Embattled Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday he had been wrong to appoint Labour politician Peter Mandelson as UK envoy to Washington, seeking to quell anger over a scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time associate.

Starmer, already widely unpopular with the public and many Labour MPs, is struggling to manage a controversy that has threatened to bring down his leadership.

Addressing parliament about the deepening political row, Starmer said: “At the heart of this, there is also a judgment I made that was wrong. I should not have appointed Peter Mandelson.”

He faced fresh calls to quit last week after it was revealed that Mandelson — whose friendship with the late convicted US sex offender was long known — had become Britain’s envoy to Washington last year despite failing security checks.

Starmer has insisted that he and other ministers were not told until last week that Mandelson had failed the independent vetting process.

“It beggar’s belief that throughout the whole timeline of events, officials in the Foreign Office saw fit to withhold this information from the most senior ministers in our system, in government,” he told MPs.

“If I had known before he took up his post that (the) recommendation was that developed vetting clearance should be denied, I would not have gone ahead with the appointment.”

‘Unconventional’

Last Thursday, Starmer sacked the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Olly Robins, telling MPs that he had set in motion a review of the security vetting process.

But ex-civil servants have accused Starmer of scapegoating Robbins, who will give his own account to a parliamentary watchdog committee on Tuesday.

Opposition leaders have called for the centre-left Labour leader to step down, with accusations ranging from incompetence to willful misleading of parliamentarians and the public.

Starmer told parliament in February that “full due process” was followed when Mandelson was vetted and cleared for the key role.

His Downing Street office has insisted that remains true because government rules meant the Foreign Office had the power to overrule vetting concerns, without the knowledge of Starmer and his top team.

On Friday, Downing Street took the unusual step of releasing a memo that insisted he had only found out about the vetting failure last Tuesday.

Senior ministers have so far rallied around Starmer.

“A judgement was made that the Trump administration was an unconventional administration and an unconventional ambassador could do a job for the United Kingdom,” Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander said Monday.

“That judgement was wrong and the prime minister accepts that.”

‘He has to go’

Other ministers have argued that Starmer should remain in power amid the global tumult sparked by the Middle East war and other issues, including forging closer relations with the European Union.

But polls suggest Starmer is one of Britain’s most unpopular prime ministers ever.

If Starmer had known about the failed vetting “then he has to go, he has to resign”, retired dentist Andrews Connell, 59, told AFP.

“If he knew that’s really bad. If he didn’t know, he should have known.”

Pensioner Lyndia Shaw, 73, agreed saying Starmer is “absolutely hopeless, hopeless, and I feel that yes Mandelson should face the full force of the law without doubt”.

But retiree Duncan Moss, 67, said he would be “very worried if Starmer was to leave and to not run the country. I think he’s doing a very good job. I think he’s a very mature, experienced leader”.

Starmer sacked Mandelson in September 2025, seven months after he took up the post, after new details emerged about the depth of the ex-envoy’s ties to Epstein, who died in a US prison in 2019 while facing sex-trafficking charges.

UK police are investigating allegations of misconduct in office by Mandelson, 72, when he was a Labour minister more than 15 years ago. He was arrested and released in February.

Mandelson has not been charged and denies criminal wrongdoing.

Starmer and his Labour party are also bracing for a chastening set of local elections next month, including in the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments.

• India, South Korea to expand cooperation in energy sector.
• First South Korean presidential state visit to India in eight years.
• South Korean president will be visiting Vietnam after India.
  

India and South Korea said on Monday that they would boost their economic ties by expanding cooperation in energy, critical minerals, shipbuilding, semiconductors and steel as they seek to double their trade to $50 billion by 2030.

New Delhi and Seoul also agreed to resume and step up negotiations to give new energy to their 2010 trade agreement as India wants their trade to be more balanced and South Korea wants greater market access to the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is in India for a three-day visit, the first South Korean presidential state visit to the country in eight years.

“We decided to upgrade the framework of economic cooperation between the two countries to create a new engine for shared growth,” Lee told reporters after talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The two countries created a ministerial-level economic cooperation committee for the first time, Lee said, adding that they would strengthen cooperation in areas such as nuclear power plants, clean energy as well as trade and investment.

With the Iran war squeezing global energy supplies, India and South Korea would also continue to cooperate to ensure the stable supply of energy resources and key raw materials such as naphtha, Lee added.

Modi said Lee’s visit was extremely significant and that the two countries had taken important decisions to boost two-way trade to $50 billion by 2030 from around $27 billion at present.

“Today, we are laying the foundation for the success story of the next decade,” Modi said, as he recalled strong civilisational ties between the two countries that go back several centuries.

Big investment in India’s steel sector

Indian Trade Minister Piyush Goyal said he held talks with his South Korean counterpart, Yeo Han-koo, and discussed ways to resume and revamp the trade pact and explored opportunities to deepen cooperation in the areas of industry, green energy and digital trade.

Lee will attend a joint business forum conference later on Monday where some 250 South Korean participants are expected, including leaders of household names in India such as Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and LG Group, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.

The two sides also plan to sign a total of 20 private-sector memoranda of understanding on the sidelines of the forum, covering areas including shipbuilding, digital technology and energy, Yonhap said.

Separately, South Korea’s Posco Holdings said in a regulatory filing on Monday that its steelmaking unit plans to build a joint venture integrated steel plant with India’s JSW in Odisha state. Posco’s investment until end-2031 is expected to be about $1.09 billion, the filing said.

The joint venture deal to set up a 6-million-ton-per-annum steel plant in Odisha was announced last week.

In a policy seminar at South Korea’s parliament last week, Maeng Hyun-chul, a research fellow at Seoul National University’s Asia Center, noted India’s longstanding complaint of a widening trade deficit with South Korea and said that political ties had not kept pace with commercial ties.

South Korea had a $12.8 billion trade surplus last year, with exports worth $19.2 billion and imports of $6.4 billion, according to Korea International Trade Association data.

Lee will be visiting Vietnam after India.

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.