Twelve days into the war with Iran, The New York Times is gradually coming to acknowledge that the war has not been a one-way affair. For twelve days, the Times has covered the war as though the US and Israel have had free rein to attack Iran, but as though Iran itself had been a passive recipient of the shock and awe campaign inflicted on it. Now all of a sudden, we get four major articles within 24 hours telling us otherwise:

• “How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to the War”;
• “At Least 17 US Sites Damaged in War with Iran, Analysis Shows”;
• “Iranian Military Shows It Knows How to Adapt, US Officials Say”;
• “At least 3 ships are struck in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran claims responsibility for one”;

Better late than never, but still pretty late to be telling your audience that the other side had not just managed to retaliate over the last two weeks, but had inflicted a fair bit of unexpected damage, and promises more.

In microcosm, the Iran war coverage has been a re-play of the Times’s grotesque Ukraine war coverage. For four solid years we were told ad nauseum that Russia had suffered gigantic casualties in the war, but that Ukraine’s forces were mysteriously immune to battlefield morbidity or mortality. To look for Ukrainian casualty figures in the Times was to be sent on a series of fruitless wild goose chases. All of a sudden, after four years of cheerleading for the war, the Times reported in late February 2026 that there had in fact been 500-600,000 Ukrainian casualties—a figure five or six times higher than its highest previous estimate. Always conveniently late with the crucial information that might have tipped public opinion against the war.

This is how they report all wars in which they have an ideological stake. The point is explicitly made by the mainstream journalist Barton Gellman, who covered the Edward Snowden story for The Washington Post. In his book Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, Gellman tells us pretty explicitly that mainstream journalists like him, however ostensibly critical, are ultimately partisans of and patriots for the United States who, right or wrong, want the US to prevail in its conflicts with its foreign adversaries. They also want (he tells us) to shield American soldiers from harm, even if doing so means concealing the truth. Gellman seems sure that this attitude is consistent with journalistic impartiality, but it’s easy to see why Snowden himself was skeptical.

We thus face a strange predicament. In academic life, we’re regularly told that institutional neutrality is the only guarantor of epistemic virtue. No scholar can successfully pursue the truth on campus unless the university’s administration is neutral on matters of good and evil, even in cases where the institution itself is complicit in the evil. Meanwhile, in journalism,  we’re asked to trust the reporting of obvious, even admitted, partisans who repeatedly prove, in matters of life and death, that their reporting is not to be trusted.

It may be helpful to see that both of these dogmas are exactly the reverse of the truth. There’s nothing about a morally committed university administration that impedes the pursuit of truth by faculty; despite the verbiage produced on the topic, no one has explained why it would. Coming the other way around, there’s nothing about patriotism or national partisanship that can be expected to track the truth about warfare or foreign affairs. Just the reverse. If your basic preoccupation about a war is, “Right or wrong, I sure hope we win,” you can’t impartially report on the reasons why we might deserve to lose. In fact, it’s unlikely that “we might deserve to lose” is a thought you’re capable of taking on board at all.

In the case of Iran, we do deserve to lose. We initiated a war of aggression through treachery and lies. We’ve conducted it through brutality and mass destruction. Like the Roman imperium, along with the British, French, Belgian, Italian, Nazi, and Soviet ones, the American imperium is drunk on its own illusions of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. What it needs and deserves is not victory but a gigantic mirror. Failing that, a humiliating defeat will do.