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Mostly, coverage of Iran's nuclear program is not concerned with the facts on the ground but with strategic concerns inside-the-Beltway. Of the 43 reports filed on all three newscasts over the past four years, fully 26 have had a Washington DC dateline, mostly either the Pentagon or the White House. Only eleven have originated from a abroad, a beat that has been all-but owned by Elizabeth Palmer of CBS, who is responsible for seven of them. Now Richard Engel muscles in on Palmer's turf with an Exclusive tour of the Teheran Research Reactor, which was built by US engineers for the Shah of Iran to produce medical isotopes. Engel was told that nuclear facility's output treats 850,000 cancer patients.
Naturally, NBC's Engel was not interested in healthcare reporting. He wanted to know about November's assassination of a nuclear scientist in the streets of Teheran (which CBS' Palmer did cover) and in cyber-sabotage of Iran's uranium enrichment by the Stuxnet computer worm (which The New York Times covered but no network newscast has picked up on). You listen to Engel's soundbites with nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili: clearly he blames the assassination on Zionists; as for Stuxnet, who knows what he admits to and what amounts to No Comment?
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