By Lee Smith

The Weekly Standard, May 25, 2016 – Guess who’s not part of the White House’s Iran deal “echo chamber”? Yep, Qassem Suleimani. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force thinks Iran and America aren’t poised for realignment, but rather are at war. And Iran, he says, is thrashing the great Satan. “Iran relied on logic during its confrontation with the U.S. and benefited from its enemies’ mistakes,” Suleimani said in a speech yesterday. “Iranian support [of the Assad regime] forced America to back down from its goals in Syria.”
What an ingrate! The White House frees up tens of billions of dollars so the Iranians can continue helping Assad wage his murderous campaign of sectarian cleansing in Syria, and Tehran’s Mr. Fix-It turns around and rubs it in the administration’s face. The only alternative to the nuclear deal, said the White House and its various friends in the media, academy, and think-tank community, is war. Wrong, says Suleimani, there’s only war. It looks like the IRGC’s external operations unit is not getting the Ploughshares talking points.
Last week, the Associated Press reported that the Ploughshares Fund gave financial support to media outlets, including National Public Radio, as part of its efforts to support the White House’s nuclear deal with Iran. According to Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report, the organization gave NPR $100,000 to help it report on the nuclear deal and related issues in 2015. Reports elsewhere indicate that the foundation has given NPR $700,000 over the last decade.
Both NPR and Ploughshares argue that the grant didn’t affect reporting the agreement. “We have a rigorous editorial firewall process in place to ensure our coverage is independent and is not influenced by funders or special interests,” the partially publicly supported media outlet claimed. Funding, Ploughshares’ spokeswoman Jennifer Abrahamson told the AP, “does not influence the editorial content of their coverage in any way, nor would we want it to.”
This is ridiculous. If Ploughshares didn’t want to influence the editorial content in line with its mission—to “build a safe, secure world by developing and investing in initiatives to reduce and ultimately eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles”—it would rightly have to answer to its own financial backers for wasting their money. It’s clear from other internal Ploughshares documents, in fact, that the fund closely tracks whether it’s getting its money’s worth from directly funding the media.
In 2014 Ploughshares commissioned a “Cultural Strategy Report” describing how the fund could use Hollywood, radio, journalists, and even video games to push its agenda. A section on how to provide money to journalists acknowledges “we understand that similar efforts supported by Ploughshares Fund in the past did not generate the desired volume of coverage (funding of reporters at The Nation and Mother Jones and a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity to create a national security desk).” Note that NPR is not mentioned, and how $100,000 was transferred to NPR in 2015, as it had been most years over the past decade.
Since David Samuels’ controversial profile of Obama lieutenant Ben Rhodes was published in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago, a map of what Rhodes called the echo chamber has begun to emerge. Ploughshares, as Rhodes noted, was among those individuals and organizations who “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say” about the nuclear deal. And to ensure the cycle of mutually assured validation, Ploughshares supported others to keep them everyone on message. It wasn’t just NPR, or experiments with Mother Jones and the Nation.
It’s now been reported that funds were also distributed to an Iranian former nuclear negotiator teaching at Princeton (Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote about him here); research organizations and think-tanks, like the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Arms Control Association; to a range of communitarian interest groups, lobbies and faith based organizations like J Street, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and Friends Committee on National Legislation, which calls itself a “Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest”; even to an email listserv, Gulf 2000, that disseminated Iran deal talking points, as well as conspiracy theories, to policymakers, analysts, and journalists, including Iran deal advocates like Al-Monitor journalist Laura Rozen and Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione.
As Rhodes explained to Samuels, he saw the echo chamber, a “far-reaching spin campaign,” as the only way to conduct the nuclear agreement with Iran. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” said Rhodes. “But that’s impossible.”