According to an old adage, truth is the first casualty of war. While that still holds weight in the chaos of a frontline, the mechanics of deception have changed with technological advancement. If we look at history, “truth as a casualty” implied a total blackout, a literal “fog of war” where the audience was left in the dark. Today, however, we face the opposite problem because we have too much “truth”. We have high-resolution footage of every airstrike and a live-stream of every tragedy in Gaza or Lebanon delivered directly to phones in our pockets.

In this new landscape, the real casualty isn’t the truth but our perspective. Media outlets don’t even have to spread the so-called “fake news”. They just need to frame the shot and choose certain words to change perceptions and form public opinion, without most people even noticing. This was never more obvious than during the joint US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February.

While the official narrative remained focused on “threats to sovereignty” and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the retaliatory strikes across the Gulf were framed through a very specific lens. Anyone who followed the 24-hour news cycles in London or Washington DC was to see Tehran as nothing but a cold, monolithic fortress, and a place defined by “ideological fervour” and a population waiting for a nuclear launch.

But that frame is a lie of omission. It cropped the coffee shops of North Tehran and muted the students having pragmatic, exhausted debates about their future. It ignored a population tired of being caught between their own government’s repression and the suffocating weight of foreign sanctions. When Western media outlets flattened Iran into a two-dimensional villain, they’re not just reporting but prepping the reader. They are building a world where war seems logical.

Media narratives

While it appears that the conflict, which some feared could escalate into a Third World War, may be nearing a close, it was not fought solely through missiles and drones. A parallel media war was also underway, one that often remains invisible without closer scrutiny.

In modern warfare, nations not only invest in advanced weaponry but also in carefully crafted language. Government statements are deliberately framed, and media organisations deploy words, phrases, and narratives with precision. At times, words shape the coverage in ways that align with the interests of Western powers involved in conflicts abroad.

As noted by Noam Chomsky: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

To understand this better, let’s take a look at some examples. A report released by Al Jazeera Media Institute, published recently, noted that Western media coverage of the Iran-Israel-US conflict often functions as a weapon of war, using selective language that frames US and Israeli strikes as ‘self-defence’ while depicting Iranian actions as ‘provocation’ — legitimising military action and normalising civilian casualties.

The Washington Post, in its report on the day of the attack, crafted this headline in the following way: ‘In surprise daytime attack, US and Israel take out Iranian leadership’, while in the story, phrases like “bold daytime attack”, “eliminated”, and “toppling down of foreign leaders”, portray the act as courageous and brave.

In an analysis piece on CNN, the headline reads, ‘Hezbollah just restarted the fight that Israel was waiting to finish’ — completely erasing the historic context and presenting the situation like the group actually started the war against the occupying Israel.

On the first day of the attack, when the US and Israeli missiles hit an Iranian school and martyred nearly 170, among them mostly schoolgirls, Western media covered it with qualifiers such as “near”, “adjacent to a military base”, “near base”, “military target likely”, and “appears to show a US Tomahawk missile hitting a base next to an Iranian school”, according to Al Jazeera Media Institute’s report.

The politics of naming wars

Across Western media’s coverage, terminology emerged not as a neutral descriptor but as a deliberate editorial choice. Dr Dania Arayssi, a senior analyst at New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, noted that the preference for phrases such as “Iran conflict” reflects a deeper structural tendency within newsrooms.

“The passive framing strips away agency and responsibility. ‘Conflict’ implies mutual, roughly equal friction; it obscures who initiated strikes, who holds overwhelming military advantage, and the geopolitical architecture behind the confrontation. Critics argue this is a structural bias in Western newsrooms towards language that protects allied governments from moral scrutiny,” she told Geo.tv.

Shumaila Jaffery, ex-BBC Journalist and a researcher at the University of Leeds, similarly underscored that such terminology is never incidental but carefully considered.

“It is crucial to understand that the terminology used by mainstream Western media for any war or global event is never random; there is always a deliberate thought process behind it. Through the terminology, media organisations take an editorial position, framing the conflict in a certain way.

“So, if the mainstream Western media is predominantly using the term ‘Iran conflict’, it is taking a stance that keeps the onus or focus on Iran, reinforcing the perception that Tehran is the root of the problem. And doing so, it diffuses the responsibility of the US and Israel in escalating the situation.”

For UK-based academic and researcher Dr Syeda Sana Batool, this framing extended beyond geopolitics into questions of representation and erasure.

“When we call it an ‘Iran war’, there’s a lot that gets erased straight away. First of all, responsibility gets blurred. It starts sounding like the war belongs to a place, almost as if violence just naturally emerges from there, rather than being produced by specific states, decisions, military actions, and political interests. And then, of course, ordinary Iranians get erased too.”

“Their lives, their fears and their everyday realities and the fact that they are far more than a backdrop to geopolitical drama. I think this is something I keep coming back to in my own work as well, the way media often shifts attention away from who is acting and who is causing harm and instead turns whole regions or whole communities into the story. Once that happens, power becomes harder to see and harder to hold accountable.”

Echoes of Iraq in contemporary coverage

The framing of the Iran war, experts argue, cannot be divorced from the legacy of Iraq. Dr Arayssi pointed to recurring patterns that media scholars have long identified.

“The parallels are well-documented by media scholars. Then as now: official government framing adopted as neutral fact, sceptics marginalised, threat inflation treated as responsible journalism, and retrospective accountability arriving only after the damage is done. The question worth asking is whether the lessons of Iraq have structurally changed anything — the evidence suggests institutional pressures remain largely the same.”

Jaffery, however, introduced a more layered comparison, shaped by the evolution of the media ecosystem.

“There are and aren’t. We are living in a different world with a different media landscape, and that, to me, is the biggest difference. During the Iraq War, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was manufactured by the mainstream media, and Saddam Hussein was portrayed as the biggest threat to the security of Western countries.

“At least initially, this worked to mould public opinion in favour of the war. However, this time we have a digital media echo system, which, in itself, is a Wild West, yet it has been providing an alternative view. We have seen influencers like MAGA podcasters Tucker Carlson explain to the American public that Iran doesn’t pose any direct threat to US security, and Meghan Kelly saying that President Trump decided to wage a war on Iran under Bibi Netanyahu’s pressure,” she said.

Something like this was unimaginable during the Iraq War, she noted.

The former BBC journalist said that she believes that newsrooms have also learned lessons from the Iraq war coverage, so although Iran is mostly framed as a threat to Western security, there is slightly more caution towards official claims and counterclaims.

That said, there are still partial parallels, such as the security framing. “As in every war to some extent, journalists rely heavily on sources within governments and militaries to obtain information; this is true for this one as well, on both sides.”

Selective context and the shaping of narratives

A recurring concern among analysts is not only what is reported, but what is omitted or relegated to the margins.

Dr Arayssi observed that historical context is frequently displaced within coverage.

“Context — decades of sanctions, assassinations of Iranian scientists, Stuxnet, proxy conflicts — tends to appear, if at all, deep in articles as background rather than as analytical framing. This mirrors Gaza coverage, where the October 7 attacks were treated as a ‘beginning’ rather than a point in a longer arc. Presenting aggression without genealogy manufactures moral clarity that the facts don’t fully support.”

She further highlighted the ideological weight carried by certain terms: “These terms do enormous ideological work. They frame military action by certain states as inherently defensive and rational, while identical actions by adversary states are framed as aggression or provocation. They’re not neutral descriptors — they carry a built-in assumption about who has the right to define threats.”

Jaffery situated these omissions within the practical constraints of contemporary journalism.

“It varies widely by outlet and format. For example, if it’s a short video for social media platforms, how much context can be included? But then the question is: is such a compact format, which is extremely popular, suitable for telling such a complex story?”

“There is another pattern across all wars: coverage mostly focuses on smaller events within a larger conflict. It’s quite episodic and projects daily major happenings. A few days into a war, context is sometimes taken for granted or assumed to be understood by audiences. Either it’s condensed or dropped altogether from the stories. However, context is sometimes given selectively, and at other times it’s deliberately sidelined to suit the narrative a media organisation or journalist wishes to project. So, I believe there is a full spectrum here, and the current war is no different from past conflicts in this regard.”

Batool draws a direct parallel with Gaza, where linguistic choices similarly obscure asymmetries of power.

“I think it is very similar in the sense that both kinds of coverage reveal important truths. In Gaza, similar words like conflict or clashes and that makes everything sound equal when it is not equal. A lot of power differences get hidden in that language.”

“With Iran, I think something similar happens. The bigger political picture, the actors involved and also the long history behind what is happening can all get pushed aside. So in both cases, the silence is not small but it in a way changes how people understand the whole story, it changes how people think.”

Newsroom pressures and invisible audiences

Beyond ideology, experts point to structural constraints that shape how wars are reported.

Jaffery explains how competing pressures within newsrooms influence both language and framing.

“Language is the most powerful tool for shaping public opinion in favour of or against a war, whether in the broader framing of the conflict, the phrasing of its coverage, or the representation of the adversaries involved. Newsrooms operate under several constraints: speed, audience engagement, biases, regulations, and editorial risks.

“Language is negotiated and managed with all these factors in mind.”

Dr Arayssi added that these structural pressures also influence what histories are foregrounded or suppressed.

“This is arguably the most important question. Sanctions have caused documented civilian suffering over decades. Covert operations have violated Iranian sovereignty. When that history is absent, audiences are asked to evaluate current events without the data needed to assess proportionality or cause. Whether this is deliberate is debatable — it may be as much structural (news cycle pressure, source dependency on official briefings) as intentional.”

At the same time, the human dimension of war often remains obscured.

“There are restrictions and strict limitations on the coverage of the war in Israel, Iran, and the Gulf countries. Due to this censorship, the lived experiences of ordinary citizens in the region have largely been invisibilised; to me, that is the biggest gap.”

The writer is a staffer at Geo.tv

The thumbnail and cover image were generated using Gemini.