21 April 2013 - Iran's 'Nuclear Weapons Programme' Mentioned Again with no Evidence
18 March 2013 - Obama's Threat to Iran Reported as Responsible Diplomacy
16 November 2012 - Deceptive Headline in Telegraph Makes Claims of Iran's 'Bomb-Building Capacity'
27 July 2012 - Mitt Romney Doesn't Threaten, He Just 'Woos' Others
4 July 2012 - Misleading Guardian Headline Portrays Iran as the Aggressor

26 March 2012 - BBC News Repeat Obama's Iran 'Weapons' Assumption
26 March 2012 - Evan Davis: Iran is Ahead of North Korea on Nuclear Issue

Logical Fallacies: The Financial Times on Syria and Uranium Stockpiles
The Editors, 10 January 2013

On 8 January the Financial Times published an article by James Blitz, entitled 'Fears raised over Syria uranium stockpile', premised primarily on the 'fears' and otherwise subjective ruminations of unnamed 'official' and 'expert' sources, one the two named sources being former weapons inspector David Albright (discussed further below). The claims of Blitz's...

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Luring an Attack: Julian Borger Claims Insight Into Iran's Motives
The Editors, 16 November 2012

Last week news reports emerged that Iranian warplanes had fired on a US Predator surveillance drone over the Gulf waters on the 1st November, 5 days before the US presidential elections. News of the incident was suppressed by the US until after the elections, we were told. As is standard practice in...

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US Election Foreign Policy Debate: UK Editorials on the Role of the US
Josh Watts, 6 November 2012

In a strongly-worded endorsement for Barack Obama in its pre-election issue, the editors of The New Yorker1 write that the 'flawed and complicated' 'human being', Obama, 'has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated'. This is undoubtedly relevant in regards to foreign policy. Having come...

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Alarm and Hypocrisy: When Retaliation is Unacceptable to the Media
The Editors, 3 October 2012

The Independent's 'legendary pedant', Guy Keleny, recently highlighted the hypocrisy of press reporting on nuclear weapons: 'It is an iron law of journalese usage that every nuclear power in the world has a nuclear weapon - except one. Britain alone occupies a higher moral plane, and deploys not a weapon but...

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Nuclear State: Media not Concerned about UK Weapons Development
The Editors, 18 June 2012

Over the last 7 months, UK journalists have consistently voiced their objection to nuclear weapons proliferation. This opposition appears as the western media holds a magnifying glass to Iran and speculation abounds over Iran's nuclear capabilities; speculation that appears to be more in line with western governments' policy rather than with...

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Iran: Speculation on Parchin Site Propagates through Guardian Reporting
The Editors, 5 June 2012

On the issue of the ongoing 'Iran Crisis' (in BBC speak), the evidence presented to us about the potential development of nuclear weapons by Iran remains heavily based on speculation, and has in recent months focussed on the hypothetical musings of a Washington think-tank, based on satellite images of an Iranian...

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An Attack on Iran Would Be Illegal. What Does the Media Say?
The Editors, 23 March 2012

The 'option' of a military attack on Iran by Israel, the UK and the US has been increasingly discussed in the UK media since 2011. Government threats of military action have come in various forms, with Israel warning of potential air strikes against Iran in the next few months, and Obama and...

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Cameron and Blair: The Media Continues to Dutifully Convey Intelligence 'Warnings'
The Editors, 7 March 2012

For the invasion of Iraq in 2003, 'top secret' intelligence was used to create a media storm concerning weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed in 45 minutes. Now, the media reports on a 'top-secret' briefing by MI6 to UK ministers on the 'Iranian Nuclear Threat'. The routine appears familiar:...

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Perspective Lacking as Allegations against Iran are Paraded through the Media
The Editors, 6 February 2012

Last week the Guardian's diplomatic editor, Julian Borger, reported on the 'increasing likelihood that Iran could carry out attacks in America or against US and allied targets around the world.' The claim was not his own of course; he was merely repeating without scrutiny that which was presented by James Clapper, the...

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How the UK Media Legitimise the Idea of a War on Iran
The Editors, 26 January 2012

The UK media has over the last three months obediently towed the line of western leaders in their increasingly hostile posturing towards Iran. Despite their reporting of (to give a few examples) a covert war on Iran, the entry of a US spy drone into Iranian airspace, and the recent assassination of...

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Dan Hodges: 'Keeping the Peace' by Calling for War
The Editors, 8 December 2011

In a low-point for the Telegraph blogosphere earlier this week, Dan Hodges wrote that Britain needs a 'Start the War Coalition' to function as a response to the existing Stop the War Coalition (StW) which has been working to prevent and stop British wars since 2001. Running with the Orwellian logic...

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Language Creep: Iran and the Nuclear 'Threat'
The Editors, 27 November 2011

The IAEA report on the state of Iran's nuclear programme released on 9 November didn't quite present western governments with the doomsday scenario they had hoped for. The run-up to the report's publication became a platform for voices to be raised in the media calling for yet another war, as though...

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The Media Beats the War Drum for an Attack on Iran
Graham Bell, 4 November 2011

“Iran’s nuclear ambitions have already started a war with the west”, reads the headline of Julian Borger’s piece in the Guardian yesterday, in which he discusses operations of espionage and sabotage in Iran started by the Bush government in 2007. The headline would have you believe that Iran brought these acts...

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Lots of Attention on the Iranian Navy
Graham Bell, 22 February 2011

Today, the 22nd February, the BBC has given quite a lot of attention to the movement of Iranian warships through the Suez Canal. As scores of protesters are being killed by brutal regimes in Libya, Morocco and Bahrain, big news has been made about the seemingly insignificant passage of two Iranian...

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Selective Reporting from the Chilcot Inquiry
Graham Bell, 21 January 2011

By the end of 2010, the US/UK led war in Iraq had left one million people dead and over four million without a home. For this, Tony Blair expressed his regrets on the 21st January, to which the members of the public said “too late”. After reporting this snippet of drama from...

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