Tag: iran

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Today’s Best …

tehranrally061509.jpg

… News coverage : If you wonder why all the commotion about Twitter, it’s worth checking in on users’ “coverage” of the Iranian election aftermath at http://twitter.com/timeline/search?q=%23iranelection . We need some other word than coverage to describe this; coverage suggests something organized and controlled. What we’re getting from Tehran is chaotic, rumor-filled, repetitive and largely dependent on mainstream news sources. But it’s also immediate, passionate, and encyclopedic, and it brings all of us closer to the scene. The picture above is a case in point, shot and posted today by a Twitter user in Tehran. (The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has a column today on Twitter and how it’s shifting the way we use media.)

… News analysis: Why does the Iranian opposition denounce the election results. FiveThirtyEight.com breaks down the numbers and shows some striking anomalies in the results. (On Saturday, on the other hand, FiveThirtyEight shot down one purported piece of evidence that the result was rigged.)

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‘Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon’

WSJ.com: Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon.

My headline for the story might be, “So what do you expect?” The Wall Street Journal reports the results of a Harris Interactive poll finding that “a large majority of Americans believe Iran is using its uranium research program to build a nuclear weapon.” Is that belief a surprise, considering the fact this is precisely the message that government and media are giving citizens, readers, viewers and listeners every time the subject of Iran comes up?

Let’s take a look at what Harris Interactive said Americans believed about Iraq in March 2003: Among other findings reported on March 6 of that year — 13 days before the war began — Harris reported 80 percent of Americans “believe Iraq has or is making nuclear, chemical or biological weapons”; 78 percent believed “believe there is at least some link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.” Lost in the mists of time is the finding that, even with those beliefs about Saddam and Iraq, only a plurality of Americans (45-36 percent) said they favored an attack at the time.

The point of all the above being: If people are bombarded day and night by the same set of “facts,” that’s bound to affect their thinking.