CNN and The New York Times have had an exceptionally difficult time covering a wave of anti-government, anti-Islamic fundamentalist unrest taking place in Iran. As the Iranian people have taken to the streets to speak out against an oppressive regime, CNN and The New York Times have swiftly moved to rebrand the protests as inconsequential and, at times, anti-American.
According to CNN’s latest, the protests — which have seen women throw off their hijabs, defying years of fundamentalist restrictions telling them what they can and cannot wear in public — are, in fact, a reaction to the Trump Administration’s refusal to honor an Obama-era deal giving the ruling mullahs a controlled path to nuclear weapons.
“Iranians are angry, experts say, because they expected life to get better when severe sanctions were lifted after a deal was reached in 2015 between the P5+1 and Iran over its nuclear program,” CNN claims, as though the United States is responsible for repressive policies within the formerly Westernized nation.
Obama’s team, of course, assumed the nuclear deal would moderate Iran’s restrictive and oppressive religious government. That simply didn’t happen.
Further down, the article downplays the protests as small and taking place in less consequential places outside Tehran. Only in passing does the article mention that the protests have taken place in some of the country’s most religiously repressive cities.
CNN, of course, opposes President Donald Trump’s intervention, preferring that the president take a less active role similar to that of President Barack Obama in 2009. The New York Times, in a seemingly coordinated piece, also suggested that Donald Trump “do nothing,” and work to preserve the Obama-era deal with the mullahs rather than pursue any American interest in a free-er Iran.
But if the stories out of two of America’s most “respected” media outlets have been strange, the headlines have been downright bizarre. As anti-government protests raged in Iran over the weekend, CNN and the NYT focused on . . . pro-government protests, almost certainly organized by Iran’s ruling party.
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) December 30, 2017
And that’s when CNN focused on the protests at all.
CNN’s Middle East section pic.twitter.com/nceKF2lZFE
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) December 31, 2017
Most of Saturday, CNN’s front page focused on “more important news” — that President Trump had hired security to keep nosy reporters out of Mar-a-Lago.
Generic CNN frontpage right now for US (incognito mode to make it more or less vanilla).
I’ve gone ahead and drawn red arrows pointing at all two mentions of Iran protests pic.twitter.com/JbTtGRjKwX
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) December 31, 2017
Sunday morning, at least, the Iran story lead.