The Drudge Deception
Today’s Drudge Report headline looks like this:
IRAN BUILDING SECOND NUKE PLANT
Exciting… titillating … a complete and utter lie.
In his never-ending effort to make the Obama Administration look bad at any cost – including gross journalistic dishonesty – Drudge is selling the story that the USA was caught by complete surprise when learning of Iran’s second nuclear facility.
Wrong.
The truth is that Iran only decided to reveal the existence of the uranium enrichment operation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) when it discovered that at least three countries had already known about the plant for a number of years.
Indeed, the United States not only knew about the facility, our intelligence had already leaned that the plant was too small to be used to produce nuclear energy (Iran’s professed purpose for their nuclear program) and would likely only have value for producing nuclear weapons – one to two bombs per year. American intelligence also knew that the plant was about three months from being completed to the point where they could begin operating centrifuges inside the location.
Responding to reports that Israel, the U.S. and Germany had confirmed the site existed during trilateral talks in 2002 and 2003, Uzi Dayan, who was the chairman of Israel’s National Security Council until Sept. 2002, said only that, “In those years, we tried very hard to convince our colleagues and partners that Iran is going nuclear.”
Mr. Dayan said Israel “has fair knowledge about the Iranian plants and the deployments,” but wouldn’t speak to the specifics of the plant revealed on Friday. “We know what’s going on,” he said.
While many readers have reached a point where they know better than to simply believe what they read on Drudge, the aggregator remains an important source from which many people get their news.
A conservative ’slant’ or a political agenda is one thing – completely bending a story to create a purely false headline is quite another and should be branded for the journalistic crime that it is.
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It’s been a bad week for the Drudges of the world with the president receiving so much good coverage this week and things slanting favorably to the left on the health care front (trying to suppress a smug grin of I told you so here, LOL). Hell I even heard Pat Buchanan admit that it looks canceling the missile deployment from Poland is paying off. So why are surprised by what Drudge has done, when the need arises the right has never been afraid of making shit up to suit their purpose, hell it’s the foundation of the entire tea bag movement!
If it turns out the a public option makes it into a final bill, I promise I will send you flowers as I will never be more pleased to be wrong! Unfortunately, I’m still not seeing things happen that make me believe it is going to go in that direction. But, as Chuck Schumer says, there’s always hope!
In response to another comment. See in context »Screw flowers, I want a bottle of Patron and a bucket of limes!
In response to another comment. See in context »Patron is crap for the masses! I’ll send you a good tequila!
In response to another comment. See in context »Don’t forget the limes, LOL
In response to another comment. See in context »Rick,
In response to another comment. See in context »Not to hijack your thread, but can you shout out a good tequila for a fellow Californian? Your comment was just too enticingly off-subject. OK, maybe it’s another post.
You would be surprised how many people will believe Drudge, regardless of the proof otherwise. Messing up is understandable when you are trying to make the scoop, but on something like this, purely bad journalism.
He didn’t mess up – he knew exactly what he was doing and why. That’s what is so disgusting.
In response to another comment. See in context »Commentary I have read in left leaning reports is that it wasn’t the second site that was anything surprising, but that reports that Iran would acknowledge it when they did was a surprise which required rethinking Obama’s UN speech.
I think it’s reasonable to say that while the undeclared site was not a surprise, there was a development this week regarding the site which was a surprise. I’m certain Iran took a calculated step here, and there’s little way any administration could have been ‘prepared’ for that.
The article (which I’m sure everybody here read before pronouncing judgment) did describe ‘hasty’ preparations and meetings regarding dealing with it. In other words, something was surprised or forced.
Wrong? Well, not really. A lie? Again, not really… well, unless people are presumed not to RTFA and instead just take a heading and made asinine assumptions.
Your article talks straight past this point, and past the article’s point.
On a completely separate point:
Personally, I think we all have to gamble on the actions of a nuclear armed Iran. There has been no meaningful progress towards stopping them from developing nuclear weapons, and the *only* steps even being considered here are sanctions, which have much more often than not proved to be useless in curtailing efforts of “rogue regimes”.
While I guess sanctions are still ‘arguable’, they’re still not available even with the strategic ‘handout’ to Russia. China is not predisposed towards complying, and it would probably require threats of a trade war to get them to do so. Unfortunately that’s a huge gamble for everybody involved.
Sanctions are unlikely to make a significant dent in Iranian politics due to lack of enforceability, its relatively unsophisticated economy and the corrupt nature of such international business to begin with.
Economic sanctions would require years, if not decades, to work, which will provide Iran with plenty of time to finish building their initial stock of weapons. It wont be easy for Iran, but it’s definitely within their goals and abilities. (Remember, this is the country which defeated Saddam’s tanks and land mines which masses of soldiers, some of whom may not have even hit puberty… economic sanctions aren’t even a pin prick to the historical steadfastness of Iran/Persia.)
Perhaps a radical overhaul of the NPT is in order to deal with this mess. There’s no political will for stopping Iran, much as there was no political will for stopping North Korea. They both built clandestine nuclear programs under the watches of both Republican and Democratic administrations. Our current anti-proliferation efforts clearly have problems to which I don’t have a solution.
For decades, I have played a small role in policing journalists who demonstrate bias or are too incompetent to achieve factual and contextual accuracy. I have tried to reach my goals as a speaker on behalf on the organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, as a teacher at the University of Missouri Journalism School, and as a writer for craft magazines such as Columbia Journalism Review. If I could figure out an effective way to license journalists, I would certainly propose it. Thank you for keeping watch on Mr. Drudge.
My pleasure!
In response to another comment. See in context »Like most of the “journalists” on Fox, his only purpose is to tell people what they already believe. To stoke their hatred of anything other than the conservative script.