In 2011, Bloomberg News celebrated making The Bloomberg Way: Guide for Reporters and Editors available to the public.
“There was no tradition of journalism at Bloomberg when Bloomberg News began in 1990, and so we had to invent a set of values. We had to invent our news judgment,” Bloomberg news editor-in-chief Matt Winkler explained in 2014 when the guide’s updated version was released. “By 1995-96, there really was a book that could be called the Bloomberg Way.”
Bloomberg’s failure last week to properly identify a straightup news analysis as news analysis signals that somewhere along the way the media outlet may have lost its way.
In their Oct. 2 piece, Sam Dagher and Golnar Motevalli postulate, as the headline states, “Iran Pushed Into Missile Fire By Sustained Israel Escalation“:
Iran’s generals and clerics have repeatedly shown a reluctance to go to war in recent months, yet the scale of Israel’s damage to the country’s regional prowess left them with little option but to retaliate.
Localities in Israel where sirens warned of incoming Iranian missiles Oct. 1, 2024 (Image from IDF)
The article speculates that Iran had no choice but to hit Israel with massive ballistic missile fire: “Left with little room to maneuver, Iran then fired about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night …”
But earlier internal division within the Iranian leadership pointed to other options on the table. As Times of Israel reported (“Iran’s leadership said deeply shaken, divided over response to Nasrallah’s killing,” Sept. 29):
Hawkish members, among them Saeed Jalili, urged quickly building Iran’s deterrence by hitting Israel before the latter did the same to Iran, officials with knowledge of the meeting told the Times.
State television, which is controlled by those with ties to Jalili, has also urged hitting Israel, the report said.
But Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian opposed such a move, believing that launching a preemptive strike against Israel would mean falling into a trap set by the Jewish state to start a regional war, officials said.
Other moderates also worried that an attack on Israel would draw responses damaging critical Iranian infrastructure, an acute problem amid the already weak home economy. . . .
At the United Nations General Assembly last week, Pezeshkian told reporters that Iran was ready to “lay down its arms if Israel laid down its arms,” and called for an international force to intervene in establishing peace in the Middle East,” the report said.
Conservatives attacked him for the speech, saying his message showed weakness that encouraged Israel to kill Nasrallah, the Times said.
Clearly, the more hawkish voices won out. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran had no other choice.
Moreover, the Bloomberg journalists tap observers who make the argument that Iran was pushed into a corner against its will, as if the regime is moderate and shuns conflict. In a woefully false depiction of the regional reality, Dagher and Motevalli report:
Ahmed Al-Heela, a Palestinian expert on Iran’s so-called axis of resistance — the name given to a network militia groups sponsored by Tehran — said: “Israel messed with Iran’s national security” when it killed Nasrallah and went after Hezbollah.
“There is an organic and structural connection between the IRGC and Hezbollah,” he told Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language news channel, referring to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of redrawing the map of the Middle East and pushing back Iran’s influence in the Levant spurred the leadership of the Islamic Republic into action.
Obscured behind the talk of “Iran’s national security” and “Iran’s influence in the Levant” with its “decades-in-the-making network of armed allies” (ie, terrorist proxies) is the regime’s quickly advancing nuclear program coupled with its ongoing explicit threats to wipe Israel off the map, a looming noose over Israel’s existence. Had Dagher and Motevalli bothered to seek comment from an Israeli expert on Iran’s “axis of resistance,” they likely would have received the following picture painted by analyst Yossi Klein Halevi in The Los Angeles Times (“Opinion: Israel Is Fighting to Beat Iran’s Doomsday Clock,” Oct. 7):
In its war against the Jewish state, Iran achieved two historic victories. The first was to surround Israel with terrorist enclaves. The second was to outwit the Israeli campaign — which included sabotaging nuclear installations and assassinating Iranian scientists — to prevent Iran from nuclear breakout. Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold.
No country, including the United States, is likely to use force to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear bomb. No country, that is, except Israel. The Jewish state, founded on the promise of providing a safe refuge for the Jewish people, cannot allow the ayatollahs to attain the means to fulfill Khamenei’s genocidal prophesy.
The culminating moment of this war to restore Israeli deterrence against existential threat will be preventing Iran’s nuclear breakout.
Denying terrorists immunity applies most of all to the Iranian regime. For decades the ayatollahs have hidden behind terrorist proxies. Time and again, Israel has fought Hamas and Hezbollah, while avoiding direct conflict with the source of regional terrorism. [Emphasis added.]
Focusing through Klein Halevi’s clarifying lens, fair observers could easily conclude that it is Israel which was pushed to take more aggressive steps against Iran’s “ring of fire” terrorizing Israel — from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq, and West Bank terror organizations — which all stepped up their attacks in Israel in the last year. Consider, for instance, Hezbollah’s August attack on Majdal Shams in which 12 children were killed. And before that, Hezbollah’s incessant rocket attacks targeting northern Israeli communities started on Oct. 8, displacing some 60,000 Israelis from their homes for a year. These acts are not sustained escalations which pushed Israel into blowing up communications devices and targeting Hezbollah leaders, as the Bloomberg headline put it?
On the question of Israeli versus Iranian escalations, a reporter queried State Department spokesman Matthew Miller Oct. 1 following Iran’s attack on Israel:
And then both you and the National Security Advisor just a few minutes ago talked about [Iran’s attack] being a brazen and unacceptable escalation. But does the administration see anything that Israel has done over the course of the last three weeks as escalatory?
To which Miller responded, raising a key point glaringly glossed over in the Bloomberg analysis:
So certainly they have done things to expand the conflict, but if you look at the actions that they have taken, they were bringing terrorists to justice, terrorists who have launched attacks on Israeli civilians. If you look at what Iran did today – we have been warning for some time about the threat posed by Iran arming and funding terrorist groups across the Middle East. And the attack today just demonstrated the danger of those actions. What you saw was Iran launching a state-on-state attack to protect and defend the terrorist groups that it has built, nurtured and that it controls. So there is a difference between the actions that we have seen Israel take to defend its civilians — [interruption] — and what we’ve – I just – and what we’ve seen Iran take. …
No, you – we have certainly seen Iran – or – we’ve certainly seen Israel expand the nature of its attacks against Hizballah, but it is a very – it is a very different type of attack than what we saw today from a state – a state actor against another state.
Finally, Dagher and Golnar Motevalli’s argument that the Iranian leadership could not possibly withstand Shiite frustration and public pressure is patently absurd. Iran has stood remarkably firm against widespread public outrage over its brutal repression of its citizens. The regime has no trouble withstanding public pressure when it chooses to do so.
Given that the authors’ speculations are just that — speculations — CAMERA urged Bloomberg to appropriately label this piece as a news analysis and to amend its headline to acknowledge the escalation on the part of Iran’s proxies. As of this writing, editors have failed to do so. Perhaps it’s time again for an update of the values and practices which constitute The Bloomberg Way.
See also “Bloomberg: Ceasefire Deal to Exchange Hostages, Palestinian ‘Political’ Prisoners“