These moralistic "tough-guy" tones might sit well with armchair warriors like the Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt and the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, but they appear likely to continue America's stumbling progression toward another Middle East war.
And, as during the prelude to the Iraq War, the attitudes of the Post and Times editorialists are in sync with the warmongering of the neoconservatives. Regarding Iran, it is hard to distinguish between the opinions of the Post, the Times and, say, neocon propagandist Michael Ledeen writing recently in the Wall Street Journal.
So, over the past several weeks, it has become the collective judgment of key honchos from American journalism that the Obama administration should refuse to seek compromises regarding Iran's nuclear program and instead push for "regime change."
However, beyond the human consequences of such war-like policies, there's the journalistic concern about these prestigious opinion leaders making up their own "reality."
For instance, there's the troublesome fact that virtually all the available evidence indicates that contrary to Western hopes and desires President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12, 2009, election in Iran and that his chief challenger Mousavi didn't even come close.
As an analysis by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes discovered, not a single Iranian poll whether before or after the election, whether conducted inside or outside Iran showed Ahmadinejad with less than majority support. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It!"]
However, the Post and Times seem determined to place their cherished myth of Mousavi's victory at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Over the past year, whenever they mention the Iranian elections, the Post and Times characterize the vote as "disputed" or cite the opposition's accusations that the results were "rigged" or "fraudulent."
The Bush Exception
Though one might argue that such wording is fair given the controversy, it is worth noting that the two newspapers took the opposite approach toward the U.S. presidential election in 2000 when the evidence was overwhelming that George W. Bush stole the victory from Al Gore, who got more votes nationally and apparently got most of the legal votes in the key state of Florida.
Rather than forthrightly present the findings of a news media study which discovered Gore's rightful Florida victory a year after the election, the editors of the Post and Times buried the startling result and instead highlighted hypothetical partial recounts that still left Bush ahead.
The editorial thinking after the 9/11 attacks apparently was that the truth would undermine Bush's "legitimacy" amid the crisis and open the newspapers to accusations that they had undercut the patriotic unity that was then sweeping the country.
To enforce the "Bush-won" judgment, prominent commentators, such as the Post's media writer Howard Kurtz, mocked anyone who bothered to read the recount study's actual results and who dared notice the unacceptable outcome (Gore's victory). Those who did became "conspiracy theorists." [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]
So, the major U.S. news media harps on what is essentially an unsupported conspiracy theory that Ahmadinejad "stole" the Iranian election while treating as a "conspiracy theory" the accurate recognition that Bush did steal the U.S. election. You can look far and wide for the Post and Times referring to Election 2000 as "disputed" or "rigged" without much success.
To make matters worse, the Times and Post editorialists now have elevated their mythology about Iran's "fraudulent" election into the chief rationale for relying upon the Green Movement to facilitate "regime change" in Iran, despite recent evidence that the opposition is fizzling.
"As a formal political organization, the reform movement is dead," reported Will Yong and Michael Slackman in a news story for Saturday's Times that nevertheless carried the hopeful headline, "Across Iran, Anger Lies Behind Face of Calm." (Given today's economic dislocations, a similar headline could be applied to nearly every country on the planet, including the United States.)
Spiking Afghan Peace
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