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Read One Iran Deal Opponent's Tweetstorm That Brilliantly Exposes Iran Echo Chamber

Ben Rhodes
Ben Rhodes / AP
May 2, 2017

 

"As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. 'We created an echo chamber,' he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. 'They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.'"

That comes from David Samuels' New York Times profile of Ben Rhodes, Obama administration deputy national security adviser, published one year ago.

How did the pro-Iran deal echo chamber work in practice? Omri Ceren of The Israel Project uses a current example—a coordinated attack on the reporter who exposed a secret giveaway to Iran hidden in the nuclear deal—to lift the curtain on the mechanics of the echo chamber.