Disgraceful Reporting by the Boston Herald and Others on Iran

Source: LRC
Michael S. Rozeff

The best way to get news is to read actual testimony, reports, transcripts, and speeches. The worst way is to read headlines, unless you like to be subjected to distortions and misunderstandings. In between, one can read news reports and then blogs, comments, and editorials about news reports.

No matter what one reads, the next step is to think about the matter and place it in perspective based on important factors, past events, past news, past communications, history, and so on.

Case in point: the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper today. See here for his actual testimony in written form. Most important is that he said clearly that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and CIA chief David Petraeus said the same thing, and the latter said he had met with the head of Mossad to convey his view. This portion of his testimony was not reported in the Boston Herald article. Instead, it pieced together two unconnected parts of his testimony and left the impression that Iran was making enriched uranium in order to conduct an attack on the U.S.!! See here. This is disgracefully poor reporting and utterly misleading.

Google provides headlines. Many of these, that I will not cite, are disgraceful too. They leave the impression that Iran has bolstered its threats unilaterally and is suddenly more willing to attack the continental U.S. This is not at all what Clapper said. He said that Iran is "now more willing to conduct an attack on the United States" in the case of a "real or perceived" threat by the U.S. to the regime. In other words, an attack on them or a U.S. threat on them that they considered deadly serious might possibly be met by their attacks on American soil. That's his opinion, but even that doesn't get reported accurately. For example, the Washington Post says, according to Google, "launch terrorist attacks inside the United States in response to perceived threats from America and its allies..." Notice that they added the word "terrorist" to Clapper's testimony and they left out the part about a real threat. This is really pitiful and biased reporting.