On July 5th, I was reading the digital version of the New York Times as I do every morning through their app and noted that its editors had chosen to place at the top of the first page the story written by Abdi Latif Dahir titled, “As Iran’s Patriarch is Mourned, Glimpses of a changing Tehran.” I had a few observations about that editorial placement decision and about the piece itself that I passed onto the outlet’s editors, but sadly I never heard back from them.

First, it was disappointing that on July 5^th, the day after our country celebrated its 250^th anniversary, the New York Times chose to make Dahir’s piece their first story, versus reporting anything about the 250^th anniversary of our unique democracy. Putting aside all the claims of lack of patriotism and lack of love for our country that could be made, the outlet clearly helped to spread the PR and media strategy of the state of Iran, a media strategy that has been used to discredit the U.S. and other Western societies for many decades, even while the West has created a better quality of life for their people than that of the brutal authoritarian state of Iran.