This newspaper has gradually gained credibility over the past dozen years, and naturally it is not expected to show the same behavior as, for example, a handful of Twitter accounts or yellow sites.
However, last Friday night (September 16, 2022), the New York Times published a report, the inaccuracy of which became clear to everyone in less than 24 hours, and a non-professional reporter did a fatal blow to the credibility of this American newspaper.
In her report, the non-professional writer of the New York Times, quoting “four informed sources”, claimed that the leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei, has fallen ill and is under the supervision of a team of physicians, and has canceled his last week meetings and those of the next as a result.
Those who are familiar with social networks may have seen such baseless rumors from the most yellow and discredited users of social networks many times in recent months or even years. Naturally, such rumors are not taken into account by observers. But it seems that the New York Times newspaper and its writer did not pay any attention to the important matter of “credibility of the source”, which is an unquestionable media principle, to the extent that apparently all four sources cited by the New York Times were yellow sources that spread such a rumor instead of news.
The New York Times and its writer not only did not pay attention to the credibility of the source, but also did not refer to common sense to verify the detailed and completely false claims in this report.
First, the history of Ayatollah Khamenei’s illness and surgery eight years ago on September 8, 2014 shows the way he and the Islamic Republic of Iran faced such issues. Accurate and timely information in such cases has always been on the agenda.
Second, if such a critical situation had really occurred for the health of Iran’s leader, the question did not arise for the writer and editorial board of the New York Times, what was the president of Iran doing at the Shanghai Summit in such a situation? Shouldn’t he have canceled or at least shortened his trip in such circumstances?
Just putting these two issues together was enough for the mentioned newspaper to ignore the fantasies of those four anonymous and perhaps fraudulent sources.
Anyway, on Saturday morning, coinciding with Arbaeen Day, Ayatollah Khamenei participated and gave a speech in a mourning ceremony in Tehran. In this way, the claims of the New York Times were overturned and on the other hand, the credibility of this media was destroyed overnight.
Apart from issues such as not respecting the principle of source credibility and not referring to common sense to validate the facts of the report, it seems necessary to pay attention to the fact that the New York Times newspaper is known as a newspaper close to the US Democrats, the party that is now in power in America.
This fact is enough to consider the possibility of mischief on the part of this newspaper. It is obvious that the media people are hard-pressed to believe that such a terrible gaffe could have come from a newspaper on the level of the New York Times without any particular motive.
It is not a secret that the American ruling body benefits from disrupting the political atmosphere and economic markets in Iran; especially in the midst of negotiations to lift the sanctions, which is actually a battle of wills, and the American side has proven that it will not spare any mischief to break Iran’s resistance against its excessive demands.
But the only achievement of this unprofessional media gambling was to lose decades of credibility for the New York Times.
Translated by IRNA English Desk
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