Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran, August 29, 2006. Majid/Getty Images
July 21, 2013
On September 27, 2012, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a presentation at the United Nations about
Iranian nuclear capabilities. It featured a simplistic, cartoon-like drawing of
a bomb and a hand-drawn “red line,” indicating that Iran’s accumulation of
enriched nuclear material in excess of the amount represented by the red line
would constitute justification for a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu did not
mention any other option.
The Wall Street
Journal’s coverage of the presentation focused on
the differing official opinions about Netanyahu’s claim that “the international
community needed to be prepared to attack no later than summer of 2013 to
prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb.” The New York Times
coverage of the event focused on how Netanyahu’s deadline represented a
“softening” of the Israeli position as part of a “difficult dispute with the
Obama administration.” Britain’s Financial
Times focused on divining Netanyahu’s motivation
for the speech: “[The address] was a highly public argument for a stronger U.S.
threat to attack Iran if it does not back off from what the Israeli leader
described as the final push toward a nuclear weapon.”
Absent from much of the
news coverage of Netanyahu’s presentation was a thorough evaluation of Iran’s
actual nuclear capabilities, or of the full range of options
available to policy makers. The news coverage made it seem as if the only
choice facing the international community was when to threaten to attack Iran’s
nuclear program, and what Iran needed to do to avoid being attacked.
The media coverage was
representative of larger patterns we found in a study of the way in which six
leading newspapers in the United States and Britain have framed events related
to Iran’s nuclear program over the past four years. Rather than thoroughly
exploring Iranian intentions and capabilities—and the factors affecting
security strategy on all sides—much of the news coverage has focused on the
political and diplomatic back and forth between government officials,
particularly on what different American, European, and Israeli officials say
and, more briefly, what Iranian officials say back.
Rather than asking why officials say what
they say, and how best to settle the dispute on terms acceptable to all, news
coverage—and as a consequence, public discussion—has been caught in a
constrained and distorted narrative of how Iran threatens global security and
how best to coerce it to stop. It is a narrative that has only a passing
resemblance to the complex contours of the dispute, but one that holds vast and
potentially dire consequences.
Echoing the Official Line
There can be little doubt that
English-language news media coverage plays an important role in American and
European public perceptions about Iran’s nuclear program and in the official
policy response to it. Media scholars and political scientists have found that
certain news outlets’ framing of the debate about Iraq’s supposed stores of
weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003 was found in hindsight to have
profoundly affected public discussion of the threat posed by Iraq and increased
the popular and political support for preventive military action.
With the international
stakes as high, if not higher, in the case of Iran and its nuclear program, the
question becomes how is news media coverage affecting public perceptions, and,
ultimately, the policy options available to decision-makers? This was the
driving question behind “Media Coverage of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” the study conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at
Maryland (CISSM). The study examined the news coverage of six prominent and
agenda-setting English-language newspapers (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, and Independent) during four
three-week periods throughout the past four years.
In this instructive but
admittedly limited sample of newspaper coverage of Iran’s nuclear program, many
of the same patterns that plagued news coverage prior to the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq reappeared: an overreliance on official government sources; a narrow
framing of the dispute that hews closely to official preferences; and a lack of
precision and context in discussing Iranian nuclear capabilities and
intentions.
For example, nearly 70
percent of the sources quoted or relied upon in the 1,232 articles analyzed in
the CISSM study were associated with a national government, with U.S. and
Iranian officials making up 36 percent and 23 percent, respectively, of all
government sources. As a consequence of this heavy reliance on official
government sources, news coverage emphasized how officials saw the dispute and
what officials argued was the preferred or necessary policy course.
The
most prominent example of this pattern was the reporting about the Obama
administration’s “two-track policy” of coercive diplomacy. Newspaper coverage
of the 2009 Geneva negotiations and the subsequent fuel-swap deal focused on
what officials from the United States and Western European states saw as the
acceptable outcome of negotiations: Iranian concessions, including full
cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and tight
restrictions or prohibitions on Iranian dual-use nuclear capabilities. A
September 27, 2009 Washington
Post article reported that
“[I]f Tehran does not respond seriously by year’s end [to U.S. demands], the
United States and its partners could begin to push for crippling sanctions.” Similarly,
an October 2, 2009 Wall
Street Journal
argued: “Despite initial signs of progress in talks... U.S. officials are
expected to push for new U.N. or unilateral sanctions unless Tehran backs up
its word with actions in coming weeks and months.”
When negotiations
didn’t yield the expected outcome within the U.S.-imposed time frame, coverage
focused on the necessity of sanctions to further pressure Iran. While some
newspaper coverage focused on the likely inability of sanctions to produce
Iranian concessions, few articles explored other potential policy options that
might lead to a mutually agreeable outcome and avoid military action. Even
fewer mentioned the possibility that pressuring Iran further could actually
lead to regional instability or to an Iranian decision to build a nuclear
weapon.
When the UN Security
Council finally debated and passed an additional sanctions resolution in June
2010, the logic of the sanctions went mostly unquestioned in newspaper
coverage. Instead, a majority of the coverage focused on the belief held by
U.S. officials and others that the sanctions, in the words of a June 10, 2012, Washington Post
article, “should prompt the Islamic Republic to restart stalled political talks
over the future of its nuclear program.” Coverage during this period did give
some attention to the failed diplomatic efforts of Brazil and Turkey to avoid
the sanctions, but didn’t address the substantive critique made by Brazilian
and Turkish diplomats of the sanctions resolution and the policy course adopted
by the United States, China, France, Russia, the U.K. and Germany (the P5+1).
The news coverage
examined in the CISSM study also lacked the necessary precision, context, and
sourcing for assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions. Competing
official and independent estimates and statements certainly made it difficult
for reporters and editors to clearly describe Iran’s nuclear capabilities and
intentions. But more often than not, coverage of Iran’s nuclear program simply
included a restatement of some of the often-competing official claims. Rarely
were the conclusions of all available estimates considered; and rarely were
they synthesized sufficiently and put in the necessary context.
The February 2012
release of an IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear activities provided a window into
how the newspapers covered this topic. The report noted that Iran had begun
enriching uranium up to 20 percent U-235 in the Fordo enrichment facility and
was enlarging its total stockpile of this type of uranium.
A
February 25, 2012 Washington
Post report was careful to
characterize Iranian advances in uranium enrichment as moving Iran closer to
having the requisite material to build a nuclear weapon, without suggesting
that Iran had actually decided to build a weapon. The article did not
acknowledge, however, that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which
Iran is a party, does not prohibit non-nuclear weapon states from enriching
uranium up to 20 percent U-235 or limit the amount of such material they may
have for peaceful purposes, such as fueling a research reactor or producing
isotopes for medical use, so long as these activities are under IAEA
safeguards. Instead, the report focused on the degree to which Iran’s
activities moved it closer to having enough low enriched uranium and
centrifuges to be able to produce a weapons’ worth of highly enriched uranium
in a relatively short amount of time, should it choose to do so, and in the
likelihood that the “advances” in Iran’s enrichment program were in excess of
what Iran needed to meet its stated goals.
Other coverage of the
IAEA report was less nuanced, instead using less precise language about Iran’s
“nuclear ambitions” and simply presenting Iran’s claims and U.S., European, and
Israeli suspicions about Iranian nuclear activities: “New suspicions over
Iran’s nuclear ambitions emerged Friday,” reported a February 25, 2012 Wall Street Journal
article. “Iran has dramatically accelerated its production of enriched uranium
in recent months while refusing to cooperate with an investigation of evidence
that it may have worked on designing a bomb,” a February 25, 2012 Guardian report read.
The approach of this
coverage reflected the efforts of competing governments to frame public
understanding of the policy choices confronting officials. While U.S.,
European, and Israeli officials often had varying assessments of Iranian
capabilities and intentions—and varying preferences for how to address what
they perceived to be the threat posed by Iran—all understood the basic dynamics
of international diplomacy and domestic politics: portraying Iran’s advances as
evidence of dangerous intentions and growing capabilities to make weapons, as
some of the coverage of the IAEA report did, made it easier for officials to
advocate for a more urgent response to Iran’s nuclear activities, possibly
including the use of military force. Putting Iran’s advances in the context of
previous assessments, as some of the articles did, left open the possibility
that additional coercive measures or diplomacy could succeed in thwarting
Iran’s nuclear advances.
Questioning Iran’s Intentions
Other characteristics of
news coverage of Iran’s nuclear program included the degree to which coverage
placed on Iran the burden for resolving the dispute over its nuclear program,
and the manner in which negative sentiments about Iran colored newspaper
coverage.
Coverage of the
September 2009 revelation of the
existence of the Fordo enrichment facility provided a clear example of
how newspaper coverage framed Iran as fully responsible for causing the
dispute, and therefore fully responsible for the concessions necessary to end
it. The coverage acknowledged that U.S. and European leaders were using the
construction of an undeclared centrifuge facility at a hardened site near a
military base as leverage in upcoming negotiations with Iran, but it gave
little consideration to Iran’s claim that it had done so in response to foreign
threats to destroy its less protected centrifuge facility. A September 26 Guardian article explained how
U.S. and European leaders saw the Fordo revelation as an opportunity to
“demand” that Iran take “concrete steps to restore ‘confidence and
transparency’ in the country’s nuclear program.” In other words, according to
the coverage, the negotiations were exclusively about Iranian behavior—what it
was willing to do and not do. As a consequence of its failure to disclose the
site earlier, Iran did bear some responsibility; but to place the entire burden
on Iran is to ignore a tumultuous history of past negotiations and actions
about which all parties have felt aggrieved, and of the well-established tenets
of the non-proliferation regime.
Coverage of the
negotiations that followed the Fordo revelation referred regularly to the hope
that pressure on Iran would force it to engage in “serious negotiations.”
However, the coverage did not describe in any detail what behavior would
demonstrate that Iran was “serious” about negotiations and how such behavior
would differ from previous behavior. Indeed, at times it seemed that “serious
negotiations” was a euphemism for conceding to U.S. demands. The coverage never
questioned whether the United States or the P5+1 was doing enough to convince
Iran that it was serious about seeking a negotiated resolution on mutually
acceptable terms, or how American interests and domestic politics constrained
Washington’s policy approach.
When the negotiations
yielded agreement in principle on a deal for Iran to swap much of its stockpile
of low-enriched uranium for fully manufactured nuclear fuel using uranium
enriched outside of Iran, newspaper coverage was cautious, focusing on the
potential benefits of the deal if Iran would quickly accept specific terms of
the U.S. proposal to prove that it was not just “playing for more time.” As an
October 2 Wall Street Journal article noted, “Iranians may be seeking to defuse pressure for
sanctions while continuing their nuclear program.” A Financial Times
article from the same day was considerably more skeptical: “A deal remains a long
shot. At stake is whether Iran builds a nuclear infrastructure that, despite
all its protestations, would make it much easier to produce fissile material
for a bomb.” None of the coverage questioned whether it was necessary or
productive to demand that Iran quickly take or leave the deal, at a time when
internal politics prevented Iranian leaders from making a quick decision.
Again, the point is not
that Iran is blameless and undeserving of suspicion, but that there are
complicated international and domestic contexts to the broader dispute that
need to be acknowledged. Indeed, if these contexts are understood fully, one
would appreciate the degree to which Iran has equally significant reason to be
suspicious of U.S. and international motives and behavior. For instance, the
United States has a significant and active military presence in the Middle
East, Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan, and together with Israel, the United
States has been waging a covert campaign to forcibly undermine Iran’s nuclear
program.
The generally prevalent
negative sentiments toward Iran are most clearly seen when coverage of Iran is
compared with international responses to similar events and behavior by other
countries. A September 26, 2009 Independent article published a day after the Fordo revelation contrasted
calls to lift economic sanctions against Burma with calls to further sanction
Iran and suggested that this “double standard” might be Iran’s fault because it
is “a particularly difficult country to deal with,” and because “its ambitions
and its willingness to compromise are so uncertain.”
Negative sentiment
toward Iran was also pervasive in 2010 coverage of the public debate about
imposing another round of punitive sanctions against Iran. Iran’s behavior was
characterized as sneaky: “Iran and its state-backed enterprises have become
adept at skirting sanctions,” read a June 10, 2010 Independent article; “a
shadowy network of Middle East gasoline suppliers is already undermining U.S.
efforts to pile pressure on Tehran,” read a June 17, 2010 Wall Street Journal
article.
While Iran might indeed
have developed sophisticated ways to get around UN and national economic
sanctions, that could be because it views the sanctions aimed against it as
illegitimate and part of a campaign to weaken the government and interfere in
the inner-workings of the country. Moreover, the Iranian government and the
Iranian people may see the ability to circumvent sanctions as innovative or
resourceful, not merely evasive, but none of these alternative interpretations
was explored in news media coverage of this issue.
Differences in
newspaper coverage of Iranian and Israeli ballistic missile tests also
demonstrated underlying sentiments about Iran. In the days leading up to the
October 2009 Geneva negotiations, Iran test-fired a few types of ballistic
missiles and coverage of these tests focused on the degree to which the events
were meant to send a belligerent message to U.S., European, and Israeli
officials prior to negotiations. According to a September 29, 2009 Independent article, the
Iranian missile tests were a “show of defiance.” This report also emphasized
the offensive capabilities of the tested missiles and the fact that their
capabilities put Israel within range.
In contrast, when
Israel was set to test-fire missiles as part of its anti-ballistic missile
program development in early 2012, the emphasis of newspaper coverage was on
the missiles’ defensive capability rather than whether its actions provoked
concern. Underlying this coverage is the assumption that Iranian missile
capabilities pose a threat, while Israeli capabilities are non-threatening and
justified. While this could be the case, it’s also possible that Iran’s
security strategy rationally justifies its missile capabilities and that
Israeli capabilities are threatening to some.
Another aspect of
newspaper coverage that could be seen as revealing underlying sentiments about
Iran is how frequently Iran is referred to as an “Islamic republic.” The
newspapers in this study rarely referred to Iran by its formal name, the
Islamic Republic of Iran, on first mention, instead simply referring to the
country and its government as “Iran.” Yet on second mention, newspapers
regularly referred to the country and the government as “the Islamic republic.”
Iran is a theocracy, where Islam is a central part of governance and society,
yet in using this alternative term, news outlets implied that Iran’s Muslim
identity made it different—and potentially more threatening—than other
countries. By comparison, although the formal name of Pakistan is the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan, it is rarely if ever referred to by these newspapers as
the “Islamic republic.”
Informed Public Discussion?
None of the patterns that were found in
recent newspaper coverage of Iran’s nuclear program were terribly surprising.
Media scholars and observers have long hypothesized and experimentally
confirmed that reporters and editors tend to index their news coverage of
foreign policy events to official viewpoints and that public discussion about
policy options tends to be limited by the scope of official preferences. News
media also have a well-documented tendency to portray “out” groups, such as
communists during the Cold War or Muslims after the September 11 attacks, in
negative or at the very least suspicious ways. A 2007 study by scholars at
Louisiana State University confirmed that the same is true regarding portrayals
of Iran and Iranian officials in some coverage of Iran’s nuclear program.
The effects of these
tendencies, however, have varied with the nature of events. Sometimes they lead
news media to inform public discussion in a way that eventually feeds back into
official discussion; sometimes they simply affect official discussions, which
are then recycled by reporters and editors who rely predominantly on official
sources. Sometimes sentiments presented in news coverage influence public
sentiment; and sometimes they simply reinforce already-held public sentiments.
In English-language news coverage of Iran’s nuclear program and the outcome of
the international dispute about it seldom are these tendencies sidestepped
altogether. Journalists rarely seem to find a way to inform public discussion
with opinions and policy ideas from outside of official circles, which could
then inject new perspectives and possibilities into official debates.
The tendency of some news media to rely so heavily on
official sources and to adopt the framing of U.S. and European government
officials leads to a focus on official conceptions of the threat posed by
Iran’s nuclear program and on official preferences for how to deal with it.
Again, while there is variation in official U.S., Israeli, and European policy
circles about the threat posed by Iran and how to confront Iran’s nuclear
program, the baseline view is that Iran’s known nuclear capabilities, its
unreasonable and ideological disposition, and its past interference in regional
affairs pose direct threats to U.S., European, and global interests in the
Middle East. To address this threat, the international community needs to
pressure Iran—with economic sanctions or threats of military attack—to restrict
its nuclear activities. Much of the news coverage examined in the CISSM study
reflects and reinforces these official views.
Indeed, Iran’s nuclear
program is worthy of international scrutiny; some questions about past Iranian
research related to nuclear weaponization remain unresolved. But why is the
threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, which by all accounts has not
actually developed nuclear weapons, seen so differently by officials than the
threat posed by a North Korean regime that has built and tested nuclear
weapons? Why can the United States and its international partners be satisfied
with patiently and vigilantly limiting the nuclear threat from North Korea but
not Iran? Is the threat posed by Iran made larger or smaller by the coercive
diplomacy and punitive economic sanctions that have been the dominant approach
advocated by U.S., European, and other government officials? These types of
questions, which leave room for alternative conceptions of the threat posed by
Iran and how to resolve the ongoing dispute, are often overlooked as news media
focus primarily on official pronouncements and framings.
The news coverage
examined also tended to marginalize public opinion, especially if it was
skeptical of official narratives. For instance, official policy discussions
about Iran’s nuclear program in February and March 2012 as captured in news
coverage, focused on the possibility and rationale for Israel and/or the United
States to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in order to impede its nuclear
program. Meanwhile, public opinion in the United States and elsewhere showed a
considerable reluctance to attack Iran. Only 25 percent of Americans surveyed
in a March 2012 Program on International Policy Attitudes poll supported an
Israeli military attack against Iranian nuclear installations, while more than
74 percent of respondents thought the United States should work through the UN
Security Council, presumably by engaging a broader set of stakeholders, to
achieve a peaceful resolution. More recently, a June 2013 New York Times/CBS poll found that nearly
60 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the threat posed by Iran could
be contained—nearly the same number that felt that the threat from North Korea
could be contained. These sentiments were rarely represented in news coverage
during the periods examined. These patterns point to an important incongruity:
while newspaper coverage constrains public and official discussion, the public
doesn’t always buy the official line.
The
tendency of some English-language news coverage to place on Iran the burden to
resolve the dispute about its nuclear program also significantly constrained
policy and public discussions. Identifying the appropriate policy course
depends on whether one sees the failure to resolve the dispute as a result of
Iranian intransigence and unwillingness to engage in “serious negotiations,” or
as a consequence of the P5+1 trying to apply inequitable rules on the use of
nuclear technology and materials. If the latter were the case—and this is not
the majority opinion among U.S., European, Israeli, and other officials and as
a consequence was rarely expressed in news coverage—then resolving the dispute
might require the P5+1 to assure Iran that it would not be kept from or
punished for engaging in activities protected by international law. Similarly,
if what is perceived and reported as Iranian intransigence or lack of sincerity
is seen instead as a reasonable Iranian response to what Iranian officials view
as threats from Israel and the United States, then P5+1 policy makers are
foolhardy to wait for Iran to agree to terms that could institutionalize what
it views as a strategic disadvantage.
Perhaps most troubling
of all of the patterns identified in the study is the tendency to associate
negative sentiments with Iran. If policy makers or members of the public
perceive Iran as implacably hostile toward some of its neighbors, other actors,
or the international system as a whole, or as preternaturally untrustworthy—as
some of the news coverage examined suggests it is—then it will be that much
more difficult to conceive of and execute a consensual resolution to the
dispute.
If the goal of news
media is to act in the public interest, to hold public officials accountable,
and to permit an informed public to play a constructive role in the foreign
policy decisions made by their governments—in their name—then journalists ought
to consider more carefully how they go about framing the facts and assessments
that animate complex policy issues such as Iran’s nuclear program and how the
international community could and should respond. Without considering these
fundamental characteristics more carefully and reflecting a broader spectrum of
viewpoints and policy possibilities in their coverage, they are liable to
repeat the mistakes that contributed to disastrous policy choices in the past.
Jonas Siegel is project manager and outreach director at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. He previously served as editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Saranaz
Barforoush is
a PhD student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the
University of Maryland. From 2002 to 2008, she worked as a reporter and
translator for Iranian newspapers and weekly magazines, including Hamshahri
Daily, Asr-e-ertebat,
Zanan, and Hayat-e-no.