The Daily Background

As everybody knows, the US and Iran have very abnormal relations since 1979, and this creates several problems. Not the least of which is the problem of accurate reporting about activities within and with regard to Iran. Of course there’s a language barrier, but there’s a lot more at play than that.

Iranian media is controlled largely by the government, and as such is not always reliable. However, it is very difficult for foreign media to operate within Iran as well, which greatly impairs our judgement of what is actually going on inside Iran. And there are plenty of people eager to push their own stories for their own reasons.

For instance, the right-wing pro-war Israeli paper The Jerusalem Post has reported sensational, inaccurate things about Iran’s nuclear program in the past.

The hawkish pro-war Canadian paper National Post has reported erroneously that Iran’s parliament was taking steps to identify Jewish Iranians by forcing them to wear yellow badges, like those used by the Nazis during the Holocaust (this turned out to be totally untrue, and I was actually among one of the first bloggers to call them out on the hoax story in fact). Unfortunately, a good deal of damage had already been done, and the story had spread in the press (the National Journal Post ultimately offered a public apology for its erroneous and sensational reporting, it should be noted however).

Recently, it was reported that Iran had kicked nearly 40 IAEA inspectors out of Iran. Doubts have been cast on these reports as well.

And this type of hoax and misinterpretation is not only limited to the media, either.

Last year, the House Intelligence Committee (then controlled by Republicans), released a report which said that the IAEA had discovered evidence that Iran was indeed building nuclear weapons. It was reported all over the place, and the story line got out there pretty quickly, but a short time later, the IAEA issued a very terse statement accusing the Republican-led committee of not only distorting its findings, but also of wholesale fabrication and straight-out-lying.

That ultimately turned out to be somewhat of a minor embarrassment for the House Republicans involved. Or at least, it would have been a minor embarrassment if they had cared about the truth (their report was roughly of the journalistic integrity that you might find in, say, one of Ann Coulter’s books).

The fact is that various media outlets have published a remarkable amount of inaccurate stories about Iran, and pundits have gone to great lengths to further sensational story lines. Now, that said, I’m no fan of the Iranian regime (quite the opposite), but there is still a great deal of absurdity floating around in the US press. Despite what the pundits may want you to think, we have no hard evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

The latest flare up in Iran reporting is a claim that Iran is building 3,000 centrifuges which are used for uranium enrichment. The Iranian government denies this, and says that it is highly technical and a statement made by one of their lawmakers was lost in translation. So these are some reasons why I take pretty much any sensational-sounding story regarding Iran with a grain- or a fistfull- of salt. Sure, I’ll read the stories published, but I don’t believe everything I read.

Filed under: Iran Related, Z-TDB Blog