AP Headline Writers Make Iran NIE Say The Opposite of What It Says
December 3, 2007 -- 6:34 PM EST // //

Poor Pamela Hess. The AP's rock-solid intelligence reporter did her job today, explaining thoroughly that the intelligence community's latest collective judgment on Iran finds, with "high confidence," that Tehran shut its nuclear program down in 2003. Too bad her headline writers didn't do theirs.

Like all other straight write-ups of the judgment -- known a National Intelligence Estimate -- Hess's story emphasizes that Iran shuttered its nuclear program in 2003 under international pressure. It further reports, faithfully following the NIE, that Iran is considered unlikely to have a nuclear weapon, even if it "went all out" (Hess's words), until 2015. The NIE also says that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium for its civilian energy program, and so Hess reported that as well.

So what did the AP use for its headline, as of 1:03 p.m.?

Now, someone at the AP must have figured that headline was misleading. After all, you'd read that and reasonably believe those U.S. officials are saying Iran has a nuclear weapons program. So what was AP's new headline, at 1:43 p.m.?

And that's where the AP left it, at least as of 6:30 p.m. By contrast, the New York Times's headline read "U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work." The Washington Post: "U.S.: Iran Halted Nuclear Weapons Program in 2003." The Los Angeles Times: "Iran Has No Nuke Program, U.S. Intel Says." None of these stories differs meaningfully from Hess's piece. That's because all of them reported the NIE accurately.

These misleading AP headlines aren't free of consequences. Chances are the headline writers at the AP's bajillion newspaper and web subscribers will riff off of the AP's headlines in their pick-up. That means millions of casual readers will come away with an impression of the Iranian nuclear weapons non-program that's exactly the opposite of what the U.S. intelligence community says it is -- or, at the least, they'll be needlessly confused. And when Bush administration hawks or GOP politicians or Joe Lieberman lie about the nuclear threat from the Tehran Islamofascists, they'll be playing to an already-bamboozled audience. Nice work!

-- Special HM Guest-Star Spencer Ackerman