“Another one of my favorite examples of a journalist getting it wrong on an epic scale was Fareed Zakaria’s 2009 Newsweek cover piece, “Everything You Know About Iran Is Wrong.”
Zakaria’s got the sterling resume – Yale, Harvard, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, adjunct professor at Columbia – and he wrote, in what must have been a heavily researched piece, that Iran’s regime might “be happy with a peaceful civilian [nuclear] program,” “Iranians aren’t suicidal.” “Iran isn’t a dictatorship,” and it has a culture of “considerable debate and dissent.” Newsweek readers no doubt concluded that hyperbolic media coverage had obscured the reality of Iran, which was a sophisticated, multifaceted, modern state that is not so scary or brutal after all.
A month after the Zakaria piece ran, the Iranian regime announced Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won reelection with 60 percent of the vote, a result that many Iranians concluded had to be fraudulent. The regime crushed the Green Revolution with brutal force, shooting women like Neda Agha-Soltan in the street.
Within a matter of months, President Obama announced “the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years.”
So if you had previously seen Iran as a country dominated by a brutal, dangerously aggressive, nuclear-ambitious regime that already demonstrated a willingness to use children to clear minefields and embraced a philosophy of risk and sacrifice unthinkable to Western values. . . it turns out everything you knew about Iran wasn’t wrong. Everything Fareed Zakaria knew was wrong.”