ng other than what they wanted to hear which, in practice, was often what the Shah wanted them to hear.
Our concern is not with this predictable failure of official intelligence, however, but with the failure of a supposedly independent press to provide a corrective. When the Shah fell from power in 1989, it was due not to a sudden thunderbolt that come out of nowhere, but rather was the culmination of tensions within Iran that had been building for many years. Why did the American press miss this immensely important story? The information was available to anyone willing to learn modern Iranian history, and to go out onto the streets of Iranian cities to talk to the Iranian people. This study will examine this failure by comparing New York Times editorials on Iran to official State Department bulletins during the period 1970 1981.
Review of Literature
The relevant background literature for this Study can be divided into two principal categories: studies of Ame
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