004 and what the press knew before the election and when, from, say, January until November, plus a re-examination of all the information that came out obscurely or was shunted by the press (in other words, questioning decisions to print a story but to make certain it got a small audience). My guess is the press is hiding knowledge that could have changed whether or not torture happened in some cases, and knows how devastating that would be if made public.
