- Media, power, and the Iran–US Israel conflict
- Engineering the war spectacle: Whose war, whose interests, whose lives?
The Iran–US, Israel war is not simply unfolding on the ground — it is unfolding across screens, headlines, and social media feeds worldwide. Yet, how the conflict is narrated depends heavily on who is telling the story. Western and non-Western media outlets report on the same incidents with strikingly different angles, creating what can only be described as a bipolar divide in global narratives. From the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera to France 24, news organisations across the world are framing the war in ways that reflect political allegiances, corporate interests, and historical biases.
Historically, patterns in media coverage reveal a clear alignment with geopolitical interests. Western outlets have covered conflicts such as Palestine–Israel, Ukraine–Russia, and Vietnam–US in ways that foreground State narratives and marginalise the experiences of local populations. Meanwhile, non-Western media — often from the Global South — have emphasised human suffering, historical injustice, and the legacies of imperial intervention. In the context of Iran and the US, and by extension Israel, these patterns are reproduced: headlines, commentary, and visual storytelling reinforce North–South and East–West power hierarchies, shaping public perception across borders.
From the beginning of the 20th Century, media reporting has been anything but neutral. Ethnic, racial, and political biases have historically shaped how conflicts are reported, determining whose deaths are mourned and whose are overlooked. Dramatisation — through emotional imagery, curated expert commentary, and sensational headlines — intensifies these biases, transforming geopolitical struggles into consumable narratives while the lived reality of civilians fades into the background. Amid this spectacle, basic human rights (HR) are often sidelined. Where is the United Nations Security Council? Where are global HR organisations? And why are local populations, particularly in the Global South and East, repeatedly marginalised in media representations of violence and suffering?
Theoretical lens: Media power, framing, and spectacle
Edward Samuel Herman and Avram Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media introduces the ‘propaganda model’, showing how the media operate within elite power structures. They differentiate between worthy and unworthy victims, highlighting how Western media often humanise those aligned with their geopolitical interests while marginalising others. The contrast between Al Jazeera’s focus on civilian casualties in Qom, Iran, and the BBC’s emphasis on Pentagon, US, troop movements exemplifies this distinction, demonstrating how the media filter reality to manufacture consent for strategic objectives.
Robert Mathew Entman’s theory of framing (Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm) further illuminates how the media shape moral perception. By selecting which aspects of reality to highlight and which to obscure, outlets like CNN — through repeated reports on potential US invasions of Iranian islands — normalise speculative power strategies while sidelining the human cost. Such “frame reinforcement” ensures that the moral weight of war is selectively assigned, subtly guiding audiences to interpret the conflict through the lens of geopolitical strategy rather than humanitarian consequence.
Edward Wadie Said’s Orientalism complements this analysis by situating media narratives within a postcolonial framework. Iran is frequently portrayed as a dangerous “Other” in Western reporting, while the West is depicted as rational, defensive, and morally superior. Fox News’ framing of Iran as a potential mass-killer exemplifies this civilisational hierarchy, reinforcing fears that legitimise military aggression.
Douglas Kellner’s Media Spectacle highlights how news transforms political events into dramatic spectacles, emphasising emotion, personalisation, and sensationalism over structural analysis. Headlines such as “Iran could have killed millions” or “US President Trump explodes at Germany” exemplify this process, turning geopolitical crisis into entertainment, spectacle, and political theatre. Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place extends this argument, suggesting that modern warfare exists largely as hyperreality: multiple conflicting narratives obscure a singular truth, producing fragmented perceptions of war that are experienced more as media consumption than lived reality.
W. Lance Bennett’s indexing theory offers further insight, showing the media frequently reflect elite disagreements rather than the perspectives of ordinary people. Reuters and the AP, for example, emphasise North Atlantic Treaty Organisation tensions or Iran’s strategic readiness while neglecting civilian suffering, reinforcing the idea that news serves power structures more than public inquiry. Similarly, Herbert Irving Schiller’s Communication and Cultural Domination points to the dominance of Western media, which marginalises voices from the Global South and perpetuates North–South inequalities in narrative authority.
Empirical divergence in coverage
The divergence in media representation is evident in the coverage of the same events. On 27 March, Al Jazeera reported, “At least 18 killed, 10 wounded in US–Israeli attack on a residential area in Iran’s Qom”, foregrounding civilian suffering. On the same day, the BBC emphasised institutional discourse: “Pentagon denies report that US is considering sending 10,000 troops to the Middle East.” CNN framed speculative military action with “Trump weighing invading several Iranian islands”, repeating this narrative across its coverage, while Deutsche Welle highlighted technological and strategic dimensions in “Iranian missile strikes strain Israel’s Iron Dome.” France 24 shifted focus to media control with “Israel tightens media restrictions on war coverage”, demonstrating how even within the Western media sphere, coverage priorities diverge.
US outlets also diverged internally: CBS News foregrounded domestic political pressure with “Pressure mounts on Trump to end Iran war”, whereas Fox News amplified fear, reporting “(US State Secretary Marco Antonio) Rubio warns: Iran could have killed millions.” Sky News Australia personalised the conflict through political drama: “Trump explodes at Germany for ‘inappropriate’ statement about the Iran war.” Reuters highlighted fractures within Western alliances, while the AP focused on Iran’s defensive stance. Across all these examples, civilian suffering and the lived realities of ordinary people were largely secondary to elite, strategic, and political concerns.
Cultural and critical analysis
These differences reveal more than editorial preference; they reflect structural power imbalances, ideological commitments, and the performative nature of modern war. Al Jazeera’s focus on human casualties centres the war’s embodied violence, whereas BBC and CNN foreground institutional and speculative narratives, normalising state action. European outlets like Deutsche Welle and France 24 introduce subtle ideological variations, legitimising certain actors while backgrounding causes and consequences. US outlets domesticate conflict, framing it through electoral and domestic political lenses, while alarmist reporting heightens existential threats and securitises Iran. Even so-called neutral outlets, such as Reuters and the AP, remain aligned with official sources, reflecting elite debates rather than independent critical inquiry.
Taken together, these patterns illustrate how global media operate in a bipolar — or multipolar — ideological field, reproducing North–South and East–West hierarchies. Media ownership, state influence, audience targeting, and geopolitical alliances collectively construct a mediated war reality in which civilians and fundamental HR are subordinated. War becomes not only reported but performed, dramatised, and emotionalised, producing a spectacle that shapes perception and consent.
Whose war is this?
Ultimately, the Iran–US war, as mediated globally, is as much about narrative as it is about bullets and missiles. The media act as ideological intermediaries, producing fragmented truths aligned with power blocs, corporate interests, and geopolitical loyalties. The concept of “manufacturing consent” is evident in the selective visibility of human suffering, while Orientalism exposes racialised and civilisational hierarchies that shape audience perception. Framing and spectacle theories show how war is turned into performance, while necropolitics and biopower reveal whose lives are rendered disposable in these narratives.
In the end, the question remains stark: whose war is being narrated, and at what cost? The evidence suggests that this is not merely a conflict between nations, but a struggle over meaning, visibility, and moral authority. The Iran–US war, as seen through the lens of the global media, reveals less about battlefield reality and more about the structures of power, ideology, and capital that shape what the world sees, believes, and feels.
The writer is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Kelaniya University’s Mass Communication Department
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication