Reporting the Iran Nuclear Issue: Peace Journalism

As a follow up to my previous Iran entry, I discovered this excellent piece from Peace Journalism, in which Jake Lynch points out how conscious or unconscious selection of certain words and phrases reinforce the propaganda of the western political elites.

Consider the word ‘fears’ – is that justified in these cases, or misleading? Was the West really ‘afraid’ that Iraq was developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Or was this, as US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told an interviewer from Vanity Fair, merely a pretext – the ‘lowest common denominator’ among advocates of regime change? Are there really such fears vis-à-vis Iran or is that, too, a convenient stick with which to rally international support against another member of the ‘axis of evil’?

However, I was mistaken when I said there was “no obvious Goldstein-esque hate-figure” because, as Lynch highlights, it is very much Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Lynch points out Ahmadinejad “was relentlessly demonised as a fanatical ‘hardliner’” for pointing out that “countries ‘which have used nuclear weapons against defenseless civilians and used depleted uranium in Iraq’, [are] taking it upon themselves to ‘be suspicious of Iran’s nuclear programme.’”

Without clear, unambiguous and rational reporting of this issue, the news media are doing nothing more than propagating political propaganda that is building “good”/'evil“ myths necessary to frame a future military intervention in Iran.