Thomas Fluharty

On May 5, the New York Times posted online a lengthy and candid interview with Ben Rhodes, the 38-year-old deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. The interview was something of a get—the profile by veteran journalist David Samuels, which would be published in the May 8 edition of the New York Times Magazine, accurately describes Rhodes as "the Boy Wonder of the Obama White House." Samuels notes that "nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase 'mind meld' " to describe his relationship with President Obama.
Long, beat-sweetening profiles of senior White House officials have become a genre unto themselves in the prestige press, but Samuels delivered something better than that. As a result, D.C.'s media establishment and its insular world of foreign policy wonks were driven into a frenzy of loathing, from which they have yet to recover.
In his own words—and presumably his statements reflect the president he has a mind meld with—Rhodes and other White House officials brag about manipulating the media. They credit themselves with creating a foreign policy narrative divorced from reality to push through the Iranian nuclear deal. This revelation, coupled with increasingly widespread recognition that the Obama administration lied about key details of the Iran deal, has understandably caused an uproar.
"We created an echo chamber," [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."
Rhodes boasted to Samuels that reporters were easy to manipulate, thanks to the elimination of veteran correspondents and foreign news bureaus:
"Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."
Rhodes's assistant, Ned Price, then explained how they would specifically manipulate the coverage:
The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. "But then there are sort of these force multipliers," he said, adding, "We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn't want to name them—"
"I can name them," [Samuels] said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.
Price laughed.
Finally Samuels gets White House officials to name names in the press. "People construct their own sense of source and credibility now," said Tanya Somanader, who worked under Rhodes.
"They elect who they're going to believe." For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration's narrative. "Laura Rozen was my RSS feed," Somanader offered. "She would just find everything and retweet it."
It would be hard to overstate how little reason the media had to trust the Obama administration on Iran. Initially, officials lied about even the existence of bilateral talks with Iran. The official narrative was that negotiations were keyed to the election of the "moderate" president of Iran Hassan Rouhani in 2013. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would later confirm reporting that talks with Iran actually began in 2011.
As for why journalists would carry so much water for the Obama administration, the simple answer is that they shared the administration's passion for a deal with Iran. Rozen's slavish devotion to Obama's Iran policy, for one, has been something to behold.
Late last summer, the Associated Press broke the news the Obama administration let Iran make a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency to "self-inspect" its own Parchin nuclear site. The terms of this side-deal with Iran were never disclosed to Congress as required by the Corker-Cardin law that assented to the deal. In a Daily Beast column that now looks incredibly prescient, Naval War College professor Tom Nichols noted that the political and media response to the AP's revelations looked very coordinated and oddly lacking in substance. Nichols compared it to 9/11 truthers who say they are "just asking questions" as a way to sow doubt. And perhaps the most spurious such question was Rozen's baselessly wondering if the documents obtained by the AP were Israeli forgeries.
That's just the beginning. When the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qassem Soleimani, responsible for killing American soldiers in Iraq, began violating sanctions against Iran by visiting Moscow, Rozen asserted his travels were lawful. In January, when Iran boarded an American vessel in the Persian Gulf, she responded to a photo of the Americans being held captive by tweeting, "looks like they are making friends." (In Samuels's piece, Rhodes is quoted lamenting the fact that the leaked news of American sailors being taken captive—Rhodes was trying to keep it a secret—would overshadow Obama's State of the Union address later that same day.) When the controversy over the Rhodes profile launched a slew of criticisms directed at her, one of Rozen's notable supporters tweeted, "Laura Rozen has been the best & most informative feed on #IranTalks. You rock Laura! Keep going." The words of encouragement came from Abbas Aslani, a foreign policy reporter at Tasnim News Agency, an organization affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic is in many ways a very different journalist from Rozen. Rather than the loudest person shouting in the echo chamber, he's much less ideological. He was always quick to emphasize reservations about the Iran deal. What's notable about Goldberg is his incredible access to the White House, including multiple interviews with the president. Goldberg last profiled Obama in the April edition of the Atlantic, and the interview caused quite a stir because Obama openly insulted American allies.
Goldberg responded directly to Samuels's article and had one legitimate beef. If the reputation of Goldberg and other journalists would be impugned, perhaps they should have been given a chance to respond. However, Goldberg undercut his own demand for fairness by claiming Samuels and his wife (Alana Newhouse, editor of Tablet Magazine) have a "personal animus," which he had discerned based on gossip from "people who are friends of mine." The usually affable Goldberg doesn't give any serious consideration to the apparent reality that White House officials believed they were spinning him.
It's worth noting that the policy infrastructure supporting Rhodes's echo chamber was amply funded. As reported by Bloomberg last year, the Rockefeller family gave millions to liberal and pro-Iranian groups advocating a deal with Iran. And the Wall Street Journal further reported that the White House, and Ben Rhodes specifically, was helping direct the efforts of those groups to pressure Congress on the Iran deal.
There were apparent financial consequences for groups that, as details of the deal started trickling out, weren't completely on board. Much of the pro-deal money was distributed via an antinuke foundation called the Ploughshares Fund. Ploughshares had been giving money to an antiproliferation group called the Institute for Science and International Security, aka "the good ISIS." ISIS stopped getting money a few years back and its president David Albright has so far declined to say it was because the organization wouldn't support Obama's Iran deal. But two days after the Samuels article was published, the organization tweeted: "We tried to warn Rozen, ACA [Arms Control Association], P-shares that official(s) overselling nuclear deal to them, should be more critical."
The terrifying reality of a nuclear Iran notwithstanding, what may be most troubling about this episode is how this manipulation of the press has become the new political playbook and how willing the pawns are to be manipulated. In 2014, Rhodes sold a band of liberal interest groups on the Iran deal, calling it "the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context." It's an apt comparison, because the selling of Obamacare perfectly tracks the dishonest machinations of the Iran deal.
First, tell a bunch of brazen lies designed to soften political resistance, e.g., "Obamacare will be deficit neutral" and "if you like your health insurance you can keep it." Second, get a bunch of court stenographers to be "force multipliers" in the press—Ezra Klein, then at the Washington Post, and the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn were relentlessly on message, as were hundreds of other reporters on the "Journo-List" email list Klein maintained. Also enlisted were media-savvy wonks such as MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who later admitted to being deceptive about aspects of the law to sell it, along with deep-pocketed liberal foundations.
Third, when reality catches up with the narrative—Obamacare is going to cost trillions, and millions are losing their health insurance—call on the same echo chamber that lied in the first place to gaslight the critics, have them alternately insist everyone knew this was going to happen or that it's a small price to pay for being on the right side of history, and, finally, have your fellow-travelers bask in achieving your political objective even though the trail of self-serving lies left behind seriously erodes the public trust necessary to govern in the future.
The minor problem with this approach is that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Perhaps the fallout over the Rhodes interview is best summed up by a headline in Foreign Policy from Thomas E. Ricks, the Pulitzer-winning reporter who covered the Iraq war for the Washington Post: "A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the a—hole who is the president's foreign policy guru." The substance of the article wasn't much more restrained. Ricks compares Rhodes to "the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds?"
Ricks is right that history probably won't look kindly on the Iran deal. It's jarring when you consider that Obama's two signature accomplishments, Obamacare and the Iran deal, were both achieved by systematically and deliberately lying. Rhodes is leaving the White House in a few months and likely knew exactly what he sounds like—a man who deserves credit for executing a winning strategy.
Besides, it's the victors who write history. On May 9, with the Rhodes controversy still raging, Fox News national security reporter James Rosen reported that the State Department had surreptitiously edited the official recording of a December 2013 press conference. An exchange where State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki admitted to Rosen the administration had been lying about when the Iran talks began had been excised from the full recording on the State Department's website and YouTube channel.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.