Last week the Daily Beast reported that a former US Ambassador to Israel, Thomas Pickering, had been on Boeing’s payroll during the same period of time that he testified in Congress and wrote op-eds in national publications in support of the Iran deal. The paper called Pickering “one of the most vocal and visible advocates for the nuclear agreement with Iran.” This revelation comes as Boeing prepares to sell $25 billion worth of airplanes to Iran, a sale which would not have been possible without the agreement between Iran and the US.
Today we learn, according to an analysis conducted by the Algemeiner,
The [New York Times] mentioned Ambassador Pickering in at least 29 pieces in the past decade, according to an Algemeiner analysis of the Times archives. Exactly zero of the 29 instances made any disclosure at all of Mr. Pickering’s paid work for Boeing, which stands to reap tens of billions in additional revenue made possible by the sanctions relief Iran got in the nuclear deal. . . .
The Times called Mr. Pickering an Iran expert. It called him “one of the nation’s most experienced career diplomats.” In at least 14 different news articles, some of the newspaper’s veteran diplomatic and national security reporters — David Sanger, Mark Landler, Somini Sengupta — called Mr. Pickering for quotations and context and opinions over and over again, without ever even once disclosing to Times readers that he was getting paid by a company that was poised to sell tens of billions of dollars worth of aircraft to Iran if a sanctions-lifting deal went through.
The Times op-ed and editorial section’s record relating to Mr. Pickering is just as embarrassingly bad. Times columnist Richard Cohen wrote at least three columns at least partly about Mr. Pickering without ever once disclosing the Boeing work. Mr. Pickering himself wrote an op-ed for the Times, an op-ed for the Times’ International Herald Tribune, and a letter to the editor of the Times. Not a single one of those three pieces disclosed the Boeing work; the op-ed’s thumbnail biography told readers of the Times merely that “Thomas R. Pickering, an under secretary of state for political affairs in the Clinton administration, served as United States ambassador to Russia, Israel, Jordan and the United Nations.”
All the lobbying that’s fit to print.
Read the Algemeiner’s full analysis here.
