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Of course, we're live here from 11 to 1, Texas time, every weekday, less Thursday, on No Agenda Radio.
And our next guest is Jonas Siegel.
And he is project manager and outreach director at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, the CISSM.
And he contributes to the center's Nuclear Past, Present, and Future project.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, you're very welcome.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
I am afraid to admit to you, but I will because it's the truth.
I did not read your whole study.
I did not have time.
Yosef Butt sent it out in the e-mail this morning.
And so I did have a little bit of a chance to breeze through it.
But mostly I just read the press release here, the executive summary.
But I'm going to read the whole thing later, even after I interview you, because I really want my best education I can get on this subject.
It's media coverage of Iran's nuclear program by you, Jonas Siegel, and Sarnaz Barfaroush.
I'm sorry.
I said that wrong.
Would you like to say it correctly for me?
Sarnaz Barfaroush.
Okay.
There you go.
My apologies.
Okay.
So what are your major conclusions in this study?
Well, you know, this is an interesting subject in part because of the conclusions of many studies post-U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that news coverage contributed to the or had a distorting effect on public understanding and the decision to go to war in 2003.
So we were quite interested in trying to understand how news coverage was particularly affecting the policy debate about Iran's nuclear program, what to do.
And so we looked at six newspapers, three English, three British papers, and three American papers, and looked at a variety of time periods over the last four years where there was heightened coverage of Iran's nuclear program.
And we had some pretty interesting findings.
Not surprisingly, some of the characteristics of the coverage pre-Iraq war remain part of the coverage of Iran's nuclear program.
In particular, there's a pretty clear focus on the he said, she said aspects of the policy debate going on in Washington and Europe and, frankly, globally.
And with that, there's a kind of a lack of understanding and explanation of the fundamental issues that should be informing both policymakers and the public's assessments of Iranian nuclear capabilities.
Right.
And, you know, what's funny about that, and there's so much here, but first of all, TV is way worse on every issue, right?
Because they just take their cues from the newspapers, but then they give, you know, half a paragraph worth of explanation of what wasn't any good in the first place.
Sure.
We, for a lot of reasons, we purposely stayed away from looking at network and cable news coverage of this issue, in part because there's so much of it.
24-hour news stations have lots of material, and so there would be lots more material for us to comb through.
But also because, yeah, their agendas are in part set by many of the major newspapers, in particular the three that we looked at, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
And so they take their cues in large part from many of the publications and their understandings of the issues.
Now, by the way, as a kind of side note here, or not really a side note, did you guys look at the Christian Science Monitor?
Were they included in your study here?
They were not.
And, you know, I think one thing that's important to keep in mind, you know, we took a relatively narrow approach in looking at these six publications.
And there are some very good reporting done by these publications in the time periods we looked at, and there's some very good reporting on this issue elsewhere.
And so by no means are the findings of this study meant to be generalized to kind of all reporting on this issue.
Right.
So that's something to keep in mind when you look at the findings.
Right.
I was just thinking, wouldn't it be nice, or, I mean, in my opinion, I'm not necessarily asking you this, but it would be nice if when they did the he said, she said that he was Scott Peterson at the Christian Science Monitor because he could actually just sit down and tell you the facts.
There are reporters who really understand such complicated nuclear and treaty issues.
Like you said, there really is good journalism on this, but they don't ever report that.
When you say he said, she said style arguments, you mean the U.S. accuses Iran of this, and Iran says, uh-uh, we'll wipe you off the map and blah, blah, blah.
And that's all they ever talk about.
They never say, hey, everyone, you're an adult.
Here's what you need to understand that is factually known about Iran's nuclear program and the various positions of the various states on this issue.
They don't do that.
And that's exactly right.
And the he said, she said characteristic of coverage really is a matter of looking at the officials who are engaged in this issue both in the United States, in Iran, in Europe, in China, in Russia, and trying to, you know, kind of understand what's going on based on what these officials are saying.
One of the interesting findings of the study is that, you know, of all sources from these newspapers on coverage of Iran's nuclear program were officials from those countries.
So a large majority of the people who are talking about this issue in newspaper coverage are officials.
And so they have certain restrictions on what they can say.
They have a certain, they have kind of a more narrow framing of what is possible, the kind of outcomes that they would like to see.
And they're also looking to constantly, you know, kind of rebut or play up against what other people are saying on these issues.
So there's a lot of politicking, a lot of kind of maneuvering, political maneuvering that goes on in official, in the official discourse, so to speak.
So that, and if that's the largest part of the coverage, and that's the, those are the voices most being heard, then you're going to get a distorted view of what is going on, what is possible.
And that's one of the main findings of this study.
Right, the lack of precision, as you put it in this executive summary here.
And you know what?
It's fair enough, right?
I mean, hey, I'm just a regular guy, too.
And when somebody says nuclear to me, I think, hey, somebody call a mathematician.
What the hell do I know about nuclear, this, that, or the other thing?
And just like everyone else, I've got to defer to experts.
I'm lucky.
I know experts who aren't liars.
But for everyone else, they're stuck with whoever David Sanger is talking to, and so they're, you know, up the creek without a paddle.
I think one of the larger issues that there is, there is a relative lack of understanding of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, of kind of the nitty-gritty of the underlying norms and legal standards that govern nuclear conduct among the public.
You know, most people don't think about these things.
At the same time, they're really important.
Government officials think about them, the government of Iran, the government of the United States, European governments, the Russian government.
These governments pay attention to the nonproliferation regime.
It means something to them.
And a lot of their policy decisions are governed by these kinds of international laws and, more largely speaking, international security norms.
And so when these things aren't understood by a large part of the public, it becomes very difficult for there to be a very well-educated polity and for there to be the kind of give and take and influence among the public and policymakers on issues like this.
And now in this, where you talk about a failure to provide adequate sourcing, are you most referring there to anonymous claims in the major newspapers?
Not necessarily, actually.
We found that there's, among all the types of sources that newspapers relied on, unnamed sources really were made up a very small part of the total number of sources that were used.
What we're really talking about is that when newspapers and reporters paraphrase certain understandings about Iranian nuclear capabilities and intentions, they often do so without necessarily saying where they get this understanding from and what are the other ways, other understandings or estimates of Iranian nuclear capabilities and intentions that are out there, and how do you square some of the contradictions that exist between different ones that are out there.
It's by no means a clear picture.
The United States government thinks one thing, the Israeli government, the German government, and parts of the British intelligence agencies think different things about Iran and their nuclear program and their nuclear operations and intentions.
So trying to present a clear picture to the public often requires reporters and editors to talk about, well, where are you getting this information from?
Is this what you're suggesting?
Is this what everyone believes, or is this only what some people believe?
And why do they believe this, and what are the questions that exist about even a relatively well-founded estimate of Iranian capabilities?
So that's what we mean by kind of inadequate sourcing.
We don't know who exactly is saying from where they're drawing their information.
Right, and then a lot of times that's just the background, right, the assumption behind the actual text that you're reading.
And so that's where you can get really way off track, right, is taking a particular view unexplained.
And, you know, here's the thing about it, too.
That's what you're saying about just, you know, the average guy on his way to Walmart right now listening to this doesn't have any reason, he doesn't think, to care one way or the other anything about details of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And so he has no cause to understand.
It's not like Chris Matthews, red and blue scoreboard guy on TV, is ever going to explain to him, or even in the New York Times ever going to explain to him, that the Iranians are within the Non-Proliferation Treaty and their safeguards agreement.
What they're so-called in defiance of are all these extracurricular United Nations Security Council resolutions that, frankly, are in direct defiance of the Security Council membership's own signatures to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and which are, in fact, on the Rumsfeld illogical standard of evidence that you must prove a negative.
You must lift up every grain of sand in Iran and prove there's not a secret nuclear weapons program beneath it, and you must answer an endless list of questions based on what everybody already knows are at least dubious, if not outright, Israeli forgeries in the alleged studies documents.
Even Ali Heinonen, the hawk from the IAEA, says he didn't believe in them.
And yet, oh well, these documents serve as the basis for 100,000 questions that the Iranians must answer, otherwise the IAEA can't prove that their entire program is peaceful.
So, in other words, never, ever, ever, in one million years, can the Iranians ever prove that what they're doing is peaceful.
All we have is a complete and total lack of evidence that it isn't.
But that's not the standard, and so try getting the New York Times to explain that one.
I mean, I think, without stepping too much into kind of what the IAEA has asked Iran to do, and what the international community has asked Iran to do, and what the appropriate policy outcome is on this situation, I will say that Iran could be doing more to answer questions that have been raised about its nuclear program, but it has also provided a lot of answers and a lot of access to the IAEA, and it has resolved most of the issues that have been raised by the agency since 2003 about potential weapons-related activities in Iran.
And there are very few countries in the world that have been inspected and have gone through the kind of process that Iran has in trying to meet the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the international community regarding its nuclear program.
Well, and you know, this is all very problematic, right?
This is not just an academic study.
This is an academic study that's an emergency, and it's so important, and I'm so glad that you did it, because right now we're sort of in the midst of a series of talks with the Iranians and the rest of the United Nations Security Council, the P5-plus-1, as they call it, to try to reach an agreement.
And there's a lot of pressure in a lot of ways on both sides, on all sides, to come to some kind of conclusion here.
Just keep your enrichment down at 3.6 percent and export your 20 percent and do it in a way where everybody can save face or something.
There's a deal in there somewhere.
It could happen if the politics are right for it to happen, and yet there's all this propaganda and, for that matter, all this misunderstanding and just ignorance, and the entire debate kind of takes place in this netherworld that's not really connected to the actual facts of the matter, what we're dealing with or the history, the context.
And so the great danger is that all the talks will fail and we could end up in a real war after all this time of threatening and not and talks back and forth and whatever from the Bush into the Obama years.
It is a very tenuous moment in these relations, and it's important for us to get it right, which is why we put such an emphasis on trying to understand how the media were framing these issues for the public, for the policymakers to make sure or at least to understand what was missing from the public discussion, what needs to be there that's not there, and or how are they being hijacked by certain interests within certain governments, essentially.
And now, in this study, do you guys take time out to name names at all, or are you going to keep it very academic and polite on that?
In terms of names of reporters or newspapers and that kind of thing?
Yeah, or both.
We didn't look at the bylines to identify particular reporters that either did really well or were guilty of certain kind of consistent bias.
There were some you noticed, though, right?
I mean, I think each newspaper has a relatively small stable of reporters who work on these issues, and so there are only a handful, maybe more than a handful, but there aren't more than a dozen or two dozen reporters who work on these issues of these papers.
So when you look at the coverage, you see the same names over and over again, that's for sure.
Right.
But, I mean, you see the same ones leaning toward the War Party position over and over again, too, don't you?
No, I don't necessarily think that.
I mean, I didn't see any evidence that there were reporters who had their own agendas in this coverage.
Really?
Yeah, I mean, I wasn't looking for it.
So, I mean, if I was looking for it, I would be able to identify it more.
I think, you know, more than anything, you know, you make certain assumptions when you're reporting a story.
You come in with kind of a ground level of understanding of the issue or kind of a particular outlook on the facts, and that has subtle and sometimes not so subtle influences on who you talk to, how you frame the coverage, what conclusions you get to, who you leave out of the coverage.
It's notable that over time there were less Iranian officials and more Israeli officials being represented in the coverage.
And that reflects a certain type of orientation or a certain privilege that was given to certain officials.
So that's what I mean.
I mean, I didn't notice any particular agenda that reporters had when they reported on this issue, but you do see these assumptions being made, and that influences how the stories are framed and how the issues are kind of discussed in the broader context of events.
Well, I'll leave names out because I don't want to make you look bad or anything, but I will say I've noticed that, say, there's one reporter at one very major paper somewhere published in New York State, I think, where, boy, he gets it wrong all the time when he shares his byline with this other guy, but then every once in a while he shares his byline with this other guy, and all of a sudden his article gets all factual and it leaves out the assumption that it's a nuclear weapons program.
You know, sometimes that just skates right by, nuclear weapons program.
Sometimes it's, well, a nuclear program that's fully safeguarded and could be maybe turned into a weapons program someday, which is a pretty major difference.
But then again, you know, I hold grudges, and maybe I notice things that other people aren't quite, you know, paying that much attention to.
Well, there are lots of shades of gray, and the words you use matter, and the words that reporters use matter, and sometimes people aren't as careful as they need to be in describing whether it's Iranian nuclear intentions or what they're capable of doing or the effect of U.S. policy in the region on the decision-making of the Iranian leadership.
I mean, you know, so the words matter, and that's a big kind of takeaway from the study is that if you're not careful with the words that you use, you can lead readers to draw broader conclusions or perhaps even misguided conclusions about what's going on, what's at stake, how to get out of the problem, the dispute that we find ourselves in.
And now, did you guys actually keep track of which stories turned out to not be right?
We didn't.
I mean, we didn't grade each story according to whether we thought the contents of it were accurate or completely accurate or partly accurate.
You know, again, the focus was on trying to understand how newspapers were framing this issue.
What areas were they emphasizing in the coverage?
How were the words that were being used, how were they kind of tells, so to speak, of certain assumptions and orientations?
So that was the main focus.
We didn't really kind of follow up and say, okay, you know, this paper said this one time, and the next time it said something different, and how can both be right?
And we didn't do that kind of reporting.
Right.
You know, oh, I guess I could refer back to, again, the sort of general ignorance on nuclear issues, and then there remains then the question of what can possibly be done about that where, you know, the average news consumer can know enough to understand an article that really gets to the point.
I mean, like I was saying earlier, they're within their safeguards agreement.
Well, you know, you have to quibble about subsidiary arrangement 3.1 to decide whether they're actually still really within their safeguards agreement.
You know, people got to understand what a safeguards agreement is in the first place before they can quibble about whatever 3.1.
So how can they ever even understand the issue when it's something that's so complicated that it's about, you know, fission on one hand and treaty obligations on the other, you know?
It is a kind of – it's a particularly complicated subject, and you have kind of the confluence of, again, international law and international treaties and very technical issues like nuclear fuel cycle capabilities.
So it's a particularly difficult topic to talk about clearly and succinctly and in a way that a broad swath of the public can understand.
But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try and that we couldn't be doing better in talking about, you know, the meaning of international treaties like the NPT in U.S. policymaking both in the Middle East and around the world, frankly.
And, yes, it makes it a little bit – maybe it makes the stories a little bit longer and uses a little bit more time to kind of go over some of the context and backgrounds.
But sometimes that's what's necessary in order to get it right.
You know, it is a complicated story.
There's a lot of moving pieces.
And so you might spend a little bit more time, a little bit more energy in trying to explain to the public what's going on and how they should be thinking about it and the questions they should have and that they should demand that need to be addressed before the U.S. and other governments make any big moves in this dispute.
And I'm sorry, because I remember now my clever thing where I was going with that – the question about keeping track of the facts and which ones turned out to be right or not.
And it goes to the point that you call finding nine here in the study, reinforcing negative sentiments about Iran.
And so in that sense, like, you know, the way I like to say it, well, gee, where there's smoke, there must be fire.
And, yes, the same apparently very cold smoke has been blowing all this time.
And yet if you ask the average guy, oh, the Iranians, man, they hate us.
They don't do nothing but burn American flags all day.
They hate us so much over there.
And, of course, they want to make nukes as fast as they can and use them against all that is good and holy in the world.
And how do I know that?
Because I've heard 10,000 negative stories about Iran in a row over the last 10 years, and none of them were ever really contradicted.
And that's where I get to the point where, you know, over here in some of the alternative media, we actually do the work and contradict these lies as published in some of these major publications and challenge their assumptions that they buy into, as you put it, too.
And so that, you know, goes to, I guess, what we were talking about before, where when it comes to talks and things like this or whether we have a war or not, you know, people can be made to believe, and we've seen the poll numbers in the past, people in America can be made to believe that Iran is a very terrible and immediate threat and that something must be done about them if they're told the right scary stories a few times in a row.
And on top of a backdrop of, again, the 10,000 stories, which I would assert most of them turn out not to really be right, but, boy, they make scary headlines a lot, what the Iranians are up to, you know?
Yeah, I mean, the negative sentiments that are reinforced by some media are problematic.
You know, there is undoubtedly a large segment of the U.S. population that has negative feelings or negative sentiments toward Iran, and whether that's a consequence of the media coverage or whether the media coverage simply reflects that, you know, I don't know for certain.
But it becomes problematic, most problematic, when you're trying to deal with international relations.
The United States has to deal with a lot of different countries and a lot of different leaders and governments around the world, and some of them don't always hold the same values that we have, and some of them might behave in ways that we don't necessarily agree with, but we still have to find ways to work with them sometimes.
You know, there was, despite all the kind of vitriol back and forth between the Soviets and the United States throughout the Cold War, there were still many opportunities for us to work together, you know, mainly on arms control, but on other fronts as well.
And I think the same goes for Iran.
Despite what some people feel about Iran and Iranian leaders and the Iranian government and the activities of the Iranian government, it doesn't mean that we have to kind of, that we can't deal with them, that they're not necessarily rational actors who can be negotiated with.
And so these are the kinds of, we have to avoid being kind of blinded by whatever underlying sentiments exist and try to look at the issue a little bit more broadly and recognize that sometimes, you know what, we have to deal with people who don't think like us and or who may think like us, but, you know, may have a different preference as to what the outcome of any particular situation would be.
And so, you know, we've got to find a way to deal with people sometimes who we don't always agree with and who don't always see the world the same way we do.
Right.
Very well said.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Jonas.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right.
That is Jonas Siegel.
The report is Media Coverage of Iran's Nuclear Program, an Analysis of U.S. and U.K. Coverage 2009 through 2012.
It's by Jonas Siegel and Sarnaz Barfaroosh.
I think that was pretty close.
At the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.
And Jonas there is the Project Manager and Outreach Director.
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