US media replays Iraq fiasco on Iran

Major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, are engaged in a replay of the kind of slanted coverage that paved the way to war in Iraq, only this time regarding Iran. The treatment of Iran's election last June, the depictions of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the alarm over Iran's nuclear program all parallel the one-sided coverage that the U.S. news media directed toward Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Iraq's alleged WMD program before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. In both cases, the leading U.S. news outlets took sides; they cast developments in the "enemy" Muslim nation in the harshest possible light; they treated the leaders as unrelentingly evil; they exaggerated the threats (and potential threats) posed by the country's weaponry, real and imagined. Without doubt, there were many unsavory aspects to Saddam Hussein as there are with Iran's Ahmadinejad. However, the U.S. media's depictions of the two leaders lacked nuance, with only the most extreme and unflattering interpretations of their words and actions allowed.