When the Media Makes Context Harder
On a striking journalistic gap in this weekend's Iranian coverage
Usually, Monday is a time to talk about entertainment media.
But today, I come to rap knuckles about the wrong kind of entertainment.
This weekend, there was a major news cycle played up in sensational ways, right until the moment when the crisis subsided—although, even then, some outlets still seem desperate to keep the excitement going for as long as possible.
I’m talking, of course, about the long-anticipated Iranian retaliation for an Israeli strike in Damascus two weeks ago.
And no, I’m not here to rap your knuckles.
My issue is with media structures that make it difficult for us in general to be more effectively empowered citizens in any global crisis.
When the news treats global conflict as sport, what are average citizens to do?
Key details for this series of events
On April 1, a consulate annex building next to the Iranian embassy (a slight technical difference with important legal ramifications) was hit by IDF, killing 16. Eight were Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Two were civilians, a woman and her son.
The IRGC is an alternate military force in Iran, which doesn’t serve the government so much as the broader “Islamic Republic”: an ideological mission it uses to sanction activities well beyond an army’s usual mandate to defend state sovereignty. Its operations in Syria are partly in support of Hezbollah, an armed group that operates in Lebanon and Syria, along fraught borders to the north and north-east of Israel.
Israel didn’t formally confirm or deny its responsibility for this attack—which caused frustration for US officials, who felt that they at least were owed a head’s up on any Israeli actions that might further embroil them in expanding regional hostilities, too.
After the attack, the Coalition Council of Islamic Revolution Forces, or SHANA—an extreme conservative faction in Iran—mourned Zahedi’s death in part by praising him for his “strategic role in forming and strengthening the resistance front as well as in planning and executing the Al-Aqsa Storm.” This radical group’s statement was then seized upon by Arab, Israeli, and Western media, as the closest thing yet seen to an Iranian admission of participation in October 7—something that Tehran has denied since the start. SHANA’s statement has since been used retroactively in public discourse to justify Israel’s attack on the consulate annex building, and escalated demands for the IRGC to be labelled a terrorist organization by the UN.
(But we’ll come back to the way that people, in death, are retrofitted to serve various extremist groups, even if it drives them into contradiction with one another.)
Iran didn’t retaliate immediately. First, it went through a series of public declarations that signalled diplomatic manoeuvres, testing the waters for international response. Then the IRGC seized an Israeli cargo ship on April 13, hours before the state’s main military response. Iran launched around 170 explosive drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles, then formally declared that its retaliatory action had concluded. This retaliatory action provided domestic operatives with plenty of useful propaganda fodder, while doing minimal damage and thus leaving the ball in Israel’s court for further regional escalation.
Iran’s drones and missiles took a while to arrive, adding to overall online confusion because the fallout of the volley was still being addressed long after Iran’s public announcement that it had ceased hostilities. Targets ranged from Israeli barracks in the northern Golan Heights; to air bases in the south and centre of Israel; to the desert area around Dimona, which houses the nuclear power plant; to Jerusalem, a holy city for all Abrahamic faiths and a site of ongoing territorial disputes. Concurrently, IDF bombed four Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and Hezbollah fired rockets around the Golan Heights area in lockstep with Iranian actions. Although Houthi rebels claimed that they had sent attacks toward Israel, it’s unclear to what extent that action was online boast versus effective assault. (US reports suggest that eight aerial devices were destroyed on the ground in Yemen.)
Although the attacks seemed to be curated for minimal significant damage, the display nonetheless showed Iran’s range and arsenal. Response to the attack was multinational, including Jordan, the UK, and the US, and showed how many regional actors stood ready to act in opposition to military escalation in the region.
One 7-year-old Bedouin girl was hit in the head by interceptor shrapnel and taken to hospital. Initial rumours of her death probably came from a conflation of “casualty” with “fatality” in preliminary reports, which also called her a 10-year-old boy.
The fallout, and media concern
The US then made clear that it would not support Israel in a retaliatory strike, while plenty of allies advocated for a UN-driven next step: a formal condemnation of the state of Iran. As noted above, Israel also wants the UN to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization, in keeping with its current US and European Parliament designations.
Meanwhile, when it comes to actual military action, US President Joe Biden encouraged Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to “take the win”—which is actually two wins, since Israel got its IRGC targets in Damascus, then demonstrated the strength of its aerial defense network by knocking 99% of the incoming explosive drones and missiles out of the sky.
Some members of Netanyahu’s far-right war cabinet have been calling for extreme reactions—“going berserk” on Iran, as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir put it; creating a response that will “[echo] throughout the Middle East for generations”, as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested—but they’re not strongly supported. (Ben-Gvir is also currently raging at Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for dismantling an illegal outpost instead of stepping up retaliatory aggression in the West Bank—so extremist in-fighting is par for the course.)
All of which should not have been surprising as it was, to many.
And that’s the real problem here.
Where was our informed citizenry?
Why were so many people convinced this was all going to get a whole lot worse?
To be sure, many in the West gamify war and eagerly leap to the idea that everyone should just blow up everyone else to “show them who’s boss”. Even after two years of massive war coverage from Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, and the awful spectacle of Israel’s half-year war with Hamas in Gaza, some are still champing at the bit for everything to break down even further—so long as the theatre of conflict is nowhere near where most Westerners live.
Unsurprisingly, then, many people breathlessly following a few tense hours of coverage seemed disappointed that it ended so quickly. They went from dreading Iranian action to mocking it, “that’s all you got?!”-style, while some online still think that Israel should go at it alone, even without support from the US.
But the other major reason for this gamified response is legacy media.
The Guardian might have been the most dramatic in its coverage—its background turning from red alert live updates to a more sedate grey backdrop only once Israelis were told they didn’t need to stay near protective shelters anymore—but almost every media outlet had its own version of visual urgency in play.
Almost everyone, that is, seemed to fail at a core journalistic duty: to inform in a way that empowers, not inflames.
The missing coverage, for context
Here’s one way that corporate media massively screwed up, from the perspective of offering journalism with integrity:
Most outlets didn’t talk about the obvious and fairly recent correlate to this event.
They could have, and should have, talked more about Iran’s equally staged retaliatory action against the US in January 2020. However, Operation Martyr Soleimani didn’t seem to merit more than a passing mention in most online coverage—even though it had come up again as recently as December 2023, and also in October for messy state propaganda reasons we’ll address in a second.
First, the history missing from Western coverage:
On January 3, 2020, the US killed Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil, while the commander of the Quds Force (part of the IRGC) was on route to meet the Iraqi PM. A February report issued by the White House would claim that the strike was necessary as an act of deterrence, while a UN special rapporteur would assert that the US’s extrajudicial killing was “unlawful” by international standards.
In the short run, this US action led to Iraq announcing the expulsion of foreign troops from its territory, and Iran firming up its last step in withdrawing from the 2015 international nuclear deal: an arms-reduction foreign policy guided by Barack Obama, which Donald Trump then dismantled for a Republican base that wanted the US to take a more hostile approach to Iran entirely.
Meanwhile, Iran signalled through various operatives an expected retaliatory action against US military installations, which it carried out on January 8 to no US deaths (though many servicemen would later report concussive injuries). The base had been given ample warning of this formal state action, and cleared of all non-essential personnel for this predictable act of showmanship involving dozens of missiles.
There were fatalities, though: while bracing for a possible counter-strike from the US, Iranian military seemed to have seen threats everywhere, and 176 people aboard a Ukrainian Boeing flight were killed near Tehran by IRGC. This shameful action against civilians incensed Iranians, and definitely informed the subsequent role of myth-making around the murder of Soleimani, as a giant of a hero whose death at the hands of foreign actors had to justify whatever damage came after, in response.
Ever since, Soleimani has been essential for Iranian internal propaganda: both state-driven, and among local extremists. Thus, in October 2023, while Tehran firmly denied direct involvement in the October 7 attack, a far-right media outlet painted an elaborate picture of how Soleimani had been the secret mastermind behind the attack, with a five-year plan that would yield Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Storm.
This is from a deranged October 10 piece from Iran’s equivalent of any number of conservative rags in countries the world over:
We said in the past that the stories about the martyr [Soleimani] transcend time and place, but today it emerges that his powers of planning and operational strategy were boundless. In the last meeting he held before he was martyred, Soleimani spent [seven hours], from 8:00 until 15:00, outlining the future plan for all the resistance factions and the way they would interact with one another. What the resistance factions found unusual in that meeting was that Hajj Qassem [Soleimani] stressed that everybody had to write down [what he said]. 'Write down what I say, [he insisted]. I am outlining the charter for the next five years!' The unity of the resistance factions based on this five-year charter is the fruit of Soleimani's martyrdom and part of the resistance factions' harsh revenge.
In December, soon after Israel killed another IRGC officer in Damascus (Soleimani’s right-hand man), the IRGC then claimed that Hamas’s attack on October 7 was not so much the fruit of Soleimani’s grand vision, as it was an express act of retaliation for Soleimani’s death—a claim with which Hamas disagreed, having made its own clear statements about reasons for the attack. There may be a broader ideological “Axis of Resistance” uniting all these Iranian-funded armed groups, but that doesn’t mean they show cohesion in how they use the same martyrs in related propaganda.
And so in April, after the killing of IRGC Brigadier General Zahedi, we again got IRGC retroactively tying a locally famous military figure to the October 7 attack—mostly for internal propaganda, but probably also to try to pull Iranian government more expressly into this regional conflict, the way that far-right actors in Israel and the West keep trying to pitch everyone deeper into more overt military conflict, too.
In other words: in war, we don’t just get straight admissions of culpability from state governments. In most every country around the world, we also have to deal with more radical and warmongering factions that know full well the power of propaganda, and who will use it through various political, military, and media offices, to drag the rest of their countries even further into local tensions and all-out wars.
And that’s precisely what’s happened here—and what corporate media has allowed warmongering propagandists achieve. Instead of offering a fuller understanding of where our intel is coming from, let alone a proper fact-checking of related claims, we keep getting a credulous signal-boosting of whatever sells sensationalism best, and in terms that keep suggesting the worst case scenario is also the most probable.
An empowered civic sphere
In a better world, we would have more politically literate citizens. Mainstream media would equip viewers and readers alike with a fuller understanding of regional history, the psychological mechanics of state diplomacy, and the material conditions that heighten or lessen a country’s readiness to launch more overt actions.
Instead, we keep getting the narrative equivalent of a child holding up two action figures as if about to crash them into one another, offering all the requisite sound-effects to build up to their impending collision, and letting the two swoop into close proximity over and over without fully making contact—all for the theatre of the thing.
Live-feed news reports are all about the play-by-play—almost by definition—but they’re also not value neutral. Whenever media outlets draw our attention centrally to the work of reacting to the latest breaking news item, they’re drawing us away from interest in any deeper, contextualizing data.
This past weekend, that lack of deeper context-building reduced Iran to a simplistic caricature, at cost to viewer appreciation for the many ways in which Iran is already engaged in local wars. Iran is indeed a major financial backer of armed groups throughout the Middle East, which has allowed it a role in many violent local actions without incurring the same military or international cost of all-out conflict. Iran is already at war, in other words, but coverage this weekend encouraged viewers not to consider those other forms as relevant. Only direct smashy-smashy matters!
Meanwhile, there are also limits to Iran’s secular control over the religionist extremists it funds—and those limits would have been good for viewers to understand in advance, so that Westerners had a more pragmatic understanding of Iranian capabilities when processing events on the live feed as they unfolded.
In particular, it was important for Westerners to understand that, even though Iran is a financial backer of many armed groups in the region, it cannot pull their strings to the extent that Tehran most certainly wishes it could. Worse yet, some radical factions are well placed to try to rope this government into far more direct and extreme response, thanks to their own propaganda campaigns around famous local heroes.
Iran can therefore be a serious menace, and also not a power whose elimination will magically solve all other problems in surrounding armed groups. For Western armchair analysts, this is important complicating data to keep in mind—eager as so many people are to fantasize just blowing a whole country away.
A lack of historical context, to say nothing of a lack in the media literacy necessary to recognize different forms of propaganda, also reduces our general understanding of war to “times when one state government makes another state’s territory go kablooey.”
All this talk of escalation solely on state terms, in other words, does a great disservice to everyday citizens, because it denies us the ability to grasp how much of Middle Eastern conflict is driven by proxy groups relentlessly destabilizing local governments—including their own, if they don’t think their states are going far enough to serve their own radical-militant agendas.
With a better political education provided by legacy media, more people would have understood in advance of this weekend’s events a) all the diplomatic signalling that Iran had been putting out since Israel’s April 1 attack on a consulate annex building, killing 16; b) Iran’s recent history of retaliatory action in response to assassinations, with an emphasis on doing minimal damage while saving face; and c) how little most countries are interested in pitching themselves into more costly, overt wars when there are plenty of lower-cost proxy alternatives instead.
Going for the less sensational response
Was it just a failure of short-term memory that caused so many media outlets to forget to contextualize Iranian foreign affairs when reporting on this military strike?
Or did no one care to educate the public simply because “war sells”, and because it was more lucrative for citizens to believe that the risk to peace had never been higher?
(And also, conversely, that so long as Iran and Israel don’t get into open, overt military conflict, there’s no greater conflict in the region to worry about after all?)
I tend not to ascribe to malice what can be explained by ignorance and indifference, and here I think “indifference” better suits our corporate-driven media economy.
I don’t think it necessarily mattered to great swaths of media if all these civic eyeballs were fixed on their screens for reasons that merely upped individual stress levels.
And after all, things could have gone differently, right? So who wants egg on their face, as being the media outlet that treated too calmly what instead turned out to be the start of World War 3? Best to err on the side of a different kind of “caution”, and whip people up into a civilization-ending clash of a public fervour instead!
This, too, is war propaganda: news media acting as if it’s just a passive observer amid increasingly violent cultural fervour, when the fact is that most outlets have far more agency in crafting the public narrative than they let on. Legacy media had a chance and a responsibility here to better inform citizens of how the world functions.
It passed on both.
And we deserve better—even if we don’t always act like it.
Even if our trauma, when normalized to life amid such relentless war games, leads us to advocate for more violence and prejudice across the board.
We deserve a media culture better prepared to educate us, rather than to trade on how riled up and eager so many of us are for more dramatic signs of state action, when living on tenterhooks around “imminent threats” for years on end.
I don’t blame individuals for gamifying global events.
I don’t even blame individuals for the gleefully cruel and cavalier things they say, and the horrific things they rationalize and stump for, when assailed by so much hateful propaganda day in and day out.
What I blame is our general media milieu, for stressing out humans to the point where gamified treatments of war seem a far sight better than the unbearable wait for something, anything to happen to break up current norms.
This past weekend, many of us played into the game around coverage of Iran—and centrally at cost to our own sanity, and to what remains of human decency.
But we don’t have to keep playing into such games.
In the future, we can pay more attention to the visual and emotional cues on major media outlets. If they’re signalling that we should be riled up and/or riveted, we need to ask ourselves if there’s anything these outlets are also doing to empower us.
And if they’re not—if all this coverage offers is a sense of civic helplessness in the face of global horror—then we have to choose wisely.
Even if the horror is addictive.
Even if we’re worried we’ll “miss out”.
Because even when the whole media economy is clamouring for our attention, we owe it to ourselves to keep asking this one critical and re-humanizing question:
Does it serve us best to lean into such coverage, or away?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML