More Bombings Are Always in Order

The coverage didn’t explain why Iran is allied with Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, or provide a history of either group that reached past the era of iPhones. It didn’t address a near century of American meddling, pressure, and outright repression in and around Iran. It didn’t prod the Pentagon’s presumptions that Iran having nuclear weapons spelled a surefire global catastrophe. It certainly didn’t confront the legitimacy of Israel’s own not-so-secret possession of nuclear weapons or its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, despite the Israel Defense Forces having committed scales of civilian slaughter scarcely seen this century. (Needless to say, the United States’ axiomatic right to nuclear armament merited no discussion, even as it remains the only nation in history to have dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations.)

More appetizing for the five media bigwigs was the prospect that President Donald Trump blundered his initial assessments of the strikes. In devoting days of front-page real estate to a leaked intelligence report that the bombings may have set back Iran’s alleged nuclear program by “only” months, the news outlets rallied around the idea that the bombings were inadequate. The implication, of course, was that more bombings were in order.

The outlets enlisted a phalanx of interview subjects from consistently pro-war think tanks and federal institutions, almost all of whom agreed that Iran is bad, the US good, the bombings imperative; if discrepancies arose, they concerned tactics rather than history, legality, morality, or substantively alternative viewpoints. Perhaps worst of all, these mainstays of the mainstream media glibly painted Iran as scary, repressive, malicious, and incomprehensible, marshaling the Orientalist rhetoric that has legitimized decades of American-led and -funded depredation in the Middle East.

One of the more appalling analyses of the war was published last week by Roger Cohen, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Paris bureau chief for the New York Times. The piece opens with a former political prisoner “shuddering” at her memories in Iran’s “notorious” Evin Prison before it depicts a “humiliated” post-bombardment Iran “limping on.” (As it happens, on the day Israel bombed Evin, killing seventy-one people, the Times published a piece titled “What to Know About Iran’s Notorious Evin Prison,” highlighting its “horrifying conditions” and its standing as a “symbol of repression.” The fact that detainees, visiting relatives, and prison staff were among those bombed to death seemed beside the point.)

In his analysis, Cohen introduces readers to the war’s historical context within a section titled “Paranoia, Institutionalized,” which begins not with the joint CIA–MI6 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953, but with the 1979 Iranian Revolution in which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced “a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West.” (Such was the passive voice — “seen as” — in which Cohen framed the shah, who was a brutally oppressive and corrupt US-installed dictator.)

“Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important,” Cohen went on to solemnize about a post-revolution Iran supposedly overrun by turban-clad fanatics. He closes with a summary of Impasse, a film about the onus of the hijab and “the ravages within a single Iranian family brought on by differences over the theocratic government.” An effectively sinister end to a story about a sinister Islamic nation — but hardly a surprising one from a journalist who recently called the United States a nation “whose core calling has been the defense of democracy” and who, in 2008, just over a year after the Lancet issued a study estimating the Iraq War’s death toll could have been as high as 942,000 people, wrote, “I still believe Iraq’s freedom outweighs its terrible price.”

Similarly representative of this tendentious reportage was an article by Greg Miller, the Washington Post’s investigative foreign correspondent, titled “A weakened Iran could turn to assassination and terrorism to strike back.” In his ominous picture of a scheming, retaliatory Iran, Miller doesn’t permit a single mention of Israel having recently assassinated thirty Iranian security chiefs and eleven nuclear scientists, nor one of Israel’s decades-long habit of killing off unfavorable actors around the region. Instead, it is Iran that’s said to pose “an escalated threat” to the United States and its allies in the Middle East. “Asymmetric strikes” and “terror plots abroad,” Miller warns, could come at any time.

Synagogues in France and Germany are increasing security, he reports, just as Iranian spies are being arrested in Cyprus and Britain. But how, one wonders, might Iran symmetrically respond to hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, and the elimination of its top military leaders at the hands of the most monied (and lethal) militaries in modern history? Where do Mossad spies having infiltrated Iran’s government, planting drones and explosives inside the country, factor into this tale of peril and espionage? How would the United States respond if Iran were to assassinate its secretary of defense, which, in effect, is what the Trump administration did in 2020 when it droned the convoy carrying Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani? (Miller notes that Iran’s limited response to this “seemed oddly subdued” — implying, by extension, that a normal retaliation by Iran would have entailed something murderously unhinged.)

Miller’s evasions to these questions are abetted by the narrow regional context he offers his readers. “Iran is widely seen as a particularly determined sponsor of violence,” he writes, adding that the nation “has been linked to devastating attacks since the early years of the Islamic republic.” He cites Hezbollah’s 1983 attack on US service members in Beirut, but he fails to mention either the United States having interfered in the Lebanese Civil War to begin with or Israel having enabled an unimaginably gruesome massacre of more than 3,000 civilians in Beirut the year prior — a massacre to which then senator Joe Biden later responded, “Israel’s presence in Lebanon is vitally important.”

He doesn’t mention the US military shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, killing all 290 people on board. (The naval captain of the ship that fired on the plane was later awarded the Legion of Merit.) He certainly doesn’t mention the US-facilitated coup in Iran, the US having authorized the sale of chemical weapons supplies to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, or Israel’s still unfolding region-wide spate of civilian murders, ostensible war crimes, and infrastructural destruction.

No, in this account, there is only one menace to the Middle East. In fact, Miller tells us, concerns about Tehran were “so grave” that US officials thought it might have been Iran that ordered twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to try to assassinate President Trump in 2024. (Investigators, he dutifully concedes, later concluded there was no such link.)

One-Sided Antagonism

State propaganda, by definition, disseminates through news reports that assume the positions of national institutions, particularly the military — and that uncritically cite government officials without affording space to dissenting positions and opinions. Throughout the five outlets’ coverage in the last month, a chorus of reliably consonant interview subjects, in the guise of scholarly dissections, helped to calcify a narrative of unilateral antagonism by giving cover to caricatures and beginning after the facts in order not to have to unearth their foundations.

A single New York Times article credulously cited President Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, US intelligence agencies, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, American officials, Senator Lindsey Graham, European officials, Western officials, Secretary Marco Rubio, and Representative Jim Himes. Another cited the Israel Defense Forces, the former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, and the famously compromised Brookings Institution.

A Wall Street Journal analysis about Iran potentially emerging from the bombings “more dangerous and unpredictable” than ever featured a who’s who of think tank centrists without a single dissenting voice. Among them was Behnam Ben Taleblu, an “Iran expert” at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is an organization so renowned for unequivocally Israel-aligned stances that the Journal disclaimed that it “promotes relations with Israel in Washington.” Nevertheless, the paper fortified its analysis with Taleblu’s wisdom: “The regime is wounded, but still lethal. Any victory lap now, despite the real successes, the real military successes, would still be premature.”

To the Washington Post, Sen. Chris Murphy said, “You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence — no matter how many scientists you kill. There are still people in Iran who know how to work centrifuges.” Neither Murphy nor the Post interrogated the killings themselves — they were inevitabilities to be briskly nullified by reverse conjunctions: “Yes, but.” In a news report on June 25, the Washington Post conformed to Murphy’s premise: “Israel has said it killed up to a dozen senior nuclear scientists during its airstrikes, but Iran has spent decades researching and producing nuclear materials and has a deep bench of experts.” But Iran. In a news report published on June 26, the New York Times wrote: “In nearly two weeks of fighting, Israel killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists. But if enough have survived, Iran could use a hidden stockpile to race toward a weapon.” But if.

The news reports in the last weeks that drew on the phrase “race toward the bomb” are too numerous to count, evoking George Orwell’s warning about the likelihood that “ready-made phrases” come to “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.” One CNN headline read: “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been smashed, but the race toward a bomb may be gathering pace.” Another CNN headline read: “Israel says Iran was racing toward a nuclear weapon.”

In some reports, vilifying rhetoric about Iran assumed near Disney-ish proportions. One New York Times piece ended with a zinger by Rep. Jim Himes: “The regime may be vile, but they are not stupid, and this stuff can be relatively easily relocated.” Iran’s vileness stood unquestioned.

A CNN report spookily referred to the Iranian enrichment plant Fordow as “perhaps the most impenetrable fortress of Iran’s nuclear program [. . .] buried deep beneath a mountain.” According to the Wall Street Journal, after the bombs stopped falling, it was not death and destruction but domestic arrests, paranoia, and the dress code–enforcing morality police that plagued the Iranian people. In another news report, drawing on the argot of professional wrestling blogs, the Wall Street Journal touted “Israel’s thrashing of longtime enemy Iran.” On the night of the US bombings, the Associated Press offered a seminar in how not to write a lede with this mixed-metaphor dramaturgy: “The U.S. military struck three sites in Iran early Sunday, inserting itself into Israel’s effort to decapitate the country’s nuclear program in a risky gambit to weaken a longtime foe amid Tehran’s threat of reprisals that could spark a wider regional conflict.”

In the same report, republished by the Washington Post, the Associated Press somewhat breathlessly described “darkness outside the West Wing” and “a siren r[inging] in the background in city traffic that continued without pausing for the historic moment” of Trump’s post-bombardment address. Cohen, in his aforementioned New York Times analysis, invited Brookings Institution fellow Jeffrey Feltman to describe Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, “deep in his bunker,” as someone whose “eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”

When you work inside mainstream newsrooms for a few years, you learn two things about the reportage of incipient foreign wars in which the United States is a player. The first is that only a handful of American news organizations can afford to send reporters to battlefields. Those that do usually end up explicitly (or indirectly) embedding with a national military. Those that do not must instead rely on a handful of international news wires — Associated Press, Reuters, AFP — to cover the events, which the wires themselves base mostly on “official” (i.e., governmental) sources. The results are standardized extractions from the fog of war, repeated across newsrooms.

The second is that the senior reporters tasked with covering wars from the United States’ standpoint end up roaming the halls of the Pentagon or otherwise rubbing shoulders with brokers and notables at DC taverns — and they do so for the long haul, often for whole careers. The national security establishment is hard to crack and the correspondents who endure do so by reproducing official press releases, by weltering in the incrementalism of today’s facts without yesterday’s context, and by looking more or less fondly upon their compatriotic service members.

Because the aspirations to work in network news and to report on military affairs tend to converge in people who already have centrist politics, such suspensions of disbelief tend to come easily. It helps that they are able to humanize, even befriend, the military officials sitting in stately, air-conditioned offices rather than having to contend with the gory repercussions of faraway drone strikes on shabbily constructed civilian apartments in Sanaa or Beirut — or Tehran. As these senior correspondents settle into plush lives of six-figure salaries, daily routines, and ample facetime on national television, they also settle into the roles of military mouthpieces.

A Media Narrative That Sounds Familiar

In May 2004, the New York Times published a famed quasi-apology for its hawkish reportage on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the invasion. Few of the newspaper’s reports showcased this drum-beating more than those by Judith Miller. “More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, [George W.] Bush administration officials said today,” begins one of Miller’s 2002 eagerly unskeptical articles.

The report bears an eerie structural and substantive resemblance to the last weeks’ coverage of Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed, in the highly susceptible weeks preceding the outbreak of war, the pattern among our leading news outlets — seen long before Iraq and Gaza — seems to be a posture of feverish bellicosity in the early stages, followed only much later by handwringing investigations of consequent civilian misery, and always with a tone of surprise, as if civilians in the modern age have not consistently borne the brunt of warfare’s miseries.

“We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” the New York Times wrote in that rare moment of contrition. “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”

Twenty years later, during his Weston International Award acceptance speech, the Indian intellectual Pankaj Mishra noted that while the “war on terror” may have come to be seen as a military and geopolitical failure, “it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life.”

The delicate approach to certain social and domestic issues espoused by the mainstream press in the last decade seems not to have extended to its foreign policy reportage. When it comes to enemies of the Pentagon, our most influential journalists continue to yield to embedded mendacity, the abnegation of interrogation, and the victory of partisanship over truth. The total death toll following the invasion of Iraq remains unknown, but it is likely the highest of any conflict in the twenty-first century. Facile, reflexive coverage of the air strikes against Iran could easily have resulted in a comparable cataclysm, a comparable inequity. The chapter is not yet closed.