Iranians injured in an Israeli attack on Keshavarz Boulevard in central Tehran. Photo: Amir Kholousi/AFP via Getty Images.
By Belén Fernández – Jun 18, 2025
Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”
Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
‘Preemptive strike’
From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)
On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.
Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:
Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.
That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.
In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.
‘Potential salvation’
Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”
In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.
On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?
We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”
Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.
‘It’s all targeted’
Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”
After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”
Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.
(FAIR)
Belén Fernández
Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, Marytrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon, and, most recently, Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin.
