Crazy, Stupid, False, Impotent, and Blind: The Cognitive Biases of the Iran Coverage

There are a number of biases — including, or akin to, normalcy bias — that are badly undermining the American public’s ability to understand the Iran War, all arising from the press’ failure to ever learn how to cover Trump. Before any journalist reports something about Iran, they should first assess whether the report reflects a filter making the report crazy, dumb, false, impotent, or blind. Crazy Start with crazy. Between his narcissism and his increasing age, Trump’s normally disordered thinking has become a mess, particularly as he contemplates how extensive his failures in Iran really are. And rather than reporting that Trump repeats contradictory things in the same speech — such as that the US had achieved victory in Iran but needs lots of help from European allies and Iran is desperate for a peace deal — the press continues to pick and choose which things to report to make them appear coherent rather than reporting that Trump’s statements show he can’t muster even a few minutes of logical thought about the war that is destroying the global economy. Similarly, the press repeats what are clear attempts to bluster Iran, long after Iran has proven to be immune to such bluster. Reporting this stuff as true — because it is true that Trump said it — is not reporting. Reporting would be to describe that the President exhibits signs he is batshit insane, presiding over a war with world-changing implications with the aptitude of an old man yelling at clouds. Stupid But Trump’s crazy rants are built on top of two kinds of stupid. The first is the bubble of sycophancy he lives in, which ensures he gets little useful information about the war. In a piece describing how much of what Trump learns about this war comes via snuff films of DOD blowing Iranian shit up, NBC explained how the sycophancy makes Trump stupid. Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said. The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.” The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said. But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said. They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said. [snip] Overall, the official said, the information Trump gets about the war tends to emphasize U.S. successes, with comparatively little detail about Iranian actions. One example came this month when five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were hit in an Iranian strike at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to one of the current U.S. officials. Trump wasn’t briefed about the strikes, and he learned what had happened from media reports, the official said. When Trump inquired, he was told the planes weren’t badly damaged, the official said. The official said Trump reacted angrily behind the scenes to the news coverage. Publicly he posted on Truth Social calling coverage of the strike misleading and accusing media organizations of wanting the U.S. “to lose the War.” Then there’s the inherent stupidity of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, whom Trump has put in charge of “negotiations,” making them central, but utterly unreliable, players to this war. I can’t stop thinking of the implications of this Laura Rozen piece that described that Witkoff and Kushner literally did not understand what Iran had offered before the US started bombing, and therefore did not understand what a cost this war was compared to the offers of peace Iran made. Then consider that Barak Ravid (an expert on the topic, but a key mouthpiece for Jared) and Marc Caputo (not a foreign policy reporter, but well sourced within the White House) serve a central role in the “reporting” on this war. Why it matters: President Trump said Friday that he was considering “winding down” the war, though U.S. officials said the expectation was there would still be two to three additional weeks of fighting. In the meantime, Trump’s advisers want to start laying groundwork for diplomacy. Behind the scenes: Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are involved in the discussions around potential diplomacy, sources say. - Any deal to end the war would need to include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, address Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and also establish a long-term agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles and support for proxies in the region. - There has been no direct contact between the U.S. and Iran in recent days, though Egypt, Qatar and the U.K. have all passed messages between the two, a U.S. official and two additional sources with knowledge said. Egypt and Qatar have informed the U.S. and Israel that Iran is interested in negotiating, but with very tough terms. - The Iranian demands include a ceasefire, guarantees that the war will not resume in the future, and compensation. [snip] What’s next: The sources said Trump’s advisers want to be prepared if talks with Iran take shape in the near future. - Witkoff and Kushner’s terms will be similar to the ones they presented in Geneva two days before the war started, according to the sources. I mean, sure, what they say is what key players tell them, and that’s important to know. But the key players are painfully stupid, and you can’t say that in a story — “here’s what Jared told me, but he’s a dumbass and you should assume the exact opposite is true” — and remain a successful access journalist. There are other kinds of stupidity here; Zeteo reports that Whiskey Pete’s colleagues call him Dumb McNamara, for example (and that piece avoids all the cognitive biases I lay out here). And they all build in a kind of rot to any reporting based primarily off well-placed insiders who are, by definition, dumb or playing dumb. False Trump is mentally unwell, but he’s also a committed liar. As a narcissist, he is especially a committed liar when experiencing failure, as Trump is experiencing in Iran. And he seems to be doing at least one intentional thing with his lies: juicing both stock and oil markets to minimize the damage of his catastrophic war, and perhaps also to buy time to try to come up with solutions to the problems he caused. It’s unclear how many times the markets will buy his claims that we’re close to victory, but thus far, it has worked every time. And Trump’s con has forestalled an even bigger financial crash. But then someone — probably someone in immediate vicinity to Trump (or perhaps someone with a really good wiretap) — has found another use for his serial attempts to juice the markets, monetizing Trump’s lies: getting fabulously rich off of insider trading. Just because markets still believe Trumps serial claims of imminent victory, however, doesn’t mean journalists should, especially not without a caveat in the title, “Trump declares victory, like he has already done 14 times.” Trump is a liar, a conman. But he also appears to be lying with a good deal more intent than he normally does. And thus far, that’s giving him political space to pursue insane policies, which will get more people killed. Impotent Perhaps most ominously, almost all journalists covering Trump presume that he has primary agency here and that, therefore, if he says he wants something, he can get it. Journalists have done so even though, thus far, there has been little correlation between what the media reports that Trump wants — Iranians to rise up, a quick war, a way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — and what has happened. He has succeeded in killing a fuck-ton of people; nothing else he has wanted has come to fruition. He has been impotent to get what he wants (aside from some good snuff footage and perhaps some illicit billions from this war). Not only are people ignoring that Israel has repeatedly acted on its own in ways that defy Trump’s purported wishes, but more importantly, Iran gets a vote, and Trump has guaranteed Iran’s resolve by attacking them while purporting to negotiate with them, making negotiations almost impossible. There’s an even more dangerous effect of this agency bias. Few journalists are considering how much help Iran is getting from Russia and China, and whether Trump has the ability (or character) to fight Russia and China. To be sure, there have been isolated reports of the ways that Russia is helping Iran, first with reports of its intelligence sharing, and more recently with reports that Russia is providing drones, fuel, and food. One of the most intriguing stories of the war, which didn’t get enough attention, was this WSJ report of an Israeli strike on a supply port in the Caspian Sea. An Israeli strike on a naval outpost in the Caspian Sea targeted Russia’s support for Iran in the war, hitting a supply line that the countries have used to move ammunition, drones and other weaponry, people familiar with the matter said. Last week’s strike was Israel’s first ever on the world’s largest inland sea. Far beyond the reach of the U.S. Navy, the sea connects Russian and Iranian ports about 600 miles apart, giving the countries a place to freely swap weapons along with goods such as wheat and oil. The route has become especially important for transferring Iran’s Shahed drones—now made in both countries—which Russia has used to bombard Ukrainian cities and Tehran has used to strike airports, energy facilities and U.S. bases across the Persian Gulf. This Atlantic Council report assesses this cooperation (including with China) more fully. But I’ve yet to see a broader consideration of what this means, of the degree to which Trump’s catastrophic attack on Iran was part of a decades-long plan by Russia, incorporating things like the WikiLeaks operation, the support for Trump, and the payments to the Taliban, to reverse America’s force projection. And that prevents us from understanding the possibility — likelihood, even — that Trump will find a way out of this by betraying Ukraine and Europe and allying openly with Russian, something that has been in the cards since the election. If that doesn’t happen, the involvement of (at least) Russia and possibly China could lead this thing to spiral further out of control, not least because Trump’s inability to fix the problem he caused is disproportionately affecting Asian countries. Blind Which brings me back to the decision by private satellite companies, notably Planet Labs, to delay the release of imagery reflecting targets on American or its allies facilities. California-based Planet Labs has expanded restrictions on accessing its imagery of the Middle East to prevent adversaries from using it to attack the U.S. and its allies, a sign of how the expansion of commercial space business can impact conflicts. Planet, which operates a large fleet of Earth-imaging satellites and sells frequently updated images to governments, companies and media, told customers on Monday that it was extending restrictions to a period of 14 days from a delay of four days imposed last week. The decision came after NYT published this story showing that Iran had succeeded in hitting communications infrastructure around the Middle East, including what is probably the strike that led to Benjamin Pennington’s death, which has never been fully explained. But that strike — the strike on Prince Sultan’s radar — may well explain how Iran succeeded in another attack — the one that damaged five refueling tankers parked at Prince Sultan — presented as an example of bad news Trump learned from reading it in WSJ. An Iranian missile strike damaged five U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, two U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. The aircraft were parked on the flight line at the time of the strike and sustained damage but were not destroyed, according to the officials. The tankers are being repaired and are expected to return to service. No U.S. personnel were killed in the attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. President Donald Trump disputed those characterizations in a Saturday Truth Social post, saying, “The Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not “struck” or “destroyed.” Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that.” Trump singled out The Wall Street Journal by name, saying its reporting was “the exact opposite of the actual facts.” And that, in turn, explains the NYT revelation that US troops have abandoned the bases that should be best equipped to keep them safe. Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable, with the ones in Kuwait, which is next door to Iran, suffering perhaps the most damage. Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on Port Shuaiba that destroyed an Army tactical operations center. Iranian drones and missiles also targeted Ali Al Salem Air Base, damaging aircraft structures and injuring personnel, and Camp Buehring, damaging maintenance and fuel facilities. In Qatar, Iran struck Al Udeid Air Base, the regional air headquarters of U.S. Central Command, damaging an early-warning radar system. In Bahrain, a one-way Iranian attack drone struck communications equipment at the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. At Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Iranian missiles and drones damaged communications equipment and several refueling tankers. An Iranian-backed militia in Iraq launched a drone swarm attack on an upscale hotel in Erbil early in the war. Iranian officials have even accused the U.S. military of using civilians as human shields by putting American troops in hotels. Much of this damage was catalogued in that original NYT story. But yesterday’s story only had a single photo, and even after Planet Labs’ delayed release of satellite imagery showing what Iran has hit, media coverage has focused on US targets, not damage to US and allied facilities. Iran appears to be achieving, temporarily at least, a key objective: to force the US to withdraw from its bases. But we’re blind to the extent of that and so significantly blind to the potential larger implications of it. All governments lie. Truth is the first casualty of war. Blah blah blah, I get it. War involves a lot of lying. But something more pathological is happening here. And unless it is fixed, it will be especially hard to exert the political pressure to prevent snowballing catastrophe. So, you really believe that if given better information the American public would be better able to understand this war? And then do what? Down here where the middle of the bell curve resides these discussions are so obfuscated by language that’s inaccessible and socially constructed to disguise true intentions (our intuitive understanding of legalese-it’s not just the media) it leaves those who want to understand, become civically involved and advocate for real change unconnected and without meaningful mentorship. I tell people to come here, read, learn and then they ask, “Now what?”. Looking forward to the slap down I’ll take for my attempts to create meaningful understanding and practical applications for real improvements in this brief life. “Now what?” That is and has been the problem with US culture — a revolting inability to take action, a frustrating insistence on needing to be told what to do, and a sad lack of critical thinking. What actions would be most effective in persuading other to join and take action? What actions would be most effective in realizing necessary change? The same people asking “Now what?” can’t summon those questions let alone the answers to them. At least the youngest voters are beginning to see through this malaise because they’ve dealt with their elders’ refusal to deal constructively with threats to their lives when it comes to guns or fossil fuels. ‘Right as Rayne!’ Sorry, couldn’t resist. ; – ) [Moderator’s note: please avoid emojis as they aren’t searchable. Emoticons are fine, though some prompt emojis — this one needs extra spaces to prevent triggering an emoji. /~Rayne] Sorry – on my computer it never generates an emoji so I don’t see it. Glad to know if I space it out it won’t pop on the site. Okay to delete this – just a quick reply. I think I have noticed the complete unwillingness of the media, MS and right wing, to engage with the soldiers carrying out Trump’s war? To hear what they have to say, to observe the conditions they fight under? To hear the Christian-Dominate nonsense coming from the upper ranks. And the conditions of the lower ranks. They just wont Gotobed like they used to. And there seems to be an assumption that the soldiers who started the war will be there to finish it. That’s absurd. So what does Trump do when we need more soldiers? Make a “day of infancy” speech? Or does he think people will sign up out of admiration for Hegseth? Or will Trump offer citizenship to immigrants willing to fight? A Nation of Sheep – Wm. Lederer. Not much changes. Well, one good start is already occurring, in that the voters are making their frustrations known in the special elections where the GOP lost a large majority of them and underperformed (relative to the prior elections) in all of them. Even the MAGAs in the Congress and state houses are seeing how the wind is blowing and have been taking their own actions to save their seats. Note that dealing with the bots and the government lawlessness requires Congressional investigations so the flipping of the chambers needs to be completed. These include the voter suppression, the redistricting plays (now out of favor due to the special election losses), the SAVE Act demands and other games like our Riverside County sheriff seizing the Prop 50 ballots. He’s also running for Governor, BTW in our jungle primary. What keeps happening is that parties have been hauling these games into court and exposing the lies as much as the courtier press allows them and the old adage about sunlight being the best disinfectant rings true again. If I had to pick what more needs to be done, it is to improve publicity. ICE backed down (sort of) in MN and elsewhere because of all of the documentation being done. Get things on tape, give them to the independent outlets and keep it going. It will take a long time to break the RWNM hold over the courtier press, but journeys of a thousand miles start with one step. The regime can’t oppress even a million free sources of documentation, much less than the 100 million or so capable of spreading the word. wrt publicity — citizens need to do more citizen journalism, become their own Ben Franklins and ensure the rest of the public knows what’s going on. They have social media, it’s not as if they have to buy a printing press and establish a business in order to develop reach. And they need to self educate about the bottlenecks in existing social and news media in order to bypass them. Look at how much people outside of MN learned about ICE not from news media but social media. That. Do more of it. I worry the SAVE Act is not as widely known as it should be since it likely affects more than half of eligible voters. Do citizens know they should already be obtaining copies of their birth, marriage, and spouse’s death certificates to prove their identity if this POS bill passes? Do they know they may need copies of their divorce decree(s)? This is an action item we could and should be working on, while communicating to the broader public this is the equivalent of Nazis asking, “Papers, please.” I am increasingly of the belief that Texas’ gerrymander is going to backfire, big time. I am not the only one -the word is that Florida’s legislature is getting cold feet about following Texas’ lead. A fair enough question, and it can be a sign of a healthy evolution: awareness is the first step, a desire to take action is the second step, and then some folks might get stuck — they’re at a loss as to what action to take. Lots of things should spring to mind (participate in a protest, write your representatives, send a letter to the editor), but they might feel ineffective or at least lack an immediate payoff. I have two recommendations: 1.) Find someone who is taking action and get busy alongside them! I’m a fan of Tom Sullivan, the morning blogger at Digby’s Hullabaloo. He’s a very creative activist and organizer. Reading him definitely gives me ideas and energy to get off my butt. 2.) Get active in party politics. We’re a two-party system, so if you’re not putting your energy into one of the two parties, you’re consigning yourself to being a spectator. (There are special cases where a third party can be in the game, such as the WFP in NY, but I don’t know much about them.) Personally, I think we need more and better Democrats. To this end, I’ve started putting in time on weekends, volunteering on Democrats’ general election campaigns (in hopes of electing more Democrats); this past year, I’ve also gotten engaged with the primary process (aiming for better Democrats). I don’t make campaign contributions, but that’s another way to get involved. If you’re braver than I, you can get on the front lines in the way that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were doing it, making good trouble. Or work in a support role to those folks. And even if you’re just doing the show-up-at-a-protest, write-your-representatives stuff, that’s not nothing. It all counts! Just my two cents Maybe go back and read the post again? EW is *not* describing a situation that could be remedied simply by the public being “given better information.” The confluence of a dementing narcissist POTUS with the culture of access journalism has created a monster. Few Americans are getting anything like a true window into the maelstrom of incompetence and malevolence this administration continues to wreak, and for that reason the damage will continue–into a future increasingly jeopardized by this conspiracy of silence. I think the bottleneck is where the “public” gets its information. If all they do is watch Fox News and read Newsmax and the other right-wing shills then there is little hope they will see the collapse coming. This may be beyond simple solution. Personally, I try to hit a number of different sources starting with Al Jazeera. Excellent piece, Marcy. I read here for reliable, grounded, clarity and am never disappointed. EW keeps me (marginally) sane. Minor edit in first sentence: ‘that are…’ vs ‘that is’ (if I’m still reading clearly). Your quote from the NYT is pretty alarming: “Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable.” Something that Bret “We’re Winning” Stephens didn’t mention in his last column. [Welcome back to emptywheel. THIRD REQUEST: Please use the SAME USERNAME and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You attempted to publish this comment as Wendy F” triggering auto-moderation; it has been edited to reflect your established username. Please check your browser’s cache and autofill; future comments may not publish if username does not match. **WARNING: After four requests without compliance, you will be banned from commenting.** /~Rayne] It is amazing that it is common knowledge overseas that American bases have been blown up…not a word on MSM. I had been told that by friends overseas…reading it here I now know it is true! Thank you Marcy! We also don’t hear much about potential war crimes done by our side, with the girls’ school being the single exception. I think. donate to emptywheel right away! this post is the reason why it is imperative! What’s the difference between Vietnam and Iran? Trump had a plan to get out of Vietnam. The fucker is responsible for the death and injury to thousands of people. He’s plunging us deeper in debt. He’s batshit crazy, a pedophile and his administration is incompetent. Yet the press continues to give him a free pass. Show up for the No Kings Protest this Saturday, March 28th. Hardee har har, Trump’s 48 hr ultimatum to Iran that became 5 days is now extended another 10 days to April 6th, to exactly 8PM EST and not one dad gumm second later. OT. Flew out of IAH this morning…arrived 5am for 10am flight…210 minutes in TSA line…2 x-ray machines in operation… 15 people missed the flight in line…we had to remove luggage before take-off. Trump has time to put his name on a dollar bill?