Iran Coverage Lacks Context
Applying Traditional Approaches to Reporting Normalizes This War
Every story about the American War on Iran should include some combination of the following words and phrases:
“American war of choice”
“Illegal war”
“American and Israeli aggression”
“Trump’s ultimatums”
“Illegal American blockade”
I choose these phrases deliberately, because they have disappeared from the media discourse.
Watch the coverage from ABC World News Tonight (which is the best of the nightly network news shows):
One could be forgiven for viewing this as a normal dispute, even for assuming that Iran might be the aggressor or that it randomly is holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage. Stories like this — and like the coverage in The New York Times, which spends much of its update thread today discussing “negotiations,” peace talks, and American “terms,” as if the United States is attempting to defuse a situation it did to create.
Vice President JD Vance’s diplomatic trip to Islamabad, where he was expected to press Iranian negotiators for a nuclear deal, has been put on hold after Tehran failed to respond to American negotiating positions, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Vance had been scheduled to depart Tuesday morning for the Pakistani capital, where talks were set to resume on Wednesday — the same day the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran is set to expire. Without an Iranian response, the official said, the diplomatic process is in effect paused, though the trip has not been canceled.
Note the language: The United States plans to “press Iranian negotiators,” but “Tehran failed to respond to American negotiating positions.” Iran, the report implies, is being recalcitrant, is delaying, is at fault for a “diplomatic process (that) is in effect paused.”
All of this may be factually correct, though what matters here is not the facts offered as much as the facts left out of the report — which should include that Iran was attacked by the United States without provocation about eight months after an earlier attack by the Trump administration. Why should this matter? Flip the script. Imagine an Iranian military attack on American soil. Wouldn’t we respond with all of the tools at our disposal? This is what Iran has done in the Strait of Hormuz. This is what it has attempted to do by bombing American bases in the region and targeting American allies.
Iran is not acting irrationally. We are. We are behaving in an arrogant, imperial manner, playing the role of international bully and rogue nation. We are the ones engaged in illegal action, committing war crimes and endorsing war crimes and genocide by allies (Israel).
Context is needed. Read this:
The incomplete coverage allows misperceptions to take hold, old biases to capture narratives, and politics to stall. The war on Iran — I refuse to call it a war with or against Iran — is not popular, mostly because of its impact on the American and world economy. It is America-centric, selfish, and also accepting of the long-failed consensus that we can wage war without compromising our morality.