Topic of the Week: US and Iran Reach Tentative Peace Deal

Last Sunday, President Donald Trump took to social media to announce the United States had agreed to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran on a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end the nearly four-month war between the two countries. Our analysts rated four news articles and two videos about the MOU in our Topic of the Week.

The least biased piece in our content set came from Newsweek. This article provided additional information from President Trump’s social media posts on the matter and also included comments from Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on the MOU. The article noted that as the U.S. and Iran were negotiating the terms of the MOU, fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon was ongoing and threatened to derail negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

Our analysts also rated an article from Al Jazeera and gave this article a very similar score to the Newsweek article. The Al Jazeera article contained much of the same information about President Trump’s social media posts as the Newsweek article did, but it also included statements from several world leaders including the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shebaz Sharif, who helped to mediate negotiations of the MOU between the U.S. and Iran, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and finally U.S. Vice President JD Vance. Our analysts found both the Newsweek and Al Jazeera articles to be “simple fact reporting” with a “middle/balanced” bias.

The Gateway Pundit article our analysts rated included more of President Trump’s social media posts. The posts included in this article focused on Trump’s criticisms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S, China, France, Russia, the U.K, Germany, and the European Union and Iran during the Obama administration, which the U.S. withdrew from during the first Trump administration and comparisons of the JCPOA to the MOU. The article also includes a video clip and quotes from a recent interview President Barack Obama did with Robin Roberts of ABC News.  The article characterizes the former president as being “[b]itter” and accuses President Obama of having “trashed” President Trump in his comments to ABC News. Our analysts rated this article as “opinion” with a bias just into the “strong right” range.

One video our analysts rated was a YouTube video taken from MS NOW’s The Weekend: Primetime.  The entire video is an interview with Aaron David Miller, a former long-time State Department advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations who worked for both Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State. Miller was clearly critical of the decision to go to war with Iran and of the prospects that the MOU would lead to long-term peace, but his criticisms of the agreement did not come across as very ideological to our analysts. Miller ended the interview by stating that when “you launch a war of choice, you overestimate your own capacities, and you fundamentally underestimate the capacities of your adversary. It’s really a poster child for the law of unintended consequences, and they’re bad consequences.” Our analysts rated this video from MS NOW’s YouTube page as “analysis” with a “skews left” bias.

Another article our analysts rated was from the Daily Kos which states the JCPOA, when compared to the MOU, “got tangible results without spending billions of dollars and slaughtering thousands of innocent people.”  This article focuses on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s Face the Nation and includes a video clip and quotes from the interview.  Hegseth, described in the headline and body of the article as the “Secretary of War Crimes,” is said to have conceded the JCPOA secured an end to the Iranian nuclear program when pressed by Brennan, despite years of “TACO Trump” “lying” to the contrary.

Another video our analysts rated was made by Benny Johnson at the White House just minutes after President Trump posted on social media announcing the MOU had been finalized.  An exuberant Johnson declared, “President Trump shocking the earth by announcing a peace deal with Iran.”  In the video, Johnson began by reviewing the social media announcements of the MOU by President Trump and the Pakistani Prime Minister in real time. Next, he reviewed social media posts from journalists and conservative commentators reacting to the news of the MOU. Johnson declared “we won. I don’t know how else I don’t know how else you could possibly frame this as anything other than America winning this conflict.”  He also stated “[w]e’re looking at potentially two dollar gas and a record stock market.”

The article from the Daily Kos and the video from Benny Johnson received scores that are nearly mirror images of each other with them both having almost identical reliability scores in the “opinion” category and bias scores that were almost the exact converse of each other with the Daily Kos article in the far end of the “strong left” category and the Benny Johnson video in the far end of the “strong right” category.

If you would like to follow along with our weekly Topic of the Week exercise, you can do so by visiting our website. New Topics of the Week are posted each Monday. Read the articles and watch the videos yourself, then come back on Wednesday to compare your scores with our analysts. Learn more here.