But even if memories of the run-up to the Iraq War have led to heightened vigilance in some newsrooms, it’s unclear whether the media’s efforts to fact-check the Trump administration’s claim that an “imminent threat” justified its decision to order the killing of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani are making an impact. A lot has changed since 2003. The government’s power to frame the public debate has only been strengthened by the advent of social media and the rise of ideological outlets, while the media’s ability to control and sustain a narrative has diminished accordingly.
Officials’ claims are often amplified in headlines and cable chyrons — “Pompeo: Soleimani Was Not In Baghdad On A Peace Mission,” read a Tuesday Fox News graphic — even if they are challenged later in greater detail. The president’s message was splashed across MSNBC hours later — “Trump: We Saved Lives By Killing Soleimani,” read a chryon — during a segment where an analyst expressed fears about the U.S. being led to war.
And Trump can also circumvent any questioning from the White House press corps, which hasn’t had a formal briefing with the press secretary in more than 300 days.
The president defended the killing to millions on Monday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and has wielded his Twitter megaphone to his nearly 70 million followers to make additional unchecked claims about Iran and further threats. “Without Twitter I think we’d be lost,” Trump told Limbaugh. “We wouldn’t be able to get the truth out.”
The president’s ability to shape public opinion without offering any evidence of an “imminent threat” so angered New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that he urged the media to dismiss Trump’s claims entirely until he provides more facts.
“The media and the public are far less gullible now than they were [in 2003], but even now there’s a tendency to take administration claims at face value, or at least semi-seriously,” Krugman wrote in his newsletter. “Don’t do this. Lies don’t stop at the water’s edge. Administrations that are dishonest about domestic policy tend to be dishonest about foreign policy too. And while the Bush administration lied a lot, Trump and company lie about everything.”
The fact that the administration has argued that it has intelligence to back up its assertions – but just hasn’t shared it with the public – is one clear parallel with 2003. That means that even if news organizations are quick to point to the lack of evidence, they still feel obliged to give voice to the administration’s claims.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered confident assurances of the strength of Trump’s argument that the attack on Soleimani was defensive in nature – not an “assassination,” as some reporters and analysts argue – while appearing on six networks on Sunday, barely flinching under often-critical questioning. Both the Times and the Post have run stories quoting White House sources as suggesting the evidence of the threat posed by Soleimani was, in the words of a tweet by the Times’s Rukmini Callimachi, “razor thin.”
But their reporters continue to quote the official line, as well.
In a quadruple-bylined story leading Sunday’s paper, the Times reported that “some officials voiced private skepticism about the rationale for a strike on General Soleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years.” One U.S. official told the paper that the Trump administration’s new intelligence was essentially “business as usual” for Soleimani and didn’t suggest an imminent threat.
That deeply reported follow-up story, however, appeared to receive less Facebook interactions than two of the Times’ initial accounts on the killing, according to statistics provided by social media monitoring service NewsWhip.
Several of the biggest stories on Facebook since the killing have focused on troop deployments, while a story from British outlet The Mirror about an “unidentified eulogist” at Soleimani’s funeral putting an $80 million bounty on Trump’s head had the most interactions. (Fact-checking site Snopes notes that the bounty “is not yet known to have been authorized by, or represent the official position of, Iranian authorities.”)
Despite the signs of faltering attention by readers, news leaders insist they will continue to pursue the truth about the alleged “imminent threat” and will not shift focus as events unfold, as they say happened in 2003.
“With a few rare exceptions,” Tapper said ruefully in a POLITICO interview, “the media drank the Kool-Aid in the build-up to the war in Iraq and too many people didn’t do their jobs.”
In case anyone wondered if there were any red-rimmed Dixie cups in the CNN newsroom this time around, the network highlighted Pompeo’s lack of specifics Tuesday morning with a chyron: “Pompeo Defends Soliemani Killing; Trump Admin Yet To Offer Evidence of ‘Imminent Threat.’”
Baron, in a statement to POLITICO said, „Throughout the history of this country, there has been vigorous public debate about our foreign policy, especially our involvement in wars. That’s what a democracy looks like . . . The highest responsibility of the press is to report thoroughly, vigorously and probingly when this country’s leaders take actions that can put the lives of American troops and others at risk.“
And Walcott, whose former Knight Ridder team was lionized in the 2018 film “Shock and Awe,” believes he’s detected a shift in the right direction.
“I think that although that was nearly two decades ago, a lot of reporters at the Times, the Post and elsewhere now recognize that our job as reporters is not to accept what the government says about matters of war and peace — or anything else — at face value,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO.
Indeed, governments of both parties have misled the public during wartime, as the ”Pentagon Papers” revealed during the Vietnam War or as the “Afghanistan Papers” reiterated just last month. The Iran crisis presents a unique dilemma in terms of trusting information from the government as the president has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims in office.
Since the killing of Soleimani, there has been a push in the news media “to find out if there’s any credible intelligence to support the Trump administration’s claim that another, larger attack on Americans in Iraq was ‘imminent,’” said Walcott, now a contributing editor at Time, “as well as the extensive examinations of whether escalating tensions with Iran will make Americans and others safer or less safe.”
In a quadruple-bylined story of its own Sunday night, The Post reported that Pompeo urged Trump last summer to strike Iran, which the president opted not to do, and more specifically spoke to him about killing Soleimani several months ago. “Some defense officials said Pompeo’s claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated,” according to the Post, “and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations.”
Pompeo did mention the killing of the contractor, which has been blamed on an Iranian-backed militia, on the Sunday shows, while also asserting that Soleimani posed an imminent threat, a contention that hosts drilled down on.
“When will the American people know why President Trump decided to do what he did?” asked CBS “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
On “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked, “Don’t the American people have the right to some understanding of what it was, why it was so urgent to take out Soleimani now?”
“When you say the attacks were imminent, how imminent were they?” Tapper asked Pompeo on “State of the Union.” “Are we talking about days? Are we talking about weeks?”
Tapper acknowledged the next day that “it’s not fun when people insinuate you don’t love your country because your job is to question our leaders, but that’s the job.”
While journalists are pressing the government for answers, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who notably clashed with his former editors at the New York Times in trying to get more skeptical pre-Iraq reporting in the paper, said he still worries that the Trump administration is setting the agenda.
“You can see it already when Trump and the people around him kept saying there was an imminent threat and that’s why they had to go after Soleimani,” Risen said in an interview. “That’s the kind of thing that they kept saying before the war in Iraq. It’s always difficult to fight back against that.”
Risen — who is currently a senior national correspondent at The Intercept, where he and others recently revealed secret files showing Iran’s strong influence in Iraq — said the broader issue for the news media to grapple with is why the U.S. government “is murdering a foreign government official at a time when there’s still an assassination ban on the books.”
Some news organizations, like The Associated Press, acknowledged mostly refraining from describing the killing of Soleimani as an “assassination because it would require that the news service decide that the act was a murder, and because the term is politically freighted.”
Risen said avoiding that word is “cowardly” and likened it to news organizations using descriptions like “enhanced” or “harsh” interrogation when covering Bush-era torture techniques.
“It’s a silly debate,” Risen said. “It’s an assassination.“
Source: politico.com
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