Fact Checking the Arab Media

The New York Times reference was apparently a nod to an article published just hours before Al-Marsad’s announcement which focused on the deteriorating health of the Iranian leader and was headlined, “Iran’s Supreme Leader Cancels Public Appearances After Falling Ill.” Khamenei “is on bed rest and under observation by a team of doctors, according to four people familiar with his health situation,” the Times reported. At no point did the Times say Khamenei had died.

Multiple other news sources, including the UK’s Express, did however insinuate that Khamenei was all but dead. “Reports are coming out of Iran that Khamenei is dying [emphasis added] of cancer leaving a power vacuum,” said the Express report. “Initially, news circulated of his death last night but it was later confirmed that he is gravely [emphasis added] ill and is understood to be suffering from the late stages of cancer.” Even the US-based American Enterprise Foundation - a leading Washington think tank on the right - pounced on the news of Khamenei being “on his death bed” to call for an immediate end to the ongoing nuclear negotiations between several European countries, the US, Russia and Iran.

Fact Check Assessment: False

The Al-Marsad Article’s announcement of Khamenei’s death is clearly False: He appeared the next day in public. Unfortunately, more than being false, the report - as well as the other analyses and news reports that took the “breaking news” at face value - is reflective of a particularly irresponsible “click-bait” approach to journalism where a captivating headline is used but then immediately undermined by the text itself that follows i.e. referring to the New York Times story about Khamenei’s “grave” illness but not death.

All of which leads to a final cautionary point for the public to consider: Beware of news about the deaths of leading figures, especially controversial or unpopular ones in your home media market. Indeed, as has been seen so many times (remember “Kim Jong Un dead: North Koreans calling Trump an assassin”), “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Except that even this popular quote is actually… a misquote attributed to author Samuel Clemens, known by his pen name, Mark Twain. The humorous quote is based on a letter Twain sent to a newspaper reporter who had asked Twain about rumors that he was dying. As Dictonary.com points out:

“In May 1897, there was a rumor among journalists that author Mark Twain was either dead or dying of a serious illness. Looking for confirmation, journalist Frank Marshall White of the New York Journal contacted Twain to see if there was any truth to the rumors. Twain responded to White with a letter in which he humorously said ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration.’ In classic Twain fashion, the author jokingly expressed more offense with the rumors that he was poor than the rumors of his death. The popular misquote of Twain’s words seems to come from a biography written by Albert Paine in the early 1900s. In the biography, Paine alters the incident so that Twain speaks to an unnamed reporter in person and humorously tells him that ‘The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.’ This misquote then changed overtime to use the word greatly instead of grossly.”

Twain’s situation - i.e. false reports of his death - might not be so different from Khamenei’s situation. In fact, as early as 2009, journalist Matthew Weaver at The Guardian recounted the many times - and wide exposure - that Khamenei-is-dead news had already gotten. To conclude his review, he quoted The Guardian's former Tehran correspondent, Robert Tait: “Discussions about Khamenei's health problems are legion. He has prostate cancer; he has lung cancer; he is an opium addict; he has lymphatic cancer; he has a mouth full of false teeth since a bomb attack 28 years ago that also cost him the use of an arm; doctors have given him at most two years to live. I don't how much, if any, of this is true. The fact that it's going around at all is a measure of the hysteria surrounding the Iranian political scene.”