Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about shoddy reporting from a major legacy media outlet.
The Associated Press says “Public executions are not uncommon in Iran.” The watchdog group Iran Human Rights counted 459 such executions between 2008 and 2025, frequently featuring large audiences, including children. United Against Nuclear Iran reports that Iran “regularly carries out executions in public. In many of these cases, the victim is publicly hanged from a construction crane, an especially slow and painful execution method.” And that doesn’t even mention the extrajudicial killings of pro-democracy protesters. President Trump has said between 30,000 and 52,000 of them were murdered this year by the Iranian regime, many shot in the forehead.
So how did the New York Times spin its own news article on two recent executions? With the absurd, false claim that “Iran has long been one of the world’s most frequent users of capital punishment, but public executions are extremely rare.”
The article appeared under a joint byline. Leily Nikounazar is, according to her LinkedIn profile, a 2010 graduate of “Tehran’s Faculty of News.” Sanjana Varghese’s New York Times bio says she has freelanced for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned outlet that has harbored Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. Her main job before the New York Times was at Airwars, which is funded by anti-Israel nonprofits including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Neither Nikounazar nor Varghese, who lives in London but “grew up between Canada and Bahrain,” immediately returned my queries about whether they planned a correction.
Adverbs are frequently trouble in news articles. The Times might have gotten away with calling public executions unusual or rare. But “extremely rare” pushes the envelope in a way that makes the Times‘ extremely slanted coverage extremely obvious.
Maybe the Times Iran team is attempting to ingratiate itself in hopes of obtaining permission to make a minder-accompanied trip to the Islamic Republic to cover the eventual funeral of Mojtaba Khamenei, the same way it covered the funeral this month of Ali Khamenei with two Times video journalists, a photographer, and a correspondent.
