A new report from Media Matters released today finds that the broadcast news networks — NBC Nightly News, ABC’s World News and CBS’s Evening News — “frequently” distort or exaggerate key information regarding Iran’s nuclear program. “Two egregious misrepresentations in particular repeatedly came up,” the report says, reports “suggesting that Iran will imminently obtain the bomb and suggesting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has major influence over the country’s nuclear program.”
Indeed, as the report notes, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that it would take about three years for Iran to have a deliverable nuclear weapon should it make the decision to embark on a nuclear weapons program (the IAEA and U.S. and Israeliintelligence all agree that Iran has not made this decision). Moreover, Ahmadinejad is irrelevant to that decision. As the Associated Press noted in a report on an Iran intelligence assessment, it is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “whose word is final on nuclear and other issues.”
Media Matters charted the results of the study:
