By admin 
It’s baffling how so many American news outlets have recited President Trump’s claims that his envoys are making “progress” at the talks with Iran, when in fact it turns out, time after time, that no such progress has been made.
Read more The Conservative Majority Blew Apart One of the Biggest Myths About This Supreme Court
The pattern underscores one of the most prominent, if undersung, media “biases”—the bias in favor of pushing a story forward. Few readers would even skim a story beneath the headline “Nothing New at Arms Talks Today.” And so when Donald Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance, who is heading up the talks, announces progress, news editors perk up.
A case could be made, of course, that words spoken by the president or vice president are inherently newsworthy, especially if they cover a big-news topic. But that doesn’t mean that reporters, editors, or headline scribes have to put those words up top, especially if they’re not true.
Take, for example, this New York Timeslede on June 22: “Vice President JD Vance cast the first day of high-level negotiations with Iran as productive on Monday, saying the two sides had laid a ‘good foundation.’ … Vance claimed the talks had yielded consensus on at least one issue—international access to Iranian nuclear sites.”
Not until the fourth paragraph did the Times note: “However, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmail Baghaei, told the official Iranian state news agency IRNA that Iran had made ‘no new commitments’ for inspections.”
Which rather diminishes the headline, the lede, and the whole rationale for putting the story on the front page.
Still, the next day, June 23, CBS News’ website plowed the same dead-end road with this headline: “Vance Says Iran to Let International Nuclear Inspections Resume After ‘Good Day’ of Talks.” The lede basically repeated the headline. But then it added, “Iran’s foreign minister, however, said earlier that real negotiations on the ‘nuclear issue’ hadn’t started yet.”
This caveat is consistent with what all sides in the talks have acknowledged—that discussions on Iran’s nuclear program haven’t begun. Even the memorandum of understanding, which Trump and others signed last week, includes no provisions on nuclear issues, except that they will be a topic in the negotiations that take place in the next 60 days or longer (if they end up taking place at all).
Read more War Games
So why does CBS make a headline and a lede of a statement that is clearly untrue? (At least the editors tucked the truth of the matter at the end of the first paragraph, rather than burying it mid-story.)
I should note that there are exceptions to this syndrome, notably a story in Wednesday’s New York Times by David Sanger and Yeganeh Torbati (both veteran national-security reporters), headlined, “Trump Is Making Big Claims About Iran Talks. Iran Keeps Contradicting Him.”
But the majority of stories follow the standard mistaken beat—headlines and ledes extolling “very good progress,” “encouraging progress,” agreement on “a road map to a final deal,” then, a few paragraphs down, dramatic qualifiers, in some cases contradictions, as revealed either in Iranian denials or plain statements of fact.
The fact is that the U.S. and Iran are still far apart on the main issues—not just inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but whether Iran can enrich uranium, who controls the Strait of Hormuz in 60 days, the release of Iran’s frozen assets, the enforcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Without resolution of all those issues, there is no agreement.
Many years ago, when I was a newbie newspaper reporter in the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau, one of my colleagues, Tom Oliphant, gave me a tip that I’ve cherished ever since. “Let’s say you go to a White House press conference,” Tom imagined. “The president’s spokesman says, ‘The sky is green.’ You walk outside, look up, and see that the sky is blue. What’s your lede?”
The typical news story from the White House press corps (which was more docile than today’s) would have led with the White House spokesman saying the sky was green, then, two or three paragraphs down, a quote from some meteorologist noting that the sky appeared on certain sensors to be blue.
A better lede, Tom was instructing me, would have read something like this: “The White House claimed today that the sky was green, even though in fact it was clearly blue.”
Read more Patient Zero?
Those covering the Iran talks should learn the same lesson.