How the U.S. mainstream media coverage on Iran hides the truth

Fox News coverage of opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, on March 3, 2026. (Screenshot: Fox News)

Even those familiar with the biased U.S. mainstream coverage of the Middle East are shocked at how bad the reporting on the U.S.-Israel war on Iran has been.

By James North, Reposted from Haaretz, March 5, 2026

Even those of us who have long monitored mainstream U.S. media bias in its coverage of Palestine and the Middle East are surprised at just how bad the reporting has been on the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The media is missing big stories, distorting the facts, ignoring history — and deploying an astonishing Orwellian language of euphemism to hide some awful truths.

Here are just some examples: On the war’s first day, an aerial attack killed at least 175 Iranians in the southern town of Minab, most of them schoolgirls. But in the days that followed, you could watch the wall-to-wall coverage on U.S. cable news networks for hours, including the supposedly more progressive MS Now, and not see anything about the atrocity — even though there was plenty of visual evidence available. The New York Times did at least run a short report (on page 11) the next day, but there has been little or no follow-up. So far, we don’t even know whether it was the American or the Israeli air force that killed the schoolgirls — and there hasn’t been even been the credible pretense of an investigation.

Then, on the war’s second day, the U.S. announced that three of its warplanes had been shot down, by “friendly fire” from Kuwait, an ally. Independent military experts online were astonished by this, pointing out that the planes were hit in three separate incidents. Some were skeptical of the U.S. explanation, wondering if it was the Iranians who had actually downed the planes. Others pointed out that even if it was an accident, the catastrophe (each plane costs $70-$90 million) revealed major command and/or technical failures. But so far the story has disappeared, and no one seems to be pressing for answers.

The implication is ominous and clear: if the U.S./Israeli air forces can cause their own planes to be destroyed, how can their claims of precision, targeted bombing be taken seriously?

Also, unsurprisingly, the mainstream media is either ignoring or distorting the historical record, especially about Iran’s nuclear program. The facts of course are: in 2015 Iran and the Obama administration signed a landmark nuclear deal, which prevented Tehran from ever enriching weapons-grade material and imposed independent inspections to ensure compliance. Iran respected the agreement. Trump tore it up in his first term. Here again, you could watch cable news for hours, and almost never see this background — which isn’t that complicated — explained.

There was one brief moment on the war’s second day when the truth threatened to break through into the mainstream. Secretary of State Marco Rubio blurted out that it was Israel that had actually instigated the U.S. attack. All of a sudden, mainstream commentators — the more intelligent of whom knew about Israel’s responsibility all along — felt free to tell the truth. Edward Wong, a ranking diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times, even tweeted: “Trump wages a war on Iran because of Israel — a rationale Rubio has now openly stated.”

The honesty couldn’t last. The next day, Rubio argued that the media had misinterpreted his previous statement — and much of the mainstream just reported him verbatim, without stating (accurately) that he was now lying about what he said just the day before. And of course with occasional exceptions the media has ignored the hard facts — that Benjamin Netanyahu in particular has tried for decades to instigate the U.S. into attacking Iran.

Meanwhile, the mainstream compounds its negligent and misleading reporting with Orwellian language that is meant to further hide ugly truths. Example number one is using “take out” to mean “kill” or “assassinate.” I’ve already analyzed this offensive expression, pointing out that it dates back to the 1970s, when the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia used it to describe how they were killing black liberation fighters. On cable news, “take out” has almost completely replaced “kill” to describe what U.S. and Israeli bombs have done to Iranian leaders.

Almost as bad is “decapitate,” also instead of “assassinate.” It literally means “cut off the head,” but cable news viewers surely aren’t visualizing a guillotine in action, but something more akin to a reshuffle of personnel at a workplace.

“Boots on the ground” is another frequently used euphemism. The expression makes it sound like an innocent hike through the countryside — when it actually means heavily armed American (and possibly Israeli) invaders, backed by modern weapons — the M134 American machine gun can fire between 2000 and 6000 bullets per minute.

Finally, as the war is inevitably spreading to Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere, the mainstream media continue to call certain armed groups in the region Iranian “proxies,” implying that they are Tehran’s puppets. You don’t have to like Hezbollah in Lebanon or their equivalents elsewhere to recognize that they emerged in response to crises in their own countries. It’s easier to demonize the Iranian regime by making it alone responsible for all the violence in the region.

James North is a Mondoweiss’ Editor-at-Large, and has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City. Follow him on X at @jamesnorth7

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