There’s a moment in the middle of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger where Auric Goldfinger, now thoroughly annoyed with how Bond keeps turning up, tells 007 that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” That’s how readers of the New York Times must feel when confronted with the paper’s unsubtle front page campaign to brush back Israeli action against Iran.
Last month the Times ran a double bylined A1 article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, headlined “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” Just to make sure readers knew how to contextualize the de facto talking points, the article kicked off with: “even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program…” The disclaimer was a reference to IAEA investigations, which the Times had previously buried on A8, cataloging the evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
