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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 11/23/11

The Media and Iran: Familiar Mindlessness

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The lesson supposedly learned by the U.S. establishment media from the Iraq debacle was the danger of relying on anonymous government sources to disseminate unverified fear-mongering accusations. Rather obviously, no such lesson has been learned, as this continues to be the primary reporting method for accusing the Supreme Hitlers of the Moment -- Iran -- of anything and everything the U.S. Government can dream up. The latest entry, and one of the most egregious yet, is this Washington Post screed appearing under this headline and hovering scary picture:

Here's the crux of the story, by R. Jeffrey Smith, Joby Warrick and Colum Lynch:

The Obama administration is investigating whether Iran supplied the Libyan government of Moammar Gaddafi with hundreds of special artillery shells for chemical weapons that Libya kept secret for decades, U.S. officials said. . . .The discovery of the shells has prompted a probe, led by U.S. intelligence, into how the Libyans obtained them; several sources said early suspicion had fallen on Iran. "We are pretty sure we know" the shells were custom-designed and produced in Iran for Libya, said a senior U.S. official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the accusation.

So it isn't merely that the prior Hitler of the Moment -- Moammar Gadaffi -- had Weapons of Mass Destruction, but far more alarming: Iran likely manufactured and gave Gadaffi those WMDs! Is there no Evil behind which these Persian Monsters are not lurking? Here are all of the sources the Post reporters cite for this claim:

U.S. officials said . . .  several sources . . . A U.S. official with access to classified information . . . a third U.S. official said. . . .One U.S. official said . . . .another U.S. official said.

The Post's own Ombudsman has repeatedly bashed the paper for its excessive, ill-explained, reckless use of anonymous sources (which violates even the Post"s own non-public anonymity rules), and has insisted that the paper's "credibility" -- to the extent such a thing can be said to exist -- is being steadily eroded by this practice. Here, the Post screeches a sensationalized, highly consequential story (it even proudly notes these disclosures "may exacerbate international tensions over the country's alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction") based exclusively on anonymous U.S. official sources, and barely pretends to explain why anonymity is justified (that the accusations are "sensitive" is an added reason to ensure accountability, not protect the government accusers with anonymity).

The most journalistically baseless reason to provide anonymity is to allow U.S. officials to disseminate official government claims with no accountability -- that's called serving as a propaganda vehicle -- and that is exactly what the Post does here. Of course, Iraq-like reporting has long been used to hype every Iranian Threat, but traditionally, it's been David Sanger or Michael Gordon at The New York Times through whom these anonymous government decrees about the Growing Persian Menace have been laundered as intrepid reporting. So congratulations to the Post for scooping the NYT in being gratefully used this way by the U.S. Government. In Washington media circles, being chosen by U.S. officials as the mindless stenographic vessel for the dissemination of anonymous official statements is an honor higher than the Pulitzer. As Seymour Hersh detailed yesterday in an interview on Democracy Now, exactly the same precincts that took the lead in disseminating false claims about Saddam are being used to do so with Iran, and that certainly includes the pro-Iraq-War, supremely neoconservative Washington Post.

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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