How the Media Failed American Foreign Policy

The U.S. government invaded Iraq after a painful public debate over the possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing chemical and biological weapons. The claim turned out to be false, and the war led to the deaths of thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Two decades later, the episode is widely remembered as a signal failure not just of the post–Cold War foreign policy establishment but of the media that were supposed to hold the government to account and keep the public better informed.

Yet as bad as the Iraq War was, America’s current war against Iran is making it look like a master class. In late February, the U.S. launched a war against Iran that, unlike the very public run-up to the Iraq invasion, began with almost no public debate about the conflict’s costs, tradeoffs, risks, morality, or even goals. In mid-March it became clear that the Trump administration had not even prepared for the possibility that Iran would retaliate by blocking the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz—a maritime choke point that hosts roughly 20 percent of global energy flows, and whose shutdown has already sent oil prices skyrocketing while threatening a global recession or worse.

While President Donald Trump was sending ships, aircraft, and personnel to the region in preparation for war, much of the press was missing in action. Trump was not successfully interrogated about his rapidly shifting stated motives, which have ranged from defending Iranian protesters to imposing regime change to dismantling the country’s missile program to stopping a nuclear program that he claimed he already destroyed last year.

The invasion of Iraq followed a series of compounding media failures where false evidence was provided about the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons programs and insufficient questions were asked about the administration’s plans for pacifying the country after the invasion. The situation today is much worse: Instead of bad questions being asked by the media or false evidence provided, very few questions were asked before the fighting started, while the administration has attempted only a month later to start providing post hoc justifications for the war.

The shift in coverage of war and peace suggests a transition from mere incompetence or corruption to something closer to nihilism. The media, of course, are not a monolith—there are meaningful differences between publications, journalists, and editors, including within the establishment press. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that in the face of past failures things have actually gotten worse, and may still become more so in the years ahead.

America is a global empire that needs information about itself in order to function. But despite enhanced communication technologies, the mainstream media are offering less news and analysis about the world and America’s role in it. The rise of alternative media fills some of the gap, but smaller institutions are fighting an uphill battle.

The phenomenal impact that even small changes in U.S. foreign policy can have on other countries—as well as the sometimes abject failures of American establishment media in grappling with these events or explaining them to the public—is something that I have personally witnessed in my role as a journalist covering foreign affairs for independent U.S. media publications.

The Cipher

In 2023, a colleague and I reported on a top-secret Pakistani intelligence document, known internally as a “cipher,” showing that U.S. State Department diplomats had previously privately threatened Pakistan to remove then–Prime Minister Imran Khan.

A source in the Pakistani security establishment had leaked the document to us. It showed that in March 2022, a senior State Department official, Donald Lu, held a tense meeting with Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. to complain about Khan. Khan is a cricket star turned politician whose political rise was fueled by opposition to the U.S. drone program in the country; he had been taking what Lu called an “aggressively neutral” stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Pakistan is a country of 250 million armed with nuclear weapons and largely controlled by its military establishment. It also happens to be deeply dependent on its relationship with the U.S.—Pakistani leaders treat Washington as, in effect, a member of the ruling compact of the country, so they feel the views of America’s leadership must be taken into account. Lu conveyed to the Pakistanis that a forthcoming no-confidence vote in parliament to remove Khan would be in the interest of the two countries’ relationship, while sending an unsubtle warning about what might happen to Islamabad if he remained in power.

“I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”

The Pakistani military establishment moved the no-confidence vote against Khan forward the day after this meeting. A month later, Khan, the country’s most popular politician, was removed from power. Today he sits in jail: The military imprisoned him on corruption charges widely viewed as politicized. Due to the neglectful conditions of his incarceration, Khan recently lost sight in one of his eyes.

The cipher document was reported when Khan had already been taken to prison, and it caused a massive uproar in Pakistan when we published it. Khan had long claimed that the secret document was evidence of a foreign pressure campaign against him; following its disclosure, the cipher issue became a leading topic of discussion in Pakistani politics. The country’s leadership confirmed the veracity of the document when they called its disclosure a “massive crime.”

While this uproar over the document continued in Pakistan—triggered by the private comment of a State Department diplomat that had been interpreted as a serious threat by the country’s military junta—the issue barely registered for the U.S. public, which remained almost entirely unaware of the upheaval Biden administration officials had caused on the other side of the world. The media reaction was worse: Major publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times simply ignored the disclosure, even as it became a wall-to-wall news story in Pakistan.

Incredibly, the New York Times correspondent for Pakistan—who later posted photos of himself meeting with members of the military-backed government that replaced Khan after a rigged February 2024 election—attacked our reporting and falsely alleged that the document had been leaked by Khan’s own political party. The paper never followed up on the subject. As far as Times readers know, the entire episode never took place.

Collective Blindness

Cipher is just one of many similar omissions that I have directly encountered in my career as a journalist. Over a decade prior, I had worked as part of a small team reporting on leaked surveillance documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and saw firsthand the difficulties that whistleblowers often had in getting establishment media outlets to cover their disclosures. In the years after that, I encountered even more cases in which major media outlets failed to scrutinize government policy effectively, including credulous reporting of FBI entrapment cases in the U.S. and civilian casualty incidents abroad involving the military.

Trust in the media is decreasing as they abdicate their role as the world’s watchdog—and as new technology reshapes how Americans get information. This decline has been long in the making. From 1998 through 2011—a span of time running through the peak of what was known as the war on terror, when the U.S. was heavily involved in managing the affairs of several foreign countries—at least 20 U.S. newspapers and other media outlets completely eliminated their foreign bureaus, according to a report published by the American Journalism Review.

The retrenchment continued over the next decade, with once-formidable international news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post slashing their foreign bureaus as the world pivoted toward a more ephemeral form of “parachute journalism” and social media commentary in place of traditional forms of reporting. During this time, hundreds of entire news organizations—including local papers from midsized American cities that once regularly boasted their own foreign correspondents—simply disappeared. The business model of mainstream journalism imploded as advertising revenues suddenly flowed instead to tech platforms.

Earlier this year, just before the start of the war in Iran, the Post delivered the coup de grace to what had once been a venerable global news desk—cutting its entire newsroom by a third and eliminating several remaining foreign bureaus entirely.

Alongside this decline in coverage has been a deficit of interest by the American public in hard news about the world beyond its shores. A study published by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that only a third of Americans had an interest in international news at all; a strong majority felt it didn’t have the ability to discern the truth from the information it did get.

The populace’s introverted nature has long been noted by U.S. politicians, who covet greater public support for their foreign policy initiatives—good or bad. Expressing his frustration in rallying Americans to war in Europe in the mid–20th century, President Franklin Roosevelt lamented, “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.”

This national introversion is not unique to Americans, nor is it morally blameworthy. The problem is that unlike most countries, the U.S. oversees an empire whose actions affect the entire planet. At least for the present, Americans hold this role whether they like it or not, and so being informed about the rest of the planet and U.S. policy toward it is far more consequential.

This collective blindness or confusion about the world abroad has brought us now to a new nadir—a full-blown war entered with little public discussion, support, or even awareness of the stakes of the conflict before the first shot was fired.

The U.S. and Israel started the war not only with decapitation strikes aimed at killing Iran’s political leadership, including its head of state—a tactic that was incorrectly assumed would help trigger imminent regime collapse or an anti-government uprising—but also several devastating strikes against civilian targets, including the accidental bombing of a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran that killed at least 168 children and a separate attack on a sports facility where a volleyball practice was taking place, killing 21 people.

To their credit, many mainstream media outlets did a good job of covering these events, conducting investigations that found it was likely a U.S. Tomahawk missile that struck the girls’ school and even confronting Trump in person over the incident.

But it would have been better to ask hard questions before these terrible events took place—perhaps sparing us this war in the first place.

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Source: https://reason.com/2026/04/22/how-the-media-failed-american-foreign-policy/