Michael Slackman: New York Times and other journalists have been lying to you

My jaw dropped. I was stunned by the first paragraph of a recent New York Times piece by Michael Slackman.

Until Iran’s current political crisis, Iranian experts largely agreed that the Islamic republic wanted to develop the capacity to build nuclear weapons, without actually producing them.

Really, Iranian experts have agreed all along that the conflict was not over weapons, but over capability, from before the crisis that began in June? Slackman and other reporters presumably knew about this consensus. Why have New York Times readers not known about this?

When Juan Cole wrote in October that Iran was seeking a "latent nuclear capacity", this was nearly the first wide-audience explanation of the concept I had come across. The New York Times was doing in October what it did this week in Alan Kuperman's op-ed, claimed that the issue in discussion is preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

I'm not surprised. I've known they were lying - being deliberately misleading. I've said they were lying. They have been careful usually to put the word "weapons" into quotes by someone - so the Times could pass a statement it knew not to be true to its readers but in the voice of someone other than its reporters. To carefully parse one's words to create a false impression while not making an outright false statement in one's own voice is not only lying, but even worse, the party that does it loses the ability to claim it was innocently reporting what it believed.

Now, according to Slackman, the Revolutionary Guards are becoming more powerful and they are more hard line than the clerics they are replacing in power. The Revolutionary Guards may well be more hard line, but how does that demonstrate that Iran wants a weapon now instead of a virtual weapon, that the New York Times has known was the expert consensus all along? It doesn't. The rest of the article contains nearly no informational value.

The only information we get from Slackman's article is the stunning admission that for a long time, continuing to today, the New York Times and all US media organizations with access to Iran experts has been and continues to deliberately mislead its readers into believing Iran aims for a weapon instead of a "Japan option".

It should not be Juan Cole's job to undo hundreds of misleading articles in the press. Reporters who understand the difference between nuclear capability and a nuclear weapon have a responsibility to put the distinction between the two to government officials up to and including the U.S. President and Israeli Prime Minister, and to put their responses into their reports.

But as bad as it is, as horribly as the professional news media is colluding with government officials to mislead their consumers, the situation was far worse before the internet made information far more accessible to those willing to look deeper.