An intelligence report was released this week saying with confidence that Iran halted any nuclear weapons program in 2003, and the “rogue nation” has not resumed it as of 2007. Thankfully, the New York Times and other leading media outlets have highly publicized this report, an inconvenient truth to an administration that has consistently presented Iran as an imminent nuclear threat.
By great contrast, The Minaret has been distraught by many sectors of the media’s willingness to go along with U.S. vitriol directed against Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program in past months. Some, including The New York Times, have publicly apologized for their obvious lack of journalistic rigor in the lead-up to the Iraq War, allowing its false pretenses to go unquestioned with devastating consequences for the region.
Yet, too often we’ve seen these same media outfits towing the administration’s line on Iran, which until this week had been united on the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and largely on the aggressive rhetoric utilized to threaten it.
As notable voices within and outside the official corridors of American policy have been speaking about the increased possibility of hostilities with Tehran, the terrifying consequences of heightened conflict in the already ravaged region have apparently not been enough of an incentive for some of these same news outlets to fulfill their own standards of journalistic rigor.
Witness, for example, the Washington Post’s coverage of the IAEA’s November 2007 report on Iran. Though the report was clear that “the Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran,” arguably the most important sentence of the report given what we now know, you wouldn’t read it in the Post’s article. Instead, as indicated by its subtitle, “U.N. Report Faults Tehran’s Input on Nuclear Program,” the newspaper opted to highlight the sentences indicating less than proactive cooperation on the part of Iranian officials, and repeated what we now know to be falsehoods such that Iran could indigenously develop nuclear weapons within a year.
The high stakes and possibility for disastrous results when news outlets forego their journalistic responsibility to favor administration propaganda has repeatedly caused consternation at The Minaret, particularly over the issue of Iran. This is why were pleased to see the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, honestly and accurately presented, in the pages of the New York Times and other outlets this week. No matter that it is inconvenient to the administration, it gives us hope in the so-called leaders of our profession that the truth of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program was displayed so openly before the public this week, effectively denying the privilege of disinformation to those who would wish to use it for calamity.
However, all is not safe and sound just yet. George Bush has made it explicitly clear that Iranians simply possessing the knowledge necessary to make nuclear weapons would be enough for World War III, and the NIE has frankly stated that “We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.”
As the situation escalates, we hope that the major news outlets will continue this week’s trend of journalistic responsibility, learning from the tragic consequences of their shameful obsequiousness before the Iraq War. If not, this week’s cause for hope may retrospectively be seen as a fleeting glimpse of sanity in between historic blunders, twin disasters where the failure of the U.S. administration was surpassed only by that of its “independent” media.