This week’s Mainstream Media Scream features Reuters Editor-at-Large Sir Harold Evans comparing the U.S. death penalty to Islamic State of Iraq and Syria beheadings.
He was on CBS “This Morning” on Saturday discussing a book of photographs he had written a forward for when a shot of New York state’s Sing Sing prison death chair was shown.
“You know, when you think about this, it looks like an ordinary chair. You get up close to it, the stark brutality. The room is brutal in its starkness. Almost as appalling, in its sense, as these barbarians who have taken the heads off journalists in the desert. I have the same chill about this, seeing this,” he said.
Full exchange:
SIR HAROLD EVANS: Oh, God, help me.
GLOR: — at Sing Sing prison. We were looking at this yesterday. I mean it just —
Co-host VINITA NAIR: Because you had a really emotional reaction to all this, didn’t you?
EVANS: I did. When I was a newspaper editor, I managed to get a man pardoned for a murder — he’d already been hanged — I managed to get a pardon for a man who’d been hanged for a wrongful murder.
You know, when you think about this, it looks like an ordinary chair. You get up close to it, the stark brutality. The room is brutal in its starkness. Almost as appalling, in its sense, as these barbarians who have taken the heads off journalists in the desert. I have the same chill about this, seeing this.
You know, Sing Sing — we don’t execute people in New York anymore nor do they do it in California. But it was — Thomas Edison invented this thing in trying to complete, you know, with his current, which was direct, against the Westinghouse A/C. So out of that tremendous innovation of electrical power came this, to me, monstrosity of the electric chair. Of course, lethal injections ain’t great either.
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our pick: “There’s a very big difference between the two ‘death penalties.’ In our justice system, only the very worst murderers are put death — and only after years of trials and appeals — while the ISIS killers behead the innocent in order to terrorize the world to submit to their political demands. You’d think such a long-time journalist would recognize the difference.”
Rating: Three out of five screams.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
