For the curious American wondering how journalists should conduct themselves ethically there’s no better place to look than the oldest journalistic society in America. Founded in 1909, the Society of Professional Journalists implores journalists to seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent.
“A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.”
This sentence was how American journalist Glenn Greenwald concluded his column for The Guardian in 2013 after the paper began breaking news of the National Security Agency’s program of mass surveillance provided to them by Edward Snowden.
This idea is a fundamental yet seemingly idealistic tenet of journalism. Journalists claim to be the arbiter of the events happening around us bringing to light the most important information untarnished by bias.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to be sliding further away in mainstream media and has been for a long time.
Being a child of the 1990’s I recall my middle school experience of watching the nightly news with my parents in 2003. Every night when we tuned in we saw the live and continuous coverage of the Invasion of Iraq.
At the time, the Sept. 11 attacks were fresh on America’s mind as was the freshly-minted Global War on Terrorism. During his State of the Union speech in 2002, five months after the attacks, President George W. Bush referred to Iraq as part of the “Axis of Evil” along with Iran and North Korea. Bush’s administration then claimed Iraq had been planning the development of chemical and nuclear weapons for over a decade .
Every night for over a year, a rotating cast of talking heads and journalists aligned with the Bush administration’s talking points and began repeating it on air and in the paper. The main talking points revolved around the need to intervene in Iraq to bring stability to the region and to remove weapons of mass destruction. Journalists began shifting attention from Afghanistan to this new perceived threat. This shift of focus resulted with an invasion and war of Iraq in 2003 that 72 percent of Americans supported according to Gallup polling a few days after the invasion.
According to CNN reporting at the time, the CIA concluded in a 2004 report to Congress after the invasion that Saddam Hussien at the time of invasion had no stockpiles of illicit weapons and had not begun to produce any. Additionally the CIA admitted that Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had ended in 1991 after the Gulf War.
Ultimately, the War in Iraq ended after almost nine years never completing the objectives that had been used to justify it. In the aftermath, the Department of Defense recorded just over 36,000 active duty American casualties with 4,418 of those being troops killed in action. The Associated Press estimated that over 110,000 Iraqis died over the course of the war.
In a somewhat ironic twist of fate, I now find myself a Veteran of the Global War on Terrorism watching the same war machine churn back alive and restart almost beat for beat its successful 2003 media playbook. In the words of Rust Cohle from True Detective “Time is a flat circle, everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over again.”
We see the same cycle of manufactured consent going on now as we did in 2002. This time aimed at Iran, but instead of anthrax and chemical weapons the Trump administration has focused on “nuclear dust” and Iran being “two weeks away from a nuke”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in 2025 that Iran has roughly 440 kilos of uranium enriched to 60 percent that if enriched to 90 percent would be enough material for 10 nuclear weapons.
Iran, however, has maintained a stance on non-proliferation since 1970 when Iran signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as well as the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action(JCPOA). Iran remained a part of the JCPOA even after the U.S.’s withdrawal in 2018 only leaving in 2025 after the conclusion of the 12 Day War.
Regardless, the Trump administration repeatedly claims that Iran is two weeks away from having a nuke even after Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. This operation was touted as a successful joint strike with Israel during the 12-Day War that was supposed to be the end of Iran’s enrichment program permanently.
Mainstream media, rather than serving as that idealistic light in the dark, is instead a spotlight operated by the State Department as its unofficial mouthpiece. American approval for the Iran Conflict according to IPSOS polling in April nearly two weeks after the start showed 60 percent disapproved of military strikes against Iran.
We as journalists and the field of journalism as a whole are supposed to be that shining light in the dark. It is high time that we stick to the morals and ethics we espouse and be that unbiased arbiter of events rather than serve as the propaganda mouthpiece of an administration seemingly hell bent on repeating the sins of the past of leading America into another pointless war.