As negotiations begin in Geneva between Iran, Germany and the U.N. Security Council permanent members, Juan Cole debunks the prevailing myths about Iran. Myths that could not endure if U.S. news outlets took journalism seriously and challenged U.S. officialdom on Iran.

Realizing that "by now, talk of the Iranian elections will have traversed into the abyss of yesterday’s news," Warehouse magazine contributing writer Mohsen al Attar (7/10/09) still thinks "the events narrate a highly educational tale about the role of media in present-day society":

Few would question the media machine's efficiency. Once a major media outlet decides to run with a story--as was done with the Iranian election protests--there is little to arrest its circulation or to challenge the implications the particular telling makes.

Of the Iranians and non-Iranians supporting the protests--and they are numerous in Canada alone--an important distinction can be made between those reacting to the events and those reacting to the story of the events. I suspect those belonging to the former must possess a perpetual feeling of dissatisfaction with the media’s porous and flimsy representation of Iranian politics, as if social reality can always be tucked away in neat little binaries: tradition and modernity, religious and secular, legitimate and illegitimate.

Al Attar goes on to contrast Amira Haas' maxim that "the role of the media is to monitor the centers of power" with the appropriate term for such "stories that contain little substance, an obvious slant and are devoid of any critical analysis: propaganda." In al Attar's view, "cheerleading a particular position--there is a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, Hugo Chávez is a bad man, the solution to the economic crisis is to throw more money at the financiers who got us into the mess--is the role of a propaganda machine."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

Independent investigative journalist John Pilger recently (7/6/09) gave Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman his view of the broad media landscape, informed by the fact that "we have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program, though I wouldn't call that alternative":

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research had one of the most informative pieces I've seen on the Iranian election, published on WashingtonPost.com (6/26/09). Weisbrot examines the actual Iranian vote-counting procedures, and concludes that in Iran, "large-scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence."

Since votes are supposed to be counted at individual polling places in the presence of 14-18 witnesses, Weisbrot points out that "if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses--or perhaps hundreds of thousands--to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses."

But Weisbrot would no doubt acknowledge that the absence of such interviews is not definitive proof that fraud did not occur, because his column is as much about the failure of the U.S. media system as it is about the Iranian political system. Here's his account of looking into the actual mechanics of the vote:

After searching through thousands of news articles without finding any substantive information on the electoral process, I contacted Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who heads the North American Studies department at the University of Tehran. He described the electoral procedures to me, and together we interviewed, by phone, Sayed Moujtaba Davoodi, a poll worker who participated in the June 12 election in region 13 (of 22 regions) in Tehran. Mr. Daboodi has worked in elections for the past 16 years. The following is from their description of the procedures.

The Iranian election is a major foreign-policy story for the U.S. corporate media, and coverage has centered on the question of electoral fraud. Yet Weisbrot, a diligent researcher, found no news account that answered the most basic questions about how the Iranian vote was actually supposed to be conducted.

The main point of having a free press is to protect other freedoms, the right to free and fair elections prominently among them. If this is how they go about investigating claims of vote fraud, though, how can we hope that corporate media will ever be an effective guardian of voting rights when they're threatened here at home?

Knowing how much "we reporters love a catch phrase," Iran writer Reese Erlich (ZNet, 6/28/09) wants you to know that, despite "Twitter being all a flutter in the west," current reporting is "highly misleading" in that "Iran is not undergoing a Twitter Revolution. The term simultaneously mischaracterizes and trivializes the important mass movement developing in Iran."

After tracing the concept's origins back to self-obsessed Western media--"desperate to find ways to show the large demonstrations...reporters were getting most of their information from Tweets and YouTube video clips"--Erlich gives us the reality of the situation:

First of all the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter. While reporting in Tehran, I personally didn't encounter anyone who used it regularly. A relatively small number of young, economically well-off Iranians do use Twitter. A larger number have access to the Internet. However, in the beginning, most demonstrations were organized through word of mouth, mobile phone calls and text messaging.

But somehow "Text Messaging Revolution" doesn't have that modern, sexy ring, especially if you have to type it with your thumbs on a tiny keyboard.

More importantly, by focusing on the latest in Internet communications, cable TV networks intentionally or unintentionally characterize a genuine mass movement as something supported mainly by the Twittering classes.

In actuality, as "hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets in Tehran and cities around the country," they largely "organized silent marches through word of mouth and phone calls, since the government had shut down text messaging just prior to the election." Erlich makes clear it is important to understand that, "contrary to popular perception, these gatherings included women in chadors, workers and clerics--not just the Twittering classes."

Listen to FAIR's current radio program CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

Veteran independent Mexico reporter John Ross (CounterPunch.com, 6/28/09) wants to know which countries come to mind when thinking about "a stolen election by an entrenched regime," "demands for a recount to which election officials respond by offering to recount just 10 percent of the vote," or even "a regime-controlled media that exalts the incumbent's victory and demonizes the loser"? Are you thinking "Iran 2009? Yes!" or "Mexico 2006? Yes and no."

Toward showing that "the stealing of the Mexican presidential election by the right-wing oligarchy stirred little indignation anywhere outside of Mexico," Ross finds that "a comparison of coverage extended to both instances of electoral fraud by the New York Times, the 'paper of record', is instructive":

NYT coverage of the upheaval in Iran has been overwhelming. During the first nine days of the electoral crisis, the Times ran at least one front-page story daily--from Election Day Friday, June 12 through Saturday, June 20, the Iranian electoral sham occupied the right-hand column (the lead story) in the international edition on eight out of nine days. The Times also ran a second Iran story on the front page in six out of the nine editions reviewed--on four of those days, the stories were accompanied by a four and sometimes five column color photo....

The Times sent four by-lined reporters into Tehran for the festivities--Robert Worth, Michael Slackman, Neil MacFarquhar and the Iranian Nazna Pathi, plus Eric Schmidt reporting from Washington. Bill Keller, the New York Times executive editor, flew to the Iranian capital to pen a daily journal.

As for the contested Mexican election: "The Times ran a front-page curtain raiser on election eve, but not in the right-hand column" and "a second front-pager July 3 just above the fold." Ross points out that "unlike the New York Times coverage from Tehran, news of the enormous gathering ran inside," even as "mobilizations were expanding exponentially to 2 million participants (police reports) by July 30, the largest outpourings of political protest in Mexican history."

In sum, Ross writes of how "the brand of corporate journalism that the New York Times practices distorts such stories as Iranian resistance to electoral fraud and leaves Mexico 2006, in which millions took to the streets to defy the fraudulent election of a U.S. proxy, in the dust of history." Listen to FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Chuck Collins on Mexican Election" (8/11/06).

Proving his memory better (or at least less selective) than that of the institution of corporate journalism, Media Bloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson (6/24/09) is proposing that "It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being 'timid' in his comments about the Iranian government's violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn't consistently censor U.S./Iranian history":

Take CNN's recent Iran timeline, titled "A Brief Look at Iran's History."

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has "been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors" since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been "pro-Western." Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the U.S. government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Jacobson has to look overseas to cite reporting of the fact that "the CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company." That Agence France-Presse piece goes on to explain how "for many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests."

So maybe its not Obama's "timidity" that really gets under corporate commentators' skin, but the fact that even the United States' president is more honest about these facts than the folks at our major Cable News Network: "You might remember Obama owning up to this bit of history during his recent trip to the Middle East, in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo."

Listen to the related FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

Robert Parry of Consortium News (6/15/09) gives hearing to a "strong case" to "undercut the widespread media assumption" of electoral fraud in Iran. But, true or not, "the rush to the 'fraud' judgment among much of the U.S. news media is shaping the political realities" and posing that "Ahmadinejad's 'theft' of the election proves that hardliners in Israel and neoconservatives in the United States were right all along about the impossibility of dealing rationally with Iran"--the predictable upshot being "that force is the only option to employ against Iran."

Parry also is "curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well":

In Election 2000, Florida--a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies--was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush.

Yet the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s "legitimacy."...

Similarly, serious irregularities in Election 2004, especially in the key state of Ohio, were never seriously investigated by the mainstream news media, which instead mocked Internet sites (including ours) and citizens groups as "conspiracy theorists" for citing some of the bizarre vote tallies favoring Bush.

"When an election occurs in another country and an 'unpopular' leader appears to win," Parry tells how "an opposite set of rules apply," and in corporate journalists' eyes, "anyone who doesn't immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every 'conspiracy theory' is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored."

Discussing (5/31/09) the "story on the two U.S. journalists detained in North Korea," NPR Check's Mytwords states clearly that it "deserves coverage, as did some coverage of [Roxana] Saberi's arrest in Iran (though not the wall to wall attention given by NPR)." But a reader's link to the L.A. Times' May 24 "article on another irregular (illegal?) detention of a journalist" sheds light on a glaring double standard:

In this case the journalist was seized by U.S. forces and its allies. The reader noted the lack of NPR coverage on the abduction/detention of Ibrahim Jassam, complaining that NPR has voiced "not a word"--which this search of NPR proves.

A glance at the Committee to Protect Journalists report for "Attacks on the Press in 2008: United States" reveals that Jassam's case is not an anomaly (e.g., Jawed Ahmad). What is not an anomaly is NPR's utter disregard for, and refusal to investigate, attacks against journalists that are initiated by the United States government/military.

On this point, Mytwords notes that independent reporter "Jeremy Schahill has written incisively about the U.S. strategy of violence and intimidation against critical media and the complicity of mainstream U.S. media outlets (such as NPR) in covering it up." See also FAIR's Media Advisory: "U.S. Media Applaud Bombing of Iraqi TV" (3/27/03).

Reporting that "the Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist Roxanna Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison," Jeremy Scahill asks (Rebel Reports, 5/26/09) the simple question, "If Iran Freed Roxanna Saberi, Why Won't the U.S. Release Journalist Ibrahim Jassam?"

Part of the answer might lie in a media environment heeding former Col. Ralph Peters' recent "essay for a leading neocon group calling for future U.S. military attacks on media outlets and journalists" along with "censorship" and "news blackouts."

Of course, Scahill is savvy enough to point out that "what Col. Peters is advocating is not new"--"It is already a de facto U.S. policy to target journalists":

The U.S. has consistently attacked journalists and media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a “war crime.” Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama’s point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

The U.S. bombed Al Jazeera in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, attacked it multiple times in the 2003 Iraq invasion, and killed Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayoub. On April 8, 2003, a U.S. Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home and office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists operating in Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the fifteenth-floor Reuters office, killing two cameramen, Reuters' Taras Protsyuk and José Couso of Spain's Telecinco....

Last week, a Spanish judge reinstated charges against three U.S. soldiers in Couso’s killing, citing new evidence, including eyewitness testimony contradicting official U.S. claims that soldiers were responding to enemy fire from the hotel. One year ago, former Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne told Democracy Now! she saw the Palestine Hotel on a military target list and said she frequently intercepted calls from journalists staying there.

All of which makes it less than surprising that, as Scahill tells us, "the U.S. military continues to hold journalists as prisoners without charges or rights in...Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for Reuters has been a U.S. prisoner in Iraq since last September despite an Iraqi court's order last year that he be freed." See the FAIR Press Release: "Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" (4/10/03)

The New York Times had a story yesterday (5/21/09) about the test of an Iranian missile "that was capable of striking Israel and parts of Western Europe." This was an important point in the article--reporters David E. Sanger and Nazila Fathi included it in their lead paragraph, and later listed it among "three technologies necessary to field an effective nuclear weapon": "The second is developing a missile capable of reaching Israel and parts of Western Europe, and now the country has several likely candidates."

The article reported that the range of the missile is "believed to be more than 1,200 miles." Which led me to wonder: Which "parts of Western Europe" are within 1,200 miles of Iran? Well, the city in Iran closest to Western Europe is Tabriz, and looking at this distance calculator shows that Tabriz is less than 1,200 miles from...eastern Crete.

Now, Tabriz is not right at the border of Iran, so you could probably launch a missile with a range of 1,200 miles from some part of Iranian soil and have it land in, say, Athens. You certainly couldn't reach Italy, let alone any of the other countries that probably leap to mind when you think of "Western Europe." So why didn't the Times say "Israel and Greece" when describing the missile's potential range? Would that be too, I don't know, unalarming?

Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack "Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari" to emphasize "the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan," before admitting that "U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably provoke anger and indignation among civilians," Palestine Chronicle editor Ramzy Baroud (5/14/09) notes that "this is as much as most U.S. media... are willing to concede as far as U.S. responsibility in lethal wars, civil strife and militancy in both countries is concerned."

Baroud elaborates in ways unheard in corporate media:

The escalation in Pakistan is not entirely surprising, however, as U.S. officials and media pundits have been adamant in advising the new administration that it was not Afghanistan that posed the greater threat to U.S. interests, but Pakistan. It was similar to the attitude of neoconservatives in the Bush administration after its failure in Iraq. It was not Iraq that the U.S. should have attacked, but Iran, they tirelessly parroted, hoping to generate yet another war.

What we are not told, however, is that unremitting U.S. bombings of the utterly poor and neglected northern provinces of Pakistan have garnered untold animosity towards the U.S. and its central government allies. It provoked, in some areas, total chaos and lawlessness, which in turn gave rise to the Pakistani "Taliban."

Closing with distressing estimates of "1 million Pakistanis already on the run in the northern and eastern parts of the country," Baroud tells us how "they are threatened by fighting, hunger and all sorts of predators, including U.S. drones circling overhead"--which U.S. media also are keen to push as the latest bloody solution in the region. See the new FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Pro-Drone Propaganda: 60 Minutes Slights Critics of Controversial Weapons" (5/12/09).

Corporate media outlets treat U.S. intelligence agencies with solemn reverence when those agencies are reinforcing official views about American enemies and friends. This is true even when the same media outlets are duped by intelligence agencies time and again.

But stray from the nationalist straight and narrow, and these otherwise respected sources risk becoming invisible, perhaps even suspicious.

That's what happened in the run up to the Iraq War. CIA director George Tenet was prominently quoted as he affirmed the White House's most dire fabrications, but when intelligence officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force challenged key aspects of the White House's case for war, they were downplayed or ignored in favor of intelligence supporting the case for war.

As Washington Post Pentagon reporter Thomas Ricks put it (8/12/04), "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?" And the New York Times mea culpa on the subject, for all of its faults, similarly acknowledged that "Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."

This model goes some way in explaining why major media outlets continue to report without question President Barack Obama’s and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claims that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, even while their own director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, says it's not true.

As an excellent post by Charlie Davis points out:

Just over a week ago -- and after Blair had told another Senate panel that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons -- Secretary Clinton told ABC's Charlie Gibson that "Iran's pursuit of the nuclear weapon is deeply troubling to not only the U.S. but many people throughout the world." Obama has likewise consistently referred to Iran's "development" or "pursuit" of nuclear weapons.

It would be simple for journalists at major media outlets with official access to ask why the president and the secretary of state are making claims that U.S. intelligence can't back up. But even after all the confessions and mea culpas, the damage resulting from other instances when they failed to challenge officials, many journalists apparently still haven't learned the lesson.

[In an earlier version of this post, the headline mistakenly referred to Dennis Blair as the “DCI”-- he is the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence.]

Asserting that "one positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions," Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald (3/9/09, ad-viewing required) cites "the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen" as evidence of "a substantial--and very positive--change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel":

Two weeks ago, Cohen--writing from Iran--mocked the war-seeking cartoon caricature of Iran as The New Nazi Germany craving a Second Holocaust. To do so, Cohen reported on the relatively free and content Iranian Jewish community (25,000 strong). When that column prompted all sorts of predictable attacks on Cohen from the standard cast of Israel-centric thought enforcers (Jeffrey Goldberg, National Review, right-wing blogs, etc. etc.), Cohen wrote a second column breezily dismissing those smears and then bolstering his arguments further by pointing out that "significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist" in Iran; that "Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries"; and that "hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve" given the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman in Benjamin Netanyahu's new Israeli government.

Today, Cohen returns with his most audacious column yet: Noting the trend in Britain and elsewhere to begin treating Hezbollah and Hamas as what they are--namely, "organizations [that are] now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible," rather than pure "terrorist organizations" that must be shunned--Cohen urges the Obama administration to follow this trend.

Not prone to rose-tinted views, Greenwald reminds us that "in the very recent past, not even our Constitution's First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel's enemies," writing that "the U.S. government has made it illegal merely to broadcast Hezbollah television stations and has even devoted its resources to criminally prosecuting and imprisoning satellite providers merely for including Hezbollah's Al Manar channel in their cable package."

Now if only the Times didn't feel compelled to "balance" such sensible views with outright calls for terrorism by Israeli forces. See the FAIR Action Alert: "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as 'Education'" (1/14/09)