By the third day of the Israel-Iran war, news organisations should have been able to frame key issues as clearly as they did on day six. That delay was telling.
Media companies can become more profitable if, rather than adhering to high journalistic standards, they routinely validate their audiences’ biases. Evidence of such skewed reporting is frequently displayed when President Trump’s comments inspire snarky criticisms, or when former President Biden’s declining acuity was covered up.
Media headlines frequently bait audiences by inviting them to judge. Customer loyalty then compounds through shared biases being validated. This click-bait approach to packaging news is commercially robust but it exploits and encourages polarisation at the expense of objective reporting. This leads to more hate and less understanding.
A 2024 Gallup poll revealed that only 31% of Americans express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media to report news fully, accurately, and fairly. This is down from 53% in 2001 and 72% in the 1970s. Last year, only 12% of Republicans reported having a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust, compared to 54% of Democrats. No less than 59% of Republicans indicated having “no trust at all,” whereas only 6% of Democrats felt the same way. This substantial partisan gap is often attributed to perceptions of strong liberal biases among a significant portion of U.S. news organizations. Similar debates about media bias are also prevalent in Europe and other regions.
Infotainment
Before the internet, people living in open societies stayed informed by reading local morning newspapers or watching the nightly news. The arrival of online news greatly expanded access to news content while inducing infotainment. Audiences then swiftly migrated left and right as many centrist-holdouts wobbled financially. It made commercial sense for editors to indulge partisan viewpoints.
As the current Middle East hostilities can’t be easily spun to cater to audience biases, we witnessed baffled editors and their underlings struggling to develop narratives which would appeal to their followers. People seeking to understand the conflict were not well served by high profile news outlets in the first few days of the war. Then, on about the sixth or seventh day of fighting, many big name media organisations began to follow the lead of the less well resourced news companies which benefited from being more firmly tethered to traditional journalistic values.
It was obvious to me by day three of Israel’s operation to degrade Iran’s military and to destroy its nuclear weapons production capacity that most of the higher-profile journalists were struggling to put the war’s events in context. They routinely sidestepped questions that the public would want investigated. For instance, did time favour Iran or Israel? Or, what was the likelihood that the US’s bunker busting bombs could destroy Iran’s deepest nuclear production facilities?
Some low-budget, high-quality podcasts and substacks bolted ahead of the highly resourced news organisations by responsibly framing and addressing the core issues. Their big advantage was that they sought to report the news objectively. They didn’t need extra time to debate how they could depict events within narratives conforming to the worldviews of their partisan audiences.
Objects of sympathy
The three primary protagonists of this war, the men who lead Iran, Israel and the US, are too controversial, ruthless and powerful to serve as heroes or as objects of sympathy. Oppressor-versus-oppressed framing isn’t an option, as the least secure of the three, Iran’s 86-year-old leader, who is very unpopular domestically and regionally, continues to target civilians with ballistic missiles while Israel and the US aim their weapons at military targets.
On 12 June, the day before Israel launched its military operation against Iran, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, stated that “Iran is not complying with its commitments to international nuclear safeguards”. Two weeks earlier the agency had announced that Iran had “significantly increased production and accumulation of highly enriched uranium”. Media outlets are also precluded from casting Israel as a hapless victim as that country’s efforts to suppress Hamas has caused abundant deaths and suffering across Gaza over the past 18 months. Nor could the US be portrayed sympathetically as that country could choose observation status.
Biases can be comfortingly subtle or unabashedly pointed. Crafty storytellers live to embellish narratives. The Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by George Floyd’s death, encouraged oppressor-oppressed framing. More recently, the pendulum has swung modestly from judgemental narratives toward focusing on solutions. But judging has lasting appeal as it is so much easier than understanding the complex tradeoffs that solving great challenges entails.
Many national governments have also been slow to take a stand. Should countries endorse military force to destroy Iran’s massive investment to make nuclear weapons? Media houses have been slow to embrace this issue while dodging how President Trump should frame his decision about attacking Iran’s nuclear sites.
Downgraded
Former presidents Mandela and Obama are major historical figures who remain popular. Nonetheless, the era of ideals, which began when the Berlin Wall came down and Mandela was released from prison, ended when Russia invaded Ukraine. Validating values has subsequently been downgraded in favour of advancing solutions.
Neither Prime Minister Netanyahu nor President Trump is internationally popular, yet this duo is pursuing peace and prosperity across the Middle East. If successful, this would be a truly major achievement – and one which many well-resourced news organisations would struggle to describe objectively.
[Image: Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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