Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As a covert war against Iran seems to be intensifying, the U.S. media have looked like willing partners in an anti-Iran propaganda campaign, helping US officials project dishonest claims, rs. We'll speak with Cyrus Safdari of Iran Affairs about coverage. Also on the show: The two year anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake is being marked as a sign of failure, as millions of dollars of aid and assistance seem to have translated to hundreds of thousands of people living in tents, and a new outbreak of Cholera. But is what went wrong with [...]
Jan
06
2012
NYT Misleads Readers on Iran Crisis
Paper disappears some inaccurate reporting
In two articles yesterday (1/5/12), the New York Times misled readers about the state of Iran's nuclear program. On the front page, the Times' Steven Erlanger reported this: The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. There is no such International Atomic Energy Agency assessment. The IAEA report the Times is mischaracterizing raised questions about the state of the Iranian program, and presented the evidence, mostly years [...]
Dec
03
2010
NYT's Iran Missiles Walkback
Paper discovers reasons for skepticism
Certain editions of the New York Times (12/3/10) published today an update to its reporting on Iranian weapons with a much more skeptical tone than its original article. The first article (11/29/10), headlined "Iran Fortifies Its Missilies With the Aid of North Korea," presented the case in definitive terms: Iran now possesses powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe." As a FAIR Action Alert noted (12/1/10), the evidence to back this up was thin. And the paper decided, "at the request of the Obama administration," not to publish the WikiLeaks cable that was the basis [...]
Dec
01
2010
NYT's Iran Missile Fizzle
Paper cites WikiLeaks cable, but omits doubts
A November 29 New York Times article alleging that Iran possesses powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe" appears to rest on incredibly shaky evidence--amounting to a German newspaper article that did not fully corroborate the U.S. claims the Times was touting. The piece relied on one of the cables published by the website WikiLeaks. The Times did not publish the cable on its website "at the request of the Obama administration." But the paper was willing to selectively use information from that cable to bolster the U.S. claims against Iran. Doubts about the piece [...]
Nov
12
2010
William Greider on G-20 & trade, Ali Gharib on Iran & Wikileaks
By CounterSpin
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of the G-20 summit in Seoul is squarely focused on trade deals and U.S. relations with China. But is the whole discussion of globalization, China and trade missing the point? William Greider makes that case in a new piece in the Nation magazine. He'll join us to talk about it. Also on CounterSpin today: There's growing talk of a U.S. military attack on Iran. And some elite journalists, who think they have found evidence of Iranian interference in Iraq, are doing their part to beat war drums. If the script sounds familiar, that's [...]
May
21
2010
Helena Cobban on Iran, Mike Epitropoulos on Greece
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: When Brazil and Turkey brokered a deal to get Iran to ship much of its Uranium abroad for enriching, much of the world saw it as a positive step. But not so U.S. officials, who saw it as a threat to their efforts to impose UN sanctions on Iran—though perhaps not that much of a threat as the day after the Iran deal, the U.S. announced it had gotten China and Russia to support Iran sanctions. How has the U.S. media distinguished itself in covering all this Iran news? We'll be joined by Helena [...]
Feb
26
2010
Cyrus Safdari on Iran, Robert Alvarez on nuclear power
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen says it’s time to "fight crazy with crazy" on Iran's nuclear policy. If that passes for discussion of diplomacy in the corporate press, maybe we should look beyond them for interpretation of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report. We'll be talking with analyst and IranAffairs.com blogger Cyrus Safdari. Also this week: Nuclear power in America is back. Again. The White House announcement of multi-billion dollar loan guarantees for a new plant in Georgia got plenty of media praise, with editorialists and journalists eagerly citing familiar industry-friendly talking points. [...]
Oct
07
2009
Iraq All Over Again?
The press & Iranian nuke allegations
There have been recent discussions (e.g., New York Times, 9/29/09) about whether the press is doing a better job covering allegations about Iran's nuclear program than they did during the run-up to the Iraq War. But in some crucial and very basic ways, many in the media are performing just as poorly as they did in 2002 and 2003. The core concern is whether Iran's nuclear enrichment is intended for weapons. Pundits and reporters seem to think they have the answer. "As if Afghanistan were not enough, now there's Iran's move to get nuclear weapons," declared NBC's Chris Matthews (10/4/09). [...]
