In its September 8 headlines, Democracy Now described the weekend escalation this way:
The major escalation in fighting came after the U.S. said Saturday it had struck three Iranian oil tankers, disabling two of them and sinking a third. Tehran said it attacked three U.S.-affiliated vessels in response.
The outlet says who supplied each account. Good. A government announcing what it did remains a government announcing what it did. The microphone adds volume, not evidence.
But notice where you enter the story. The United States strikes. Iran responds. You can read both instances of “said” and still come away with that order in your head.
CENTCOM gives a different starting point. It says the Revolutionary Guard launched ballistic missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships before American forces struck the three tankers on September 5. In that account, the Americans were responding too.
This does not establish that CENTCOM told the truth. Military commands have press offices. We need not confuse those with witnesses who have nothing at stake.
It does establish that Democracy Now left a competing claim about the sequence out of those two sentences. A reader gets Iran’s stated reason for striking, without the American command’s stated reason for the tanker strikes. That choice can make the United States look like the initiator of this exchange.
You don’t have to believe either government to report what both claim. BBC put both accounts in view. Doing that leaves the reader with a dispute. A dispute is an acceptable thing to leave a reader with. We have survived them before.
The record here does not establish who fired first. Adding CENTCOM’s claim would not settle that question. It would keep a reader from mistaking the chosen opening for the known beginning.
The people near the shooting have to live with what happens. The rest of us can live with an account that admits what we don’t know.