Strikes on Iran Reverberate Through the Media

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Yesterday, Sahar Emami, an anchor on Iran’s state broadcaster, was on air in a studio covering Israeli strikes on the country—the fourth day of missiles flying back and forth between the two powers since Israel launched a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear program. “Listen, what you hear is the sound of the aggressor,” Emami said. “You hear the sound of the aggressor attacking the truth.” Suddenly, an almighty sound could be heard on the broadcast; Emami quickly stood up and walked off-set as the studio shook, fragments of debris fluttered down, and a whirl of smoke passed across the camera. Israel, it transpired, had struck the building. The country’s military later claimed that it was targeting a communications center that its Iranian counterpart was using under the guise of “civilian activity,” but this hasn’t been independently verified, and Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, had said beforehand that “the mouthpiece of Iranian propaganda and incitement is about to disappear.” (Israel also called for the surrounding part of Tehran to be evacuated.)

Iran’s state media is indeed a mouthpiece, but US press-freedom groups nonetheless condemned the strike. “News outlets, even propagandist ones, are not legitimate military targets,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote, and “bombing a studio during a live broadcast will not impede Iran’s nuclear program.” The Committee to Protect Journalists, for its part, said that it was “appalled” by the strike, and concluded that Israel’s “killing, with impunity, of at least 185 journalists in Gaza has emboldened it to target media elsewhere in the region. This bloodshed must end now.” The strike did not wipe out the state broadcaster; indeed, Emami was soon back on air, in a different studio. But Iran’s state news agency has since claimed that two staffers, an editor and an administrator, were killed.

The strike on the broadcaster came as the escalating conflict—and the informational climate in which it’s playing out—has become a huge international news story; so far, hundreds of people have been reported killed inside Iran, in addition to some two dozen in Iranian strikes on Israel. (One other media subplot has seen the Trump administration recall staffers who had been placed on leave from the Farsi-language service of Voice of America, the international broadcaster that Trump has sought to gut, a move interpreted by some observers as a belated acknowledgment of the vital role that it can play in keeping Iranian audiences informed and countering state propaganda; the top editor of VOA’s sister broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which also has a Farsi affiliate, reportedly claimed that millions of people consumed its content on Friday.) Yesterday, I reached out to Kourosh Ziabari, a journalist and contributor to New Lines magazine whose reporting on the highly restrictive—yet not entirely hopeless—media climate inside Iran I referenced last year in an article about the frightening trend of Iran targeting exiled journalists beyond its borders and their families back home (a problem, it should be noted, that has not gone away). I last spoke with Ziabari a little over a year ago, after Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s hard-line president, was killed in a helicopter crash. “When a major event with national security implications erupts, the Islamic Republic authorities expect all media organizations to follow a uniform, homogeneous modus operandi, even by resorting to inaccuracies, so that they can oversee the discourse and engineer the public mood,” he told me at the time, though it wasn’t clear this had totally worked. (Many Iranians openly celebrated Raisi’s death on social media.)

When I asked Ziabari yesterday what notable media themes had emerged from the conflict so far, he focused on coverage in the global media, telling me in a message that he had been “caught off-guard by how the most reputable media outlets are covering this conflict.” The “talking points and terminology used to describe the different aspects of this multi-pronged crisis sadly confirm the observation that even the professional proponents of journalistic objectivity are failing to uphold this principle,” he went on. “This is all the more surprising since you can see that journalists who do not have any stake in the conflict by virtue of their origins are acting as agitated partisans rather than the narrators of an outburst of violence that will go down history as a very dark moment.” Specifically, Ziabari cited a dearth of Iranian voices in Western coverage, the subtle soft-pedaling of language related to Israeli attacks, and a post-9/11 legacy of media portrayals that “dehumanize” Iranians, which, combined with the worsening authoritarianism inside the country, has served to erase the stories of everyday Iranians and civilian casualties, he suggested. “As claimed by the generals and politicians who have waged the war, the idea is the implementation of a fundamental change in Iran,” he wrote. “So, why shouldn’t those who are supposed to countenance the change have a say in the conversation that’s about them?”

Ziabari was referring to the prospect of regime change in Iran, which Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have openly invoked in recent days. Over the weekend, Reuters broke the shocking story that Israel had planned to assassinate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, but that the Trump administration vetoed the idea; asked about this on Fox News, Netanyahu issued what sounded like a non-denial denial. The broader question of where Trump stands on all this is an uncertain one and has itself been explored in news coverage in recent days: he had been negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, itself a somewhat surprising story given that it was Trump who killed a similar Obama-era deal during his first term; the US initially characterized Israel’s strikes as a unilateral measure, while acknowledging that it gave Trump a heads-up; Trump has since spoken enthusiastically of the strikes, calling them “excellent,” while insisting that he still wants Iran to make a deal. The US has not yet gotten directly involved, but that could change. (Israel, it seems, cannot destroy a crucial Iranian nuclear-enrichment facility without US assistance.) Yesterday, Trump called on Truth Social for “everyone” to “immediately evacuate” Tehran, and abruptly departed a G7 meeting in Canada. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, suggested that he had gone to mediate a ceasefire, but in another Truth Social post, Trump slapped him down (and attacked Macron as “publicity seeking” for good measure). “Wrong!” Trump wrote. “He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay Tuned!” War, apparently, as filtered through the codes of reality TV.

Ziabari isn’t the only critic to have observed that major mainstream outlets have been echoing Israel’s framing of the Iran attacks. (In an op-ed for Politico, Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, which owns Politico as well as other publications in Germany and the US, did so very explicitly, writing that while “every government should be questioned critically about all the details of its policies,” those “details should not be allowed to obscure larger historical truths”—in this case, that “Iran is the most aggressive and dangerous totalitarian force of our time.”) But a vigorous debate has at least started to play out in one corner of the mediasphere—between commentators on the US right, who are generally split between traditional hawks who take something like the Döpfner line and MAGA voices who see that as incompatible with the premise of “America First,” at least as far as American backup goes. (Asked about this perceived incompatibility by The Atlantic over the weekend, Trump responded, falsely, that since “I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”)

Media figures have been trying to get Trump’s ear on this question since before the Israeli strikes began: according to Politico, the radio and Fox host Mark Levin had a private lunch with Trump a couple of weeks ago and warned him that Iran was just days from building a nuclear weapon, a claim that Trump’s own intelligence officials rebutted. (Politico also reported that members of Trump’s inner circle had grown “infuriated” at what they perceived as meddling on the part of Rupert Murdoch to tank any Iranian nuclear deal.) Hours after Levin’s meeting, his former Fox colleague Tucker Carlson (since ousted from the network) accused him of “once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction” in the name of “regime change—young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government.” Since the strikes began, the schism has only intensified. Yesterday, Carlson went on Steve Bannon’s show, where he warned against US intervention again and took shots at both Levin (when he “gets on TV, it’s like listening to your ex-wife scream about alimony payments”) and Fox (they’re doing “what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast…to knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit”). Trump then got involved, telling a reporter that Carlson should “go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” then calling him “kooky” in a post on Truth Social. “AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things,” he wrote, “including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

It’s not clear what will happen next: the mood music out of Washington suggests that a US strike could be imminent, but Trump is famously unpredictable. What has long been clear is that despite the years of commentary categorizing him as an isolationist, his foreign policy has always been more complicated than that—and has, at times, veered in quite orthodox, neoconservative directions. Hawkish media commentators have sometimes audibly approved of this. (Once again, who can forget Trump becoming president by bombing Syria in 2017?) In recent editions of this newsletter, I’ve noted the strong echoes of 2020 that have permeated the news cycle of late; I was referring mainly to the protests in LA, but the Iran story itself echoes the very beginning of that year, when Trump authorized the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian general. Back then, too, there were concerns about stereotyped coverage of Iran, a dearth of Iranian voices, and Iraq-redux cable-news bellicosity—though it struck me at the time that the coverage did often pose tough questions about the killing and the evidence behind it, if only, perhaps, because of Trump’s reputation for recklessness and dishonesty. It’s essential that tough questions are asked again now, for those same reasons and others; even taken on their own terms, it’s far from clear that the current strikes will actually put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or catalyze regime change, or that the regime change will be desirable if it does occur. Every government should be questioned critically about all the details of its policies. History, typically, makes its judgment later.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, the Los Angeles Press Club sued the city of LA and Jim McDonnell, its police chief, alleging that officers have used “excessive force” against members of the press covering the protests that have followed the Trump administration’s recent immigration raids in the city. (I wrote about police attacks on reporters last week and in yesterday’s newsletter.) “In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege that the city and the LAPD violated journalists’ rights under the First and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee the right to a free press and due process, respectively, as well as multiple California state statutes,” the Washington Post’s Scott Nover reports. A lawyer for the plaintiffs accused the LAPD of acting with “impunity,” and suggested that she plans to sue other agencies that are on the ground in LA.
  
• Terry Moran did a round of interviews yesterday in which he addressed his recent ouster from ABC News following a social media post in which he described Trump and his top aide Stephen Miller as being consumed by hate; he told the New York Times that he stands by his post (and that he wasn’t drunk when he wrote it) and mused on a journalist’s duty in a conversation with The Bulwark. (“There is no Mount Olympus of objectivity where a mandarin class of wise people have no feelings about their society,” he said.) He also accused ABC of reneging on an oral commitment to extend his contract and addressed his move to Substack, where he already has thousands of paid subscribers. (He likened the platform to “18th-century pamphleteering.”)  
  
• Late last week, the White House Correspondents’ Association elected several board members, including Jacqui Heinrich, of Fox News, who will serve as the organization’s president in 2027 and 2028. (Earlier this year, Heinrich criticized White House moves to assert control over the press pool.) In other media-jobs news, Vice Media tapped Adam Stotsky, a former marketing executive at NBCUniversal, to be its new CEO; per the Wall Street Journal, he’ll focus on the company’s studio and ad arms. And COYOTE, a worker-owned digital newsroom in the Bay Area inspired by alt-weeklies, announced a crowdfunder ahead of a launch later this summer.
  
• The Guardian’s Michael Savage reports that the BBC is weighing plans to draw revenue from consumers of its output in the US, as it faces declining income from the public “license fee” model that has traditionally funded it in the UK. Bosses at the broadcaster reportedly see moving to a subscription or advertising model at home as a red line, but it already sells ads against its content in the US, and is now “examining the idea of asking users to pay for access in some form,” per Savage, spying an opening for its impartial brand in a highly polarized media landscape.
  
• And, after suggesting that it would no longer make endorsements in New York City mayoral races, the Times editorial board sort of did and sort of didn’t ahead of next week’s Democratic primary, in an article that, beyond trashing the progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani, offered voters unclear advice that confused even veteranobservers of city politics. Semafor’s Ben Smith saw an Andrew Cuomo endorsement; Politico’s Sally Goldenberg saw a Brad Lander endorsement; Whitney Tilson saw a Whitney Tilson endorsement. WNYC’s Jimmy Vielkind suggested that the article “could be a reading comprehension prompt on the Regents.”

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