Is Al Jazeera Bias? It Wrote "Iran Claims To Strike Back." The New York Times Just Believed Iran.


Tehran Announced A Devastating Retaliation That Mostly Failed To Show Up. One Newsroom Used The Word "Claimed." It Was The One Americans Are Warned About.

NEW YORK, New York. Somewhere in Brooklyn right now there is a man with an NPR tote bag staring at his phone like it just insulted his mother. He typed is Al Jezzeera bias into Google during the Iranian missile crisis, spelled exactly like that, because it was 2 a.m. and he was upset. Google knew what he meant. Google always knows.

What broke him was one word. Seven letters. "Claimed."

When Tehran announced its devastating retaliation against American forces, Al Jazeera, the network his uncle calls "terrorist TV," ran the one headline of the night that would pass a freshman journalism class: Iran claims to have struck back. The New York Times went with Iran strikes back, filed the retaliation as settled history, and pivoted immediately to a forensic investigation of the aftermath, including a deeply reported piece on a damaged water tank in Hormozgan Province. The BBC and The Guardian ran the same verb on the other side of the ocean, in case anyone thought this was an American problem.

There was just one issue with the strike, which is that it mostly did not occur. The missiles that launched were largely intercepted, several others went sightseeing in the desert, and Iran's most accurate delivery system of the entire war turned out to be its press office, which scored direct hits on four Western front pages without a single warhead reaching its target.


Seven Letters The Paper Of Record Couldn't Spare


"Claimed" is not an exotic word. It costs nothing. It requires no Pulitzer, no satellite desk, no correspondent standing on a hotel roof four hundred miles from the action gesturing at the horizon like it owes him money. It is the seatbelt of journalism: boring, free, and the only thing between the reader and the windshield when a regime's press release is doing eighty.

"Attribution is the entire job," explained Professor Dale Hutchins, who teaches journalism at a state school in Ohio and asked us to mention that he drives a 2011 Camry so readers understand he has no stake in any of this. "A hostile government announces a military triumph. You report that they announced it. You do not report that it happened, because you weren't there, and neither, it turns out, were the missiles."

The Times' motto is all the news that's fit to print. Nobody said anything about whose. For one strange night, the paper of record recorded Tehran's press release, verbatim verb and all, while the network funded by an emirate next door to Iran was the one asking "says who?"

"I went in trying to find out if Iran actually hit anything," said Gary Pelletier, a retired plumber from Toledo who reads four news sites every morning at a diner where the coffee refills are free and the opinions are not. "The Times told me Iran struck back, then told me everything about a water tank. Al Jazeera told me Iran said it struck back. By lunch it was clear the difference between those sentences was approximately every missile. I know more about that tank than my own water heater, and I installed my own water heater."


Iran's Most Successful Strike Landed On Four Front Pages


Here's the part the analysis pieces never quite analyzed. Iran's ability to "strike back" in any meaningful sense is the open secret of this war. Its air force is a museum with a runway. Its barrages launch with hours of advance notice into the most heavily defended airspace on Earth, with results military analysts describe, technically, as fireworks with a communications strategy.

The regime cannot reliably hit an American base. What it can reliably hit is a newsroom on deadline, an institution with zero air defenses and a powerful institutional craving to type "Iran strikes back," which is, in fairness, a tremendous headline. "Iran claims retaliation, claim contradicted by every available satellite" gets fewer clicks but carries the inconvenient advantage of being what happened.

"Tehran figured out something genuinely innovative," said media historian Roger Penberthy, reached at a used bookstore where he was losing an argument about a first edition. "You don't need missiles that arrive. You need newsrooms that do. The Islamic Republic's most effective long-range weapons system this week was a Manhattan headline desk, and it didn't cost them a rial."

The water tank investigation, to be clear, was real journalism, and humanitarian groups praised it. But it produced the defining image of the week: a newsroom that deployed forensic satellite analysis on a reservoir roof and could not deploy one skeptical verb on the regime that announced the attack. Every crater got verified. The headline never did.


Yes, Al Jazeera Is Still Biased, Which Is What Makes This Humiliating


Before anyone in Doha frames this article, let's be clear: Al Jazeera did not become objective. It had one good night, the way your worst golfer occasionally birdies a hole and talks about it for a decade. The network is funded by the Qatari state. Qatar shares the world's largest gas field with Iran, sits twenty minutes across the water from it, and has every diplomatic incentive in the hemisphere to be gentle. Bias trackers like AllSides and Ad Fontes Media will tell you exactly which way it leans.

Which is precisely the joke. The outlet with an actual geopolitical reason to flatter Tehran applied attribution. The outlets with no such ties, the ones whose staffers give conference talks about disinformation, printed the regime's announcement as an outcome. The alleged propaganda channel fact-checked the propaganda. The free press transcribed it.

"Every outlet has incentives," Penberthy went on. "The fantasy isn't that some organizations have biases. The fantasy is believing your own side's biases are objective truth wearing reading glasses. The Times was so determined not to look like it was carrying water for Washington that it carried Tehran's instead. Both-sidesism has a failure mode, and the failure mode is that one of the sides is lying."

One subscriber, who has kept his digital subscription going since Barack Obama's first term and regards canceling it the way other men regard divorce, defended the paper on grounds of nuance. Asked whether nuance ever involved skepticism toward a theocracy announcing its own military success, he excused himself to update his bio.


Propaganda Doesn't Buy Ads When It Can Get Syndicated


The public processed all this about as well as you'd expect. Conservatives shared screenshots announcing that even Al Jazeera was more honest now. Progressives countered that honesty itself was problematic in this context. Gallup's polling on media trust sat near historic lows and did not move, because it has nowhere left to go.

Then everybody went back to doomscrolling, the last activity in America with genuine bipartisan support, while the sensible people at Latest Story repeated the boring advice that actually works: read several sources, assume every outlet has blind spots, and when a government announces its own military triumph, wait for somebody other than that government to confirm it.

Media philosopher Nigel Throckmorton put it best. "The first casualty of war is truth," he said. "The second casualty is attribution. The third is the reader who just wanted to know if Iran hit anything, and was told yes, by everyone except the missiles."

Because here's the sincere part, under the jokes. "Claimed" is not pedantry. It's the entire contract. A reader can't be in Hormozgan Province, so he pays someone to ask "says who?" on his behalf. The night that question got asked in Doha instead of Manhattan is a night worth being angry about. When the paper of record reports claims as facts, propaganda doesn't need to buy advertising. It gets syndicated, fact-checked craters and all.

As for the man in Brooklyn, he reached his own settlement with reality. He kept his Times subscription, because canceling felt like divorce and his therapist already has enough material. But the next morning, quietly, before the explainers loaded, he checked Al Jazeera first, looking for one word. Then he stared out the coffee shop window and wondered whether reality had finally outsourced itself to satire.

If it has, reality should know we're a closed shop here, and the union dues are brutal.

Our British colleagues at The London Prat ran the same comparison against the BBC and reached the same verdict, with worse weather and a compulsory licence fee to be angry about.

Disclaimer

This article is American satirical journalism and commentary. It was created entirely through a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Any resemblance to a missile that actually arrived is purely coincidental and remains, at press time, unclaimed.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! https://bohiney.com/is-al-jezzeera-bias/