What do the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN all have in common?
There are many answers to the question above, but one is that all three have downplayed the seriousness of Iran’s threats to Israel, and instead focused on the Jewish state’s alleged response to being threatened.
Take for example the opening paragraph of the Washington Post story on upcoming indirect talks between Iran and US officials on the topic of its nuclear program:
US negotiators prepared to resume indirect talks with Iran this week in hopes that an attack on a key Iranian nuclear facility, widely attributed to Israel, would not derail the nascent effort at diplomacy.”
The story, written by Karen DeYoung, Shira Rubin and Kareem Fahim, starts out by framing the apparent attack on the Natanz nuclear facility as possibly derailing diplomacy. Left unmentioned is that the likely trigger for the incident was that Iran had commenced enriching nuclear material to higher levels than it had done previously, a development that would have significantly lowered the breakout time – the expected time needed by Tehran to reach nuclear weapons capability – if left unchecked.
Together with years of documented research into and testing of exactly the kind of ballistic weapons required for firing such a weapon into Israeli territory, drives home a central point: the threat Iran presents to Israel is real.
Yet the Washington Post elected to simply overlook this essential context, focusing instead on the Jewish state’s response to this burgeoning existential threat.
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Meanwhile at the New York Times, the “Tuesday Briefing,” written by Natasha Frost, fails in another way to accurately reflect the situation.
Frost defaults to trite boilerplate text when providing this background information:
Though Iran has long maintained that the program is peaceful and aimed at energy development, Israel sees it as an existential threat, as Iranian leaders have often called for Israel’s destruction.”
That is simply not accurate. Israel does not just ‘see’ Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. Employing a ‘he said, she said’ narrative here is blatantly false and fundamentally misleads readers by creating the impression that a demonstrable lie, namely Tehran’s claim that its nuclear program is peaceful, is as credible as a verifiable fact, namely the numerous threats to Israel by leading Iranian clerics and politicians.
There is simply no equivalence.
Over at CNN, Israel’s alleged actions in defense of its own citizens against the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism is portrayed as a ‘threat’ to a peaceful resolution with Tehran. An article posted to the CNN website, “Mysterious blackout in Iran threatens to undermine nuclear talks” by Ramin Mostaghim, Tamara Qiblawi, Andrew Carey and Mostafa Salem, focuses almost entirely on the apparent action taken by Israel, and says “the apparent attack could complicate the course of nuclear talks.”
Only eight paragraphs in do the writers acknowledge that the incident came “after Iran ceremoniously launched advanced centrifuges at the Natanz plant.” And while the article later mentions that “On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz,” it fails to make clear the significance of this development.
Similarly, a section in the article ostensibly giving the Israeli perspective, titled “What is Israel saying?”, fails to state clearly that Israeli officials and analysts uniformly reject the Iranian line that Tehran’s nuclear program is peaceful, and are gravely concerned by the possibility of a prospective nuclear attack.
Major Failure of Omission
Throughout these reports, numerous journalists, whose words would have been reviewed by an even greater number of editors, failed to detail the vital background information that Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has on multiple occasions explicitly called for Israel’s destruction.
Khameini’s devotion to the anti-Israel cause is not merely rhetorical; he has tacitly admitted that Iran sent arms to the Palestinians with which to attack the Jewish state, and has pushed an official government agenda of Holocaust denial and distortion.
Also omitted from news stories are any references to the spate of Iranian attacks on US forces in recent years, and the humiliation of American sailors who had strayed into Iranian territorial waters in 2016. The situation worsened to such an extent that the Biden administration authorized strikes in Syria against Iranian-linked forces.
Despite a plethora of evidence of Iranian belligerence being both the ultimate cause of instability in the region, as well as the underlying reason why any nuclear accord is likely to fail, major media outlets are failing their readers by casting Israel, not Iran, as threatening peace.
