Millions of Americans watch them. They have been compared to Murrow and Cronkite, Shakespearian fools, and even Socrates. Their guests have included world leaders, celebrities, leading scientists, and everything in between. But just who and what are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: 21st century journalists or, as they claim, mere comedians? The answer is not entirely clear-cut, as the line between comedy and journalism has blurred. Nonetheless, their position has given them a unique ability to raise issues and call out politicians in ways that mainstream journalists will not. They should embrace this power and the responsibility that comes with it.

“Fools… speak wisely what wise men do foolishly” (As You Like It 1.2)

Stewart defines himself as “a comedian” and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as “fake news.” In an interview on Meet the Press, Colbert described his character on The Colbert Report as “an active idiot.” However, some have argued that the Stewart-Colbert brand of “fake news” can actually be substantive and impactful. Their shows frequently highlight and raise awareness of serious issues, including some that may not receive sufficient attention from politicians and the mainstream media.

For instance, while many politicians decline to talk seriously about climate change, Colbert and Stewart have invited leading scientists to discuss the issue. Indeed, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, in 2007, The Daily Show “devoted a greater percentage of its news to science/technology and environmental stories than did the mainstream news media.” Shortly after Colbert invited astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson on the show to criticize proposed cuts to NASA’s manned space program, President Obama, coincidentally or not, backtracked on the proposed cuts.

Similarly, Stewart repeatedly lambasted Congress for holding up benefits for 9/11 First Responders (the “Zadroga Act”), increasing coverage of the issue and arguably shaming Congress into eventually passing the bill. Meanwhile, by creating his own Super PAC, Colbert called attention to the issue of campaign finance and what he calls the “politico-industrial complex,” winning a Peabody Award for his efforts.

The substantive content of these shows has not been lost on viewers. While Stewart and Colbert insist that they are not newsmen, some, especially younger viewers, view the shows as legitimate news sources. A 2004 Pew study found that shows like The Daily Show rivaled traditional broadcast news as sources of campaign information for young adults. Meanwhile, an Indiana University study found that The Daily Show’s coverage of the 2004 campaign was as substantive as network news. Furthermore, a 2007 Pew survey found that regular viewers of Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows were much better informed than the national average and were even better informed than those who rely on traditional news outlets.

The appeal of Stewart and Colbert may be largely driven by deep frustration with current political reality. Timothy McCarthy, Director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a cultural historian, told the HPR that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become “place[s] where people would go to get their news because our politics ha[s] become so absurd and so…superficial and really all about a series of performances” that are themselves much like entertainment. Indeed, when asked if the shows ever push the envelope and become offensive, Stewart himself told Maureen Dowd, “I don’t understand how anyone can consider jokes about this stuff worse than the reality of it.”

“There’s no slander in an allowed fool” (Twelfth Night 1.5)

Arguably, an advantage Stewart and Colbert have over mainstream journalists is that, like the jesters and Shakespearian fools of old, they occupy a position outside the societal, or in this case, journalistic, mainstream from which they can tear into politicians and mainstream journalists without fear of pushback or accusations of bias. According to Paul Cantor, a culture critic and visiting professor of government at Harvard, they “share with a venerable satirical tradition,” a willingness and license to “speak truth to power.” Cantor told the HPR that he has been “struck by how many times particularly Stewart has brought up an issue that the mainstream media refused to deal with.”

Clearly, Stewart takes on powerful people and weighty issues, perhaps surprising for a self-described comedian. According to McCarthy, however, “we are in a political and cultural moment where the distinction between entertainment and political journalism is being blurred.” He traces this blurring of the line between journalism and entertainment to the 1996 emergence of Fox News and MSNBC, which offer a mix of news coverage, “explicitly partisan” commentary and entertainment segments like Chris Matthews’ “Hardball Sideshow” and Bill O’Reilly’s “Dumbest Things of the Week.” McCarthy believes that the emergence of Stewart and Colbert “even further complicates and blurs those lines of distinction” between journalism and entertainment.

At times, Stewart and Colbert have even flirted with activism, though with mixed results. Their joint “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” received less-than-glowing reviews. McCarthy says that he attended the rally but left early, finding it to be “politically bankrupt” and a tremendous missed opportunity to “cross over into a serious political space while bringing all the humor and absurdity.” Meanwhile, Colbert acknowledged on Meet the Press that “everyone was critical of” his testimony before a Congressional subcommittee, which was intended to shine a light on the plight of immigrant farm workers.

This suggests a possible limit to their influence. Ultimately, McCarthy concludes, Stewart and Colbert are quite able to “generate political energy and rile people up,” but they generally do not “determine political outcomes.” Similarly, Cantor argues that, in terms of elections, “their effect is marginal.” To be clear, Colbert and Stewart have emphasized that they are not attempting to influence political outcomes or, as Stewart told Maureen Dowd, be “warriors in anyone’s army.” Their real power lies in their capacity to question authority and show, in Cantor’s words, “that the emperor has no clothes.”

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” – Jonathan Swift

Some would argue that with their present influence, whatever its extent, come certain ethical obligations. The Daily Show may claim to be “unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity or even accuracy,” but media experts Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini write that even “fake news” shows should be held to some journalistic standards. Williams and Carpini complain that “The Daily Show does a much better job shining a light on the foibles of others than it does taking responsibility…for its own truth claims.”

It is difficult, though, to say exactly what sort of standards Stewart and Colbert should observe. Jeffrey Seglin, Director of the Communications Program at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, told the HPR that their “ethical standard is driven by the genre they’re working in.” Since that genre is satire, they should be afforded some “license to exaggerate and…embellish the news.” Seglin adds that the viewers, themselves, “have some responsibility to be more informed.” For example, a study published in The International Journal of Press/Politics suggested that at least some conservatives watch Colbert and fail to get the joke: they believe that he is a genuine conservative, rather than a satirist parodying conservative talk-show hosts. Seglin considers this “a problem with the viewers,” not Colbert, adding, “I don’t think there needs to be a disclaimer that says ‘this is fake news’” for a show on Comedy Central.

McCarthy broadly agrees: “I’m not sure that Stewart and Colbert should be held to the same kinds of standards as, say, New York Times journalists.” He notes that “we’re not holding the political pundits on MSNBC or Fox News, or CNN for that matter” to the traditional standards of “objectivity and ethics” either. McCarthy views this as further indication that, “the definition of what is journalism and what is entertainment [has] shifted” over the past 20 years.

Indeed, freedom from strict journalistic standards is central to the ability of Stewart and Colbert to do what they do best. Perhaps a more apt criticism is that they tend to use their comedic license as a shield as well as a sword. McCarthy notes that they, and especially Stewart, have a worrisome tendency, “when they get really sharply criticized,” to “pull back and say ‘I’m just a comedian.’” McCarthy calls this an “abdication of a certain kind of political responsibility” and argues that it is difficult for them to dodge criticism in this manner and still “be taken seriously as a political force.” Stewart and Colbert may benefit from the breakdown of distinctions between politics, journalism and entertainment, but that breakdown can be a double-edged sword: as McCarthy puts it, “it’s hard…to reestablish those lines of distinction once you’ve blurred them.”

“Satire is parody with a point” – Stephen Colbert

Heirs to a long tradition of political satire, Stewart and Colbert enjoy special license to expose the folly of society’s leaders. That said, they are also very much products of their times. Their prominence, not only as comedians but also as news sources, stands as a testament to widespread popular dissatisfaction with current politics and the mainstream journalists who cover it. They epitomize the breakdown of old distinctions between entertainment and political journalism. Even if they cannot shape political outcomes, they have considerable power to inform voters, expose and shame politicians, and increase political engagement.

With this power comes a responsibility: not a responsibility to adopt the strict and confining “balanced reporting” standards of mainstream journalists, but a duty to embrace their unique capacity to enhance political discourse without retreating, as Stewart sometimes does, behind the “I’m just a comedian” shield. Just a comedian?  When Comedy Central rivals mainstream network shows as a source of substantive news, perhaps Stewart would be better advised to shed the modesty and take a leaf from the in-character Colbert’s book. “I AM a comedian (and so can you!).”

Nowadays, it’s not just a simple knock on the head.

A new study led by U. Oregon graduate student David Howell and his advisors Dr. Li-Shan Chou and Dr. Louis “Lou” Osternig indicates that certain individuals may take longer to recover from concussions than previously thought.

The study differentiated symptoms (e.g. headache, memory loss) from their ability to react and multitask, finding that while subjects usually recovered from symptoms between two weeks to a month, the latter left them milliseconds slower, even at the two-month mark.

“Even though somebody feels better and they may say, ‘Okay, I’m ready to play, I feel 100 percent,’ there may be some effects to their response time based on filtering out extraneous information,” Howell said.

Even so, what good is a millisecond? According to Osternig and Chou, the difference a millisecond can make extends beyond protecting yourself on the playing field and into situations like whether you’re able to focus in class, remember information or even hit the brakes in time while driving.

Conducted in the Motion Analysis Laboratory — located in the depths of Gerlinger Annex — the study followed around 20 high school athletes from various sports like soccer and football over the course of two months. Volunteers were required to contact the lab within three days of experiencing a concussion and were not allowed to participate if they had received another concussion within the previous year.

According to Howell, a control group of students who had never been concussed was also assembled. This group consisted of students who matched the age, height, sport and sometimes even the position played by their concussed counterparts.

Osternig and Chou — who have been researching both sports and non-sports related concussions since the early 2000s — have seen a recent increase in volunteers and attribute it to the increased media attention other studies have been receiving. All three are happy with the increased coverage but are concerned with how their research will translate from the observational to the practical.

Chou grabs a clear, half-full water bottle to explain.

“From the outside or even if you did a very detailed scan, there may be no change in the structure of the brain,” Chou said. “But … if you look at our brain, the brain tissue is more like the water being contained in this bottle.”

Chou shoves the bottle across the table to simulate a concussion. The water sloshes violently.

“So, the outside of the bottle is still intact, but the water inside the bottle has been moved around big time,” Chou said. “Those kinds of sheer force, I mean, relative movement between the skull and brain tissue create a lot of stress and strain to the brain tissues and may affect their networking with each other, and that’s why it’s so difficult for us to diagnose, as well as know what really goes wrong.”

Dr. Greg Skaggs, Director of Athletic Medicine, shares similar sentiments.

“It would make my job really easy if there was a scan, but it’s not,” Skaggs said.

As of now, the best treatment for a concussion is complete rest (no class, no driving, no practice). Skaggs says that all of the varsity athletes he cares for are educated about concussions before playing and are highly discouraged from hiding injuries.

“Let’s say you’re a 20-year-old and you’ve worked hard for a bowl game — you’re not going to want to be left out and miss that,” said Skaggs. “It’s our job to protect them from themselves.”

Ultimately, the group’s goal is to provide people with the ability to make educated decisions about high contact sports rather than casting them in a negative light.

“I think we’ll just become more educated about how exactly we engage in these types of sports,” Chou said. “I don’t think it’s going to affect individuals’ willingness to participate in this types of sports, but better prepare them to participate.”

Hockey player Matthew Hanlon echoes this. He’s never been officially diagnosed with a concussion but has seen the effects they’ve had on his teammates.

“I guess you know that that’s a part of the sport, and the positives — the joy of the sport, outweigh the negatives,” Hanlon said.

President Obama’s second-term Cabinet selections have come under criticism for being exclusively white males, at least thus far. Many contend that such choices reflect a lack of diversity and balance among those closest advisors shaping federal policy. However, such a view is mistaken, not only leaping to conclusions before all vacancies have been filled but also distorting Obama’s first-term record.

Within the past month (all while UConn was out on break), Obama nominated Chuck Hagel to be the new Secretary of Defense, John Kerry to be the new Secretary of State and John Brennan to be the new Director of the CIA. All white males, true. But it is too early to claim that all of Obama’s second-term positions will continue that trend. For example, both the soon-to-be-vacant Secretary of Labor and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will have to be filled.

Obama claims his white male picks have been reflecting the people who are best fit for the job, which should surely be the most important qualification. Whether somebody is the “most” qualified person of all 315 million American citizens is nearly impossible to determine, of course, but his first three picks appear very qualified. Hagel was a U.S. senator and Vietnam War veteran, Kerry was also a U.S. Senator and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Brennan is the Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security.

Obama has had some racial and gender diversity in his first-term picks. Attorney General Eric Holder was black, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was female, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was female and black and Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki were both Asian. He also appointed two females to the highest judicial office in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Would a completely homogenous Cabinet be good for the nation? No, since a lack of diverse viewpoints could hinder the contemplation of all reasonable policy ideas. At the same time, diversity should not take a front seat over quality and intelligence. It should be a secondary consideration to how well somebody can do the job. And in that respect, Obama appears to be balancing Cabinet diversity (an ideal) with Cabinet meritocracy (a requirement).

As Jimmy Fallon noted on his television show, “Late Night,” last week, “Obama came under fire from the GOP over the lack of diversity in his cabinet. Obama was like, ‘You know I’ll be there too, right?’”

The American people have just finally exhaled after enduring a long and tiring presidential campaign, and already the talk has turned to 2016. (“Talk” here meaning the blathering of TV’s “talking heads.”)

In my first “PR Presidency” class, we addressed this talk with a talk of our own. First, we talked about the many names rumored to be 2016 contenders, and then about just one of those names: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

My professor gingerly brought up the subject of Christie’s girth and then, as politely as possible, asked us, “Is Chris Christie too…fat…to be president?”

But, forgive me, this is my maiden editorial column in The Eagle, and I have neglected to introduce myself. My name is Ryan Migeed, I am a sophomore and I do not believe that Christie is too fat to be president.

The problem with the “Christie is too fat” arguments is that they are all preconceived. He and his team of savvy politicos can anticipate any claim and prepare for it. “Heart disease” is countered with “no history in the family.” “High blood pressure” is refuted with “What presidential candidate doesn’t have high blood pressure in such a fast-paced campaign?” And the surest answer to any query is a clean bill of health from his doctor, which is entirely possible. (Granted, that bill of health would include a scribbled note from the doctor saying, “Lose weight,” but let’s ignore that for a moment.)

The kicker, of course, would be an exercise regimen, and many argue that if Christie starts to lose weight, he is definitely running in 2016.

But I argue that Christie can be a contender – and quite possibly win – without ever dropping a pound from now until Election Day 2016. His weight will be an issue, but only a subconscious one. His opponents won’t bring it up out of courtesy, and only reporters and town hall-goers will dare to broach the subject.

To be sure, Christie will be asked about his weight. But if he has a ready-made answer that displays enough humor (without getting angry at the premise of the question or the questioner’s right to ask it), he can effectively turn his weight into a non-issue.

Remember Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 one-liner? When asked a question about his age—he would become the oldest president elected—Reagan coolly responded, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” If Christie can have a similar “Reagan moment” (and he can), he will beat the “Christie is too fat” argument.

Not to mention, Christie’s weight simply plays into his devil-may-care attitude. It is as much a part of his character as his aggressive press conferences. And characters do well on national television.

What is most interesting about this whole “Is Christie too large?” debate is that it seems to be divided on generational lines. In my class, many, if not most, students dismissed Christie’s weight as an unimportant factor. Meanwhile, our professor (who is about our parents’ age), could not accept the idea that the American people would ignore such an obvious trait.

Perhaps the youngest voting generation is more willing to overlook physical differences in light of policy differences. After all, we were the ones who helped propel the first African-American into the presidency. Perhaps we’ll do it again with the first modern president who happens to be…big-boned.

Following in the footsteps of the coach with the most wins in college football history might make some uneasy — but Brian Polian isn’t here to be Chris Ault.

“I understand I can’t replace the man and I won’t try to,” Polian said. “Nobody could replace Coach Ault. I’m going to build on the tradition he’s laid.”

The native of The Bronx, N.Y. was formally introduced as the new head coach of Wolf Pack football on Friday. The former Texas A&M special teams coordinator and tight ends coach is the 26th head man in the 117 year history of Nevada football.

With his wife and two children in attendance, Polian was introduced to the media by athletic director Cary Groth and was questioned on everything from the Reno weather to how Cody Fajardo compared to Heisman trophy winner Johnny Manziel. While Polian did mention the question was not particularly fair, he did note the main similarity between the two signal-callers.

“They are both winners,” Polian said. “My brother Chris was scouting for the (Atlanta) Falcons and he told me after watching Cody play, ‘You got a real quarterback’.”

Polian thanked numerous people who helped him along the way in his introductory speech. Among them, were coaches Tony Dungy, Dom Capers, Jim Caldwell and hall of famer Marv Levy. He especially thanked the coaches who he had worked with along the way in college: Charlie Weis, Jim Harbaugh and Kevin Sumlin at Notre Dame, Stanford and Texas A&M, respectively.

Polian is a jack-of-all trades coach and has overseen positions from tight ends to defensive backs. The Wolf Pack is getting a coach with experience on both sides on the ball with an expertise in the kicking game.

“Brian is bright, hard-working, and a well-principled man, and I believe Nevada has hired the right man for the job.” Levy said in a press release.

The head coach is coming into a situation that is three weeks away from national signing day. With most of the secondary depleted to graduation and a hole at running back with Stefphon Jefferson leaving school early for the NFL draft, Polian and his staff have quite a task ahead of themselves.  According to ESPN.com, the Pack only has five commitments as of today.

However, the head coach did bring a reputation as one of the best young recruiters in the business. He was able to bring Heisman finalist Manti Te’o to Notre Dame when he was the head recruiter for the Irish.

“There’s no reason why we can’t recruit student-athletes to this place,” Polian said, “There are a lot of positives here and this isn’t a broken situation.”

The coach even admitted he had already started going after some of his former players at A&M.

One of the biggest questions the new head man has to address is the future of the pistol offense. The Chris Ault brainchild was on life support after offensive coordinator Nick Rolovich supposedly left to Temple. Rolovich is back, and Polian doesn’t see a problem with the offense.

“I’m not a dummy. The offense is pretty good so why change it?” Polian said.

The defensive side of the football has been the Achilles heel of the Wolf Pack football team for quite some time and the new coach didn’t mention what kind of scheme he would use but rather his philosophy.

“It’s not scheme-based but effort-based,” Polian said. “Good defense is multiple (schemes) and we need to have the courage to try new things that not a lot of people agree with.”

The new coach is being thrown into the proverbial fire with next year’s non-conference schedules which includes games at UCLA, Florida State and a home date with the Oregon Ducks. However, he’s not intimidated by the challenge.

“Whoever you put on the schedule we’ll go out and compete with them,” Polian said.

The new era of Wolf Pack football has begun, and Nevada has a man who wants to make the program a national brand.

“We will continue to build a program that this university, city and state can be proud of,” Polian said.  “Not just in Nevada, but all over the west coast people can wear their silver and blue with pride.”

Delivering on its promise as “the greatest manhunt in history,” director Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty avoids being the type of sloppy action flick made by blockbuster sentimentalists like Spielberg, Cameron or Bay. While most directors would turn the hunt for bin Laden into a cheap “Hoorah!” for citizens still reeling from an unconscionable horror, Bigelow fuels Zero Dark Thirty with her trademark tension and realism, leaving little room for celebration.

9/The film opens with calls of 9/11 victims trapped in the tower with no accompanying image, sending the viewer back to a day perhaps too painful to witness. Bigelow doesn’t sensationalize the infamous day with the cheapness of an image, and instead humanizes it with a cacophony of desperate voices. This explosive opening prepares the rest of the film for a series of aftershocks: torture, misinformation, dead ends, suicide bombings and an indolent bureaucracy — unwelcomed fallout for a nation hell-bent on justice and revenge.

The manifestation of this national bloodlust is Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA agent who spends most of the film convincing a male-dominant bureaucracy to act on the accumulated evidence of Bin Laden’s whereabouts. The film falters after the midpoint, as Maya attempts to rally her government to attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold. Writer Mark Boal includes a montage of Maya defiantly scribbling a count of the number of days that have gone by without attack on her superior’s glass pane. This is Boal’s desperate attempt to breathe some life into the mundane intelligence office sequence, but he doesn’t explore the bureaucratic process enough to make it worthwhile.

After this slow section, the audience is shaken awake with the film’s payoff: the raid on Osama’s stronghold. Bigelow exhibits her mastery of the war film in this dark, grungy attack laden with night-vision shots and sweat-inducing silence. The audience becomes complicit in Maya’s mission. The camera acts as her omniscient eye over the event — she is a woman with commanding vision and we live vicariously through her victorious moment, which takes on a greater meaning for all Americans.

While we follow Maya through the story, we get little insight to her background and, perhaps even more disturbingly, her motivation. But the opening of the film is her motivation — it’s the panic, doom, dread and suffering of those trapped in the twin towers that needs to be avenged. As critic Scott Foundas aptly points out, “She’s a fanatic hunting a fanatic.”

Indeed, Maya has her own Jihad or “religious crusade,” which leads one to ask: “on our quest to kill bin Laden, have we become just as fanatical and violent as our enemy?” This impersonal, nationalistic goal leaves our very human protagonist drained and purposeless once achieved. She parallels a suicide bomber, except she lives through her Jihad and finds nothing on the other side.

____

Zero Dark Thirty is a rare, significant film because it stirs up the socio-political war gauntlet while maintaining the focus on its human characters. Many critics have taken issue with the former aspect, especially in regard to the film’s portrayal of torture. Critics have problematized these scenes with an unimaginative, vehement outcry, with Rethink Review’s critic Jonathan Kim as their lead crusader. Many critics claim torture doesn’t work as a means for extracting useful information and that it didn’t contribute to the hunt for bin Laden — therefore its function in the plot, not its portrayal, is the point of contention.

After all, if we believe for an instant that the critic knows more about torture than we do, then the critic escapes with her contempt and ignorance unquestioned. I offer a new perspective: the torture sequence could arguably be a poetic summation of American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The body of the terrorist takes on the meaning of a larger Middle Eastern population — one America has invaded, bombed, accused and ravaged in its unflinching search for Osama.

Regardless, Kim brings up a considerable point: why does Bigelow claim this film is “based on firsthand accounts of actual events,” if parts of the film digress into fact-twisting and historical digressions?

Kim and many other critics fail to understand that the story subsumes events and acts committed by the military into a general narrative revolving around one character, thus inherently fictionalizing it. If the film didn’t do this, these same critics would be bemoaning an incoherent, scattered narrative unable to string together a causal chain leading to bin Laden’s killing. Furthermore, Bigelow has no obligation to tell her story as it exactly unfolded, even with the opening claim being based on firsthand accounts. Such a film would be inherently dull. Intelligence worked for eight years — enough time to assemble a staggering six million-page document — before finding bin Laden. Who wants to watch these preliminary intel-hunts unfold in three hours?

Critics bemoan Zero Dark Thirty’s use of torture as a means for inaccurately pushing the plot forward. They refer to a report from Diane Feinstein, head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which claims torture did not directly lead to finding bin Laden. However, as CIA director Michael Morell states, “Some [information] came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques,” adding that “whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”

Film critics, government officials and any moral-do-gooders who found a comment box online have disregarded Morell’s statement (ironically, the person in the best position to see all sides of the issue) under the rhetoric of “discrepancies” and “potentially inconsistent,” desperate to affirm their anti-torture crusade.

When Kim contends that the plot from torture to bin Laden should be taken literally (and thus morally reprehensible), he reveals his severe ignorance to intelligence-gathering techniques. His own evidence laughs back at him: the six million-page intel document. Any effort to retrace causality from one clue to another would be futile.

Zero Dark Thirty uses torture as an expedient plot device with multiple functions: it takes on a wider poetic significance as the larger Middle East reveals Maya’s character and brings an American audience face to face with something ugly that did happen in the war effort. Unfortunately, the plot’s use of torture has become the major hang-up of critics missing the film’s more implicit significance. Perhaps Bigelow would’ve been wiser to muddy up the investigational timeline to dissipate the strong causality between torture and information.

___

Critics who claim the portrayal of torture in the film is immoral need to rethink the way torture serves the plot without thematizing or condoning it. At the end of the day, the US did torture detainees — whether by Maya’s hand or someone else’s – and the film presents that. Critics instead reveal contempt for the audience, determined to wave a warning flag crying, “it didn’t really happen like this!”

We get it — but it’s a movie and you’re a movie critic, not an intelligence officer. None of us know exactly how it happened and none of us wish to piece together every clue that got us there.

The real contention lies not in the how, but in whether or not Bigelow’s reductionist portrayal of intelligence gathering reveals her own misunderstanding or a conscious artistic decision to tell a complex revenge story. I’ll go with the latter.

Our first reaction was laughter, though that hardly seems fitting. Hypocrisy is rarely funny.

After two years full of questions but absolutely no answers, the NCAA just dropped the figurative hammer on itself. Let’s review the facts, or lack thereof:

Nevin Shapiro, a perpetual liar and swindler with an inferiority complex that he took out on the Hurricanes, is in prison for a Ponzi scheme totaling nearly $1 billion. Shapiro poured his heart out to a Yahoo! Sports reporter who ran with his wild story of illicit gifts, yacht trips and strippers for UM athletes from 2002 to 2010.

The NCAA launched an investigation into this alleged rampant misconduct, benefited from full disclosure and cooperation on the university’s part, but still failed to produce results.

Our athletic department has remained poised, compliant and persistent in its own right, even shutting the football team out of two bowl games to lighten any forthcoming sanctions.

“I am frustrated, disappointed and concerned by President Mark Emmert’s announcement today that the integrity of the investigation may have been compromised by the NCAA staff,” President Donna E. Shalala said in a statement. “… we will continue to work with the NCAA and now with their outside investigator hoping for a swift resolution of the investigation and our case.”

NCAA’s statement on Wednesday was shocking, and borderline humorous. Emmert called out former members of the association’s enforcement staff for improperly obtaining information to use against UM.

Give that a second to sink in. The integrity police have abandoned their own rules. The administrative body tasked to investigate wrongdoing at Miami could not follow its own guidelines.

Everyone is guilty of the occasional unethical misstep. But something feels especially unsavory about this new development in our long-running case with the NCAA.

People always wonder whether the NCAA has a particular vendetta against Miami. Since the brand first exploded during the Jimmy Johnson era, there has been outrage over perceived unethical conduct at the U.

In 2011, Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff wrote a follow-up to his infamous 1995 letter calling for Miami’s athletic program to be shut down. “Your football program has no regard for the rules and your administration has no ability to enforce them,” he said.

Two years and zero solutions later, it’s the NCAA that must look inward to investigate a blatant disregard for its protocol and its “ability to enforce” it.

Will the NCAA ban itself from bowl games? Reduce its scholarships to set the program back a few years? Or does this developing mess warrant the dreaded death penalty?

The Hurricanes’ future is still at stake. The longer this investigation drags on, the more of a hindrance it becomes. But even the NCAA can’t take away the legacy we’ve built, the pride we’ve established or our trust in this program.

We stand with the U.