Iran

"I could be VERY WRONG but this feels more like Iran acting as Triple AAA than the Iranian Hostage Crisis Redux," ThinkProgress alum and BuzzFeed World News Editor/Reporter Hayes Brown tweeted earlier this afternoon. 

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough appeared on four of the five major Sunday morning talk shows in advance of President Obama’s final State of the Union on Tuesday night and, when comparing those he sat for with ABC’s This Week host George Stephanopoulos and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, the contrast couldn’t be any more stark with the former lobbing softballs as the latter…

The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began…

President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.) After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the…

Earlier today, Fox News reported that Iran has tested "a new medium range ballistic missile test in breach of two United Nations Security Council resolutions." Yet none of Monday's Big Three broadcast network newscasts so much as mentioned the development.

At the Associated Press Sunday evening, White House Correspondent Julie Pace's coverage of President Obama's Oval Office address was predictably weak. One could cite at least a half-dozen problems with Pace's story, but two of them were particularly disingenuous.

Amidst all the news about gas prices and weather forecasts for this Thanksgiving week, Monday’s morning and evening newscasts on ABC and NBC found no time to mention that Washington Post reporter and U.S. citizen Jason Rezaian had been sentenced by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to an unspecified prison term after being detained in July 2014.

The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is…

Thursday’s Morning Joe featured a discussion on the Iranian deal and hostages in Iran. Late into the segment, Mika Brzezinski inquired of Vali Nasr on whether he was surprised the hostages weren't part of the deal. Nasr, who served as a State Department official in the Obama administration, and Karl Vick, of Time Magazine, both expressed a lack of surprise for getting the hostages. Joe…

Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.) Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country”…

Monday’s Morning Joe featured a discussion with Richard Stengel, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. What proceeded was a discussion of the administration for securing the Iran Deal, without any effort to release Journalist Jason Rezaian, or the other three hostages of the government in Iran. Stengel would try to defend the lack of action, by highlighting that…

When President Obama meets in Washington November 9 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I would imagine Netanyahu's main concern will be to find out exactly what the U.S. means by "infringement" as it applies to the Iran nuclear agreement. What exactly will the U.S. do when, not if, Iran violates the deal? What if Israel and the U.S. disagree as to whether there has been a violation?

Thursday's CBS Evening News was the sole Big Three network morning and evening newscast to report on the death of Ken Taylor, the former Canadian ambassador to Iran who helped six Americans escape during the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran. As of Friday morning, ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight, along with NBC's Today and NBC Nightly News, have yet to cover Taylor's death.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations. As described by George Jahn at the Associated Press, it was "an impassioned speech interspersed with bouts of dramatic silence." Jahn failed to report the absence of U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry. So did Rick Gladstone and Judi Rudoren at the New York Times. An unbylined Reuters…