News reporting of America's strike on Iran has been nonsensical

Media coverage of the US’ bunker-busting strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been a study in journalistic nonsense. Almost everything written about it has been suspect.

Iran’s Fordow Nuclear Enrichment Plan before American strikes.

News outlets definitively reported everything from America’s attacks on Iran having destroyed its nuclear sites to them being put out of action for only a few months. It is the equivalent of different news outlets reporting the score and result of a Super Bowl final differently.

This kind of contradictory reporting happens when no one knows anything. On the mental checklist, I run through whenever reading a news story is to ask how could the reporter know what they are reporting.

In this case, how could they know the effect of a bomb being dropped somewhere far away and exploding anywhere from 60 meters to 100 meters (200-320 feet) underground? Even the US and Israeli militaries with satellites can see only the holes where America’s 14,000-kilogram (30,000 pound) bomb penetrated the Earth’s surface. They cannot show the damage caused underground.

Verifying stories can be demanding and tedious. It involves cross-checking facts with multiple reliable sources, such as official records, expert testimonies, or witness accounts. Digital tools such as reverse image searches and geolocation can help authenticate visual content, while databases and public documents provide verifiable data. I once confirmed a story by reading documents upside down across from someone’s desk.

Human intelligence would be the only sure way to know how much damage American strikes inflicted and no one outside Iran can do that at this point. News media were making claims about the damage before even Iran would have been able to assess it. The stories were out as soon as US President Donald Trump tweeted that Iran’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated”.

It was right to report what Trump said but you do not need to be a Mensa member to appreciate that even Trump could not yet have known the extent of the damage.

The best anyone could hope for is that Iran surveys the damage and something leaks to the press, because Iran’s absurd official position is that there was little damage done and that the attacks had failed. That would take time given that the strikes collapsed the sites’ entrances and buried everything inside.

There is no way anyone could know. Trump said that Israeli intelligence had operatives who had seen the site, which is unconfirmed. Even if true, the question of how they could know remains.

Yet, instead of simply reporting the facts that Trump said the attacks had destroyed the targets and the Iranians said the damage was minimal, the media moved immediately into speculation mode. Speculation is not news.

This is where the rubbish started to flow like the Mississippi River. Under the banner of “analysis”, we were told that if the sites were not too damaged, then Iran could re-open them within a few months, but that if the damage was extensive, it could put their nuclear program back years.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. It was beyond banal.

Then we had to endure pundits pontificating about what it meant if the Iranian regime collapsed and, again, mastheads were reporting scenarios ranging from the military taking over in a bloodless coup to a full-blown civil war and chaos.

My favorite, which various commentators wrote, was that there is a difference between a “war victory” and a “strategic” victory, and that Iran’s regime not collapsing meant Tehran was still in the long game so merely by surviving it had won a strategic victory.

This is spectacular nonsense.

If Iran had won, the commentariat would be writing that Israel had been humiliated and put back in its place. Either way the result would be presented as bad for Israel. It is just a way of denying Israel’s victory because there is nothing antisemites hate more than Israel’s success. It drives them crazy.

Journalists know that they cannot be wrong about the future in the present, and that if they are later proven wrong, they will have long moved on to another story. It is a cynical game.

Slowly, as the US and Israel started to assess the impact, a somewhat uncertain picture emerged. The strikes were successful and likely caused significant damage but they could not yet be fully sure and that it would take time, and may never be fully known.

When something is unknown, news reporting should move from uncertain to more certain as the story unfolds. Coverage of this has been the opposite. This phenomenon is a telltale sign that news media has been reporting what it does not know.

The challenge journalists face - and I have been there, as editor and reporter, so I am not without sympathy - is that they have to write something.

This desperation leaves news media open to becoming propaganda mouthpieces. Too many newspapers treated a leaked US military intelligence report stating the strikes had inflicted minimal damage as gospel. It is fine to report the leaked report’s content, but who leaked it and why should have been asked loudly and clearly given that it mirrors Iran’s claims so closely.

Once journalists would have stuck to the facts but that is no longer enough. Journalists are under pressure to move their stories “up the value chain”. When news is being talked about in such terms, as though stories were widgets on a production line, you know that the know-nothing MBA-type consultants have been let loose in the newsroom.

In non-jargon English, it means it is no longer enough for journalists to report just the facts, especially as Trump is bypassing the media by tweeting directly to the world. Journalists must now explain a story’s significance. The key questions are “so what?”, as in why it is important?, and “what’s next?”, to give the story a “forward-looking slant”.

The pressure to do this, often in real-time to meet the digital age’s demands, contributes to journalists writing gibberish.

Conjecture is often presented as informed insight in the form of quotes from experts. This creates a false sense of certainty where none exists, misleading audiences who assume these talking heads or quoted doyens have privileged information rather than just opinions.

This has led to a lowering of traditional verification standards. There was a time when editors would not publish stories unless their reporters could prove them. There has been many stand-up rows between editors and reporters over this.

Lack of verification has poisoned coverage of the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza. Most of what is reported cannot be verified because there are no foreign journalists in Gaza. Every single source that a journalist might talk to there is either aligned with Hamas or under their oppressive supervision.

News outlets pretend they can get around this through attribution. For example, they will report an alleged death toll with attribution to the “Hamas-run” Health Ministry, so they can say they are being honest about the source and that readers can decide for themselves.

Replace the words “Hamas-run Health Ministry” with “Hamas Jihadist terror group” and the problem becomes clear. It is not a reliable or trustworthy source and nothing they say is verifiable. Sometimes stories state that some information is unverified, which raises the question of why are they publishing it?

This means that even “straight” news, which is what the industry calls non-opinion news, is compromised. It is inevitable that opinion and analysis pieces based on flawed input will veer into nonsense.

Now we are suffering through this problem’s latest incarnation, reporting on whether Iran moved its refined uranium out of the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant before American strikes hit.

Iran insists that it did. The European Union agrees. Israel claims to know where it is. The the US says nothing was moved out because Iran had no time to do so.

Again, when reading these articles, the question to ask is - “How could they know that?”

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