Lawrence O'Donnell devoted a segment of The Last Word to praising a tweet from Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Iran's parliament, calling it "the most striking response to Scott Bessent's childish threat." He then turned to his guest, MSNBC analyst Ben Rhodes, and asked with genuine curiosity: "Who in Iran could possibly have written that tweet?"
The answer was nobody in Iran. The tweet was ghostwritten in California.
That's the state of editorial standards at MSNBC in August 2026. The host reads regime propaganda on a national broadcast, marvels at how sophisticated it sounds, and never once considers that maybe it sounds like fluent American English because it was written by a fluent American English speaker. In California. Not Tehran. Not even close.
Rhodes, the former Deputy National Security Advisor under President Obama, was happy to play along. Rather than flag the obvious problem with an American network amplifying foreign government talking points, he used the moment to take shots at the Trump administration. "They actually spend time trying to understand their adversary, which is something that Trump clearly didn't," Rhodes said, apparently complimenting Iran's propaganda operation. He added that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent "knows that all he's engaged in is a pretty weak public relations exercise."
This is the same Ben Rhodes who once told The New York Times Magazine that his media strategy worked because "the average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns." He built an echo chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal to gullible journalists. Now he's back on television doing the same thing, except this time the journalists are older and somehow even more gullible.
The segment aired 39 days into U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, a period when you'd think American news anchors might exercise a little extra skepticism about content coming from Tehran's political class. Or, in this case, content pretending to come from Tehran's political class.
On January 12, Ghalibaf appeared at a government rally. By August 26, his parliament's English-language social media operation had been traced to U.S.-based writers. Somewhere between those two dates, nobody at MSNBC thought to ask why Iran's parliamentary speaker was tweeting like a Beltway communications consultant.
There's a pattern here that predates this segment by years. American media outlets have consistently treated foreign adversaries' English-language output as genuine diplomatic signals rather than what intelligence professionals know it to be: influence operations targeted at Western audiences. The tweets aren't written for Iranian domestic consumption. They're written for Lawrence O'Donnell.
The network that spent years warning about foreign influence in American media just broadcast foreign influence in American media. The propaganda was written on American soil, by someone who understood exactly how to package it for an American cable news audience.
They didn't even have to pay for the airtime.
