This NPR story on the Trump administration’s refusal to extend New START is a frustrating example of what happens when media outlets fail to acknowledge the transparent bad faith of one side in a debate:

Trump hasn’t ruled out renewing the treaty, known as New START. But he has made it clear that he would rather strike a bigger deal that includes different kinds of nuclear weapons — and that also brings China into the fold.

The report leaves the reader with the impression that the president genuinely wants a more ambitious arms control agenda (the headline refers to a “lofty nuclear treaty”), and the article then goes back and forth between supporters and detractors of this imaginary agenda. However, a cursory review of the administration’s record would show that they have had no interest in arms control agreements of any kind. Not only has Trump withdrawn from the INF Treaty rather than trying to save it, but he has indicated his intention to pull out of the Open Skies Treaty as well. When given the choice between preserving these treaties or ditching them, Trump is reliably in favor of ditching them. That is relevant information that never shows up in this report.

The president’s lack of support for New START is a matter of record. He has been quoted as saying that it was a “bad deal.” If the president doesn’t see the value in preventing New START from expiring, it is doubtful that he is prepared to make the effort to secure a much more sweeping arms control treaty that includes three nuclear weapons states. It is much more likely that he doesn’t care what happens to the treaty, and he is using talk of a “bigger deal” to obscure his own role in killing the existing agreement.

The article extensively quotes Tim Morrison, who until recently was pushing the anti-arms control agenda from inside the National Security Council, but it doesn’t inform readers that Morrison is a thoroughgoing Boltonite who has been part of the push to exit all of these agreements. Spencer Ackerman reported on Bolton’s hiring of Morrison back in 2018:

Morrison possesses a hostility to negotiated restrictions on U.S. nuclear weapons that rivals Bolton’s own, as well as an expertise on nuclear issues undisputed by even his harshest critics. Among arms controllers, Morrison’s name is equivalent to Keyser Söze. A former State Department official called him “the hardlinest of the hardline on nuclear policy.”

Morrison is opposed to every arms control agreement that exists, so when he is saying that he thinks that a “better deal” with Russia and China is possible that should set off several alarms. Like the Iran hawks that tout a “better deal” in order to kill the JCPOA, Morrison floats the same thing as a means of getting rid of New START. Citing his opinion without offering any of that context gives readers the misleading impression that there might be some merit to the hard-line position. The desire to appear balanced in their coverage of this issue ends up giving their readers a very distorted picture. Hard-liners routinely take advantage of the fetish to provide balance at the expense of accuracy, and it is one of the reasons why our foreign policy debates are so bad.