IT’S BEEN A TEXT-BOOK CASE of “Reading the Runes” — to take from archeology an originally Germanic phrase for deciphering obscure symbols.

Covering the Trump White House has been journalistically challenging this week. And the week included, though it eventually meant very little in the overall scale of things, a day or so when the President was meeting, though only briefly, with other world leaders for the G7 summit in Canada.

The overall task of reporters and analysts has amounted to a modern-day version of what used to be called during the Cold War years “Kremlinology,” whereby journalists had to make – quite frankly – guesses (albeit sometimes reasonably well-educated expert guesses) about what decisions were being reached inside the impenetrable center of power.

As the days have passed this week, many headline-writers resorted to presenting merely the questions being raised, instead of any answers being found by their reporters. Often, of course, there was no answer yet. For instance, from London the Daily Telegraph – even while evidently thinking it had some suggestive information, simply played safe with one of those open questions, placed atop a story from its Europe Correspondent. It read:

Dozens of US Refuelling Jets Are Headed to Europe. Why?

Watchers actually in the White House generally fared little better than Kremlinologists ever did. But it has to be said that DC’s executive mansion can never be anything like as tightly-sealed as the old Soviet citadel. There is almost always someone in the West Wing ready to leak a tidbit or two.

Many reporters this week fell upon even the almost vacuous hints dropped by of all people Trump’s Veep, J.D. Vance. In his necessarily guarded way, since he’s had to internalize the Trump slogan of “America First,” meaning no foreign wars, Vance made two main points.

Number One: “People are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.” But he also said - number Two - that Trump “may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment.”

Vance’s remarks gained a lot of prominence. Maybe more than they would otherwise, or should. The current generation of White House correspondents may have been crediting the vice-president with more significant insider knowledge than he really had, or ever has. Our Washington scribes may not be as well imprinted as some of us have been by President Lyndon Johnson — who was formerly a Veep himself, we can’t forget — reportedly describing the second-in-line position as being “not worth a bucket of warm spit." And some versions record that last word as something more vulgar.

Today’s top man himself has also of course been no slouch, as if he ever could be, at dropping sometimes cryptic quotes for the benefit of the press. And his belligerence has been as self-justifying as ever, as though the Iran crisis was all about him. In his social media feed he said:

“Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign … Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”

And he also made his (by now) oft-repeated threat that his patience was “wearing thin.”

But perhaps more telling even than his egotism was a somewhat unusual verbal shift from “I” to “we,” when he went on to post a call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” — and in referring to Israel’s air attacks on Teheran, he said “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” Such associating of himself with Israel’s aerial superiority - unlike previously, only last week, when he said America had nothing to do with it - inevitably suggested that the US itself could well now enter this all-out war against the Iranians, which had begun perhaps inauspiciously on Friday the Thirteenth.

The week’s main quandary for journalists has been a familiar one. It’s a time of major saber-rattling, at two different degrees of rattle – violent-sounding rhetoric at one level and actual bloody killings and destruction at another – all of it conducted with a background of diplomats on contrary sides very recently talking to each other, and poised to talk again if they can get the chance. At such a time, just exactly how much credence is to be placed by any journalists upon what they’re being told.

The reporting has to be all about making judgment calls; this is when substantial diplomatic reporting experience really counts. And perhaps the hardest question for both the experienced and especially the inexperienced to answer is … what’s the real goal here? To completely take out Iran’s nuclear weapons capability … or completely take out its theocratic leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei (below left) and the other mullahs? Or could it be both of those aims? You might be able to make that judgment yourselves by the time these words reach you.

And while we’re considering the possibilities, let’s recall Trump’s regular campaign rant from last year: We’ve come a long way since then. He said then that his predecessor or predecessors had:

“… sent our blood and treasure to back regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Syria — and every other globalist disaster for half a century.”

Now it seems “regime change” could be his purpose too.

REGULAR CONSUMERS OF The Media Beat will recognize this week to be another of those when I’ve had to prepare my remarks some time ahead of you hearing or reading them. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I fall back on a piece of journalistic sleight-of-hand. It’s one that I readily admit to having borrowed or inherited from that renowned practitioner of our trade, the late and greatly missed Alistair Cooke. Most Americans might have known him for hosting PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, but his British audience, largely made up of my generation, looked forward every week to hearing on BBC radio Alistair’s “Letter from America,” a ten-to-fifteen-minute commentary on current US events. His audiotape back in those pre-digital, indeed pre-satellite days – had to be flown from New York to London. So inevitably he risked being at least one day out-of-date by the time his audience heard him. So … in order not to be overtaken by hectic events … this is how he often ended his broadcast. He simply said some priceless words, after he’d reported as much as he could — words which I too will now echo.

“And the rest …” he would say “… you know.”

That’s all from The Media Beat this week, whether we are now at war or still existing in relative peace.

Covering War Against Iran

Timely Reminder on US Bigotry