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On Monday, September 28, Axios reported that President Trump was open to granting sanctions relief to Tehran in exchange for nuclear progress. Other outlets reported similar stories, citing unnamed U.S. officials as their sources. That evening, Trump denied it all on Truth Social, insisting, “This is untrue. I offered them NOTHING.” Tehran was no clearer. Iranian state media said its U.N. delegation had no plans to negotiate with Washington, even as Trump confirmed that messages had passed between the two sides through mediators.
Purposeful disinformation moves markets. Analysts and executives cannot be too careful when digesting breaking news. The pursuit of first-mover status creates a powerful trap. Seven months into a war that has pushed Brent crude above $100 a barrel, basic questions, like what each side is offering the other, turn on which anonymous official, state news agency, or presidential post one chooses to believe. Every one of these sources has a stake in how the answer lands.
Governments have always tried to shape perceptions. In July 1983, a Soviet-funded Indian newspaper published an anonymous letter claiming the Pentagon had created AIDS. It took more than two years for the story to resurface in the Soviet press and spread worldwide. What has changed now is the speed at which information travels the globe, and the ability of information warriors to exploit the credibility of the very institutions Western audiences rely on to separate fact from propaganda. That battle increasingly runs through established media, where a credible outlet can make contested claims appear to be verified facts.
This matters because foreign-policy decisions are made under uncertainty. Policymakers and the public rarely see the evidence behind a military operation or an intelligence claim. They depend on journalists, experts, and officials to establish the facts.
When intermediaries fail to distinguish verified information from interested claims, they can alter the foundation on which governments and publics interpret a crisis.
Recent conflicts illustrate the problem. In January 2020, Iran spent three days denying that it had brought down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing all 176 aboard, before reversing course and claiming that it had unintentionally shot the airliner down. In February 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced that Snake Island’s defenders had died heroically; four days later, Ukraine’s navy confirmed they were captive in Russia. The “Ghost of Kyiv,” an ace pilot bolstered by official Ukrainian accounts, had been credited with 40 kills and misidentified by the Times of London before Ukraine’s air force conceded he was a myth. Once a credible outlet publishes a claim, later reporting treats it as a reference point even while the evidence remains uncertain. Thus, information, sometimes completely false, acquires credibility through repetition rather than verification.
The result is a kind of information laundering. A claim originates with an interested party, passes to a journalist, is cited by other outlets and repeated by officials, until its origins disappear. The Iraq War remains a textbook case. On September 8, 2002, the New York Times ran a front-page story, sourced to unnamed administration officials, reporting that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment. That morning, Vice President Cheney cited the article on “Meet the Press” as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions. In a 2004 note to readers, the Times conceded that its coverage had leaned on defectors and exiles bent on regime change. The media outlet’s credibility had substituted for the credibility of the actual evidence.
The problem is not that journalists rely on interested sources. They must. Nor is every error an information operation. The challenge is distinguishing legitimate reporting of contested claims from the inadvertent reproduction of engineered narratives, and attribution alone does not solve it. On November 15, 2022, after a missile killed two people in the Polish village of Przewodów, the Associated Press sent an alert citing a senior U.S. intelligence official who said Russian missiles had struck NATO territory. The report was carefully attributed, but it was wrong. The next day the AP issued a correction: the missile was most likely a Ukrainian air-defense round. However, corrections rarely have the kind of impact that breaking news headlines do. For a few hours, one unnamed official raised the specter of a NATO-Russia war. What matters is whether a claim has been independently established, what interests shaped it, and how much uncertainty remains.
Smaller states caught between larger powers face this problem acutely. Azerbaijan’s current lawsuit against CNN, over allegations that Israel used its territory for operations against Iran, shows what happens when a contested claim enters a major outlet. Baku and Israel rejected the allegation, but its publication could shape how Azerbaijan’s relationships with Tehran, Jerusalem, Washington, and Europe are perceived. Baku operates in an information environment shaped by Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the West, each with a stake in the story. Moscow and Tehran gain from portraying Baku as a tool of outside powers, while Azerbaijan has an interest in demonstrating independence. Georgia faced a version of this after its 2008 war with Russia: when an EU-commissioned mission concluded in 2009 that Georgian shelling had started the fighting, both governments claimed the report vindicated them.
The same structural problem recurs everywhere. Militaries inflate their successes. By October 2022, Russia claimed to have destroyed 19 HIMARS launchers, though Ukraine had received only 16. Exile groups exaggerate their case. The tearful 1990 testimony about Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators, cited by President Bush as proof the war was necessary, was given by the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, in an appearance arranged by a PR firm. It never happened. Intelligence services leak for strategic effect, though not always deceptively. Washington’s declassified warnings before Russia’s 2022 invasion proved accurate. This creates a tension between journalism, which rewards speed, access, and narrative, and strategic analysis, which requires source evaluation, competing hypotheses, and an accounting of uncertainty. Energy and capital markets fall in between: they require both speed and maximum accuracy. The drive for first-mover advantage that motivates so many market shifts makes modern disinformation campaigns particularly effective for financial manipulation.
The Nord Stream sabotage shows the difference. In early 2023, Seymour Hersh blamed the United States for Nord Stream, citing a single unnamed source, while the New York Times, citing anonymous U.S. officials, pointed to a pro-Ukrainian group. Neither account settled the question. Only in July 2026 did German prosecutors charge a Ukrainian suspect. A media report establishes that someone is making a claim. It does not establish that the claim is true.
That distinction matters because perceptions are themselves strategic variables. Governments respond not only to what happens, but to what they believe is happening. In May 2023, a fake image of an explosion near the Pentagon, shared by verified accounts including one posing as a Bloomberg feed, briefly knocked the stock market down. A 2018 MIT study found that false stories on Twitter were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. An original narrative can outlive its own evidentiary foundation.
None of this makes the media uniquely responsible. Nor does it mean governments should arbitrate journalistic truth. Governments are among the most sophisticated producers of strategic information. In February 2003, Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs, relying on a defector code-named “Curveball” whom German intelligence had warned was unreliable. Skepticism toward the press is not an excuse for accepting official narratives uncritically. Governments, militaries, intelligence services, and media outlets all operate in the same contested environment, and information from any of them may carry incentives that must be weighed.
For policymakers and analysts, the implication is straightforward. Major judgments should not rest on the existence of a media report, however reputable the outlet. The questions are where the information originated, what interests its source has, whether independent evidence supports it, and what competing explanations exist. The MH17 investigation shows that discipline at work: in 2022, a Dutch court convicted three men for downing the Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014, after weighing intercepts, satellite imagery, and shrapnel, rejecting Russia’s alternative theories, and tracing the missile to a Russian army brigade. An outlet’s credibility should inform an assessment; it should never substitute for one.
The deeper problem is that geopolitical actors understand that the most effective way to influence Western audiences and markets may be not to manufacture obvious propaganda, but to place contested information inside trusted institutions, or simply to borrow their appearance. In 2024, the U.S. Justice Department seized 32 domains used by Russia’s “Doppelganger” operation, many of them imitating outlets such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and the Washington Post. The goal need not be to make audiences believe a falsehood. It may be enough to make a contested interpretation the assumption underlying subsequent debate.
As geopolitical competition intensifies, information warfare will increasingly target credibility itself. The most consequential operation may not be the obviously false story on a fringe website, but the contested claim that enters a respected outlet, is repeated across the ecosystem, and hardens into conventional wisdom. In that environment, the ability to evaluate information is fast becoming a core component of national security.
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