When This Blows Over

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their
only reporting experience consists of being around
political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally
know nothing.”
Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on
promoting the deal, which apparently included the feeding
of talking points at useful times in the news cycle to
foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward
it. “We created an echo chamber,” he told the magazine.
“They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying
things that validated what we had given them to say.”
The manager of the White House’s Twitter feed on Iran,
Tanya Somanader, said one reporter, Laura Rozen of
the Al-Monitor news site, became “my RSS feed. She
would just find everything and retweet it.”
*RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access
updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format.
Rozen, in an email, said she does not know Somanader
and that David Samuels, the author of the magazine piece,
did not ask her about the staffer’s claim before publishing
his story. “As I read it, [Somanader] says my Twitter feed
was a source of info for her . . . Samuels seems to
mischaracterize that to say the opposite.”
She said she has had a long interest in U.S. policy on Iran
and covered “over 20 rounds of the Iran nuclear deal
negotiations” over four years. “I do retweet lots of info,
from lots of sources” — including, she noted, the Russian
Ministry of Defense, “which I hardly expect most to take at
face value or as an endorsement.” She maintained that her