US and Iran, short memories, by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, August 2019)
▻https://mondediplo.com/2019/08/02us-iran
On 1 September 1983 a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor downed a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 carrying 269 passengers from New York to Seoul. KAL 007 had accidentally deviated from its planned route and entered Soviet airspace by night, flying over sensitive military installations. The Kremlin said it had mistaken the civilian aircraft for a spy plane. These incidents, extensively documented, provide an opportunity for a scientific experiment: the difference in treatment of the KAL 007 and Iran Air 655 stories gives an accurate measure of the ideological bias of western media, especially the US press which is hailed around the world for its professionalism.
On 2 September 1983 a #New_York_Times editorial, ‘Murder in the Air’, declared, ‘There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner.’ Five years later, when a US jet did the shooting, all sorts of excuses seemed conceivable. The NYT emphasised that ‘while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. On present evidence, it’s hard to see what the Navy could have done to avoid it’ (5 July 1988). Itinvited its readers to ‘put yourself in Captain Rogers’s shoes [William C Rogers III, who ordered the firing of the missile] ... it is hard to fault his decision to attack the suspect plane.’ The NYT also claimed there was blame on both sides: ‘Iran, too, may bear responsibility for failing to warn civilian planes away from the combat zone of an action it had initiated’ (2).