Saying Everything, Except Who Did It: Western Media, The Iran War, And The Language Of Euphemism

Days after the United States and Israel jointly attacked Iran, one of the deadliest incidents of the war occurred in Minab, a city in Iran’s Hormozgan province. An elementary school was struck during the attack. According to Iranian authorities, 165 people were killed, most of them girls.

Yet readers relying solely on Western media coverage could easily miss a basic fact: who carried out the strike. The New York Times headline read: “Analysis suggests School Was Hit Amid US Strikes on Iranian Naval Base.”

Assal Rad, a research scholar and a fellow at the Arab Center, told Outlook that the headline “totally hid the fact that 165 people, mostly children, were killed in a US strike.” It casts doubt through “analysis suggests.” “School was hit” is in passive voice. “Amid strikes on Iranian Naval Base” intends to justify the reason for the attack.

“U.S. Bombed Girls’ Elementary School in Iran Killing 175, Mostly Children,” that’s your headline. She fixed it. Rad refers to another instance. The Washington Post headline read: “Israel urges evacuation of South Beirut suburbs; Iran threatens revenge on US over warship.”

Iran “urges” when it is bombing civilians, but Iran “threatens” when it is being attacked.

CNN’s headline on the Minab school attack avoided naming the United States as the perpetrator. Yet when an Iranian missile struck a residential building in Israel, the network showed no such hesitation. Iran was named directly, with no ambiguity about responsibility.

The pattern was visible elsewhere as well.

The New York Times, for instance, treated Iranian attacks and casualties as established fact when Iran was the actor. But when Israel was responsible for strikes causing civilian deaths, the language shifted, attribution grew cautious, verbs turned passive and the perpetrator often vanished from the headline altogether. The result is a telling asymmetry: responsibility is explicit when the adversary acts but blurred when it is a Western ally.

Western media coverage of the Iran war is already generating debate among journalists and media scholars. Much of the criticism centres on how the conflict is framed, the language of headlines, the attribution of responsibility and the emotional hierarchy of victims. In many cases, the reporting reads like a masterclass in saying everything except who did it.

Interestingly, some Israeli outlets are more direct about agency than their Western counterparts. Headlines in Haaretz frequently named the Israeli military. One such headline read: “U.S. Probe: Likely U.S. Responsible for Iran School Strike.” In much of the Western press, by contrast, bombs often appear without bombers.

The contrast becomes clearer in headline comparisons.

The NYT headline on the US strike on the elementary school: Iran Says Dozens Are Killed In Strike on School The NYT headline on the Iranian strike: 9 Killed in Israeli City Near Jerusalem After Iranian Missile Strike

When Iran launches missiles, the actor is named clearly and immediately. When strikes attributed to the United States or Israel kill civilians, headlines often retreat into passive constructions, “explosions”, “blasts” or “airstrikes”, with responsibility left ambiguous. The result is a peculiar mix of euphemism, selective sympathy and strategic fear-mongering that shapes how audiences understand both the war and its victims.

Other headlines reflect the same framing.

The Economist: The Iran war has been a stunning aerial success NYT Headlines: An Emboldened Israel Is Seizing Opportunities to Remake Region CNN: Iran after 48 hours: Tactical success, strategic uncertainty

Rad referred to these headlines and said that Israel and the US started an illegal, unprovoked war on Iran, carpet bombing one of the most populous cities in the world, bombing schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure and killing civilians including kids. This is how Western media normalises war crimes and empire.

Rad quoted CNN headlines. “Israel says it has begun a ‘broad-scale wave of strikes’ on key regime infrastructure in Tehran,” and said, “They are carpet bombing Tehran and CNN is still trying to frame it as targeted strikes. For the thousandth time, ‘Israel says’ IS NOT JOURNALISM.”

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, media expert and author of The Indian Media Business, said she lost faith in the Western press long ago, first during the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, when much of the Western press uncritically amplified claims about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

“That scepticism has only deepened with the stark contrast between its coverage of Gaza and Ukraine,” she said. “When Palestinian children were dying and hospitals were being bombed, the moral urgency that animated reporting on Ukraine seemed largely absent. The same standards of empathy and scrutiny were not being applied.”

“I understand that media narratives are shaped by particular understandings of democracy and geopolitical alignments. But journalism’s credibility rests on the claim that its ethical standards are universal, so those principles must hold when reporting on places considered ‘elsewhere’, whether it is in Bangladesh, Nepal, Iran, India or Palestine.”

Alan MacLeod, an independent journalist in the US, referred to a CNN story with the headline, “Hezbollah just restarted the fight that Israel was waiting to finish” and said, “It is total propaganda. CNN is completely turning the reality on its head.”

Reporting from Tel Aviv, BBC correspondent Clive Myrie described the United States and Israel as forces that “seek to transform Iran.” The phrasing did not go unnoticed.

Jonathan Cook, an award-winning journalist and a British media critic, told Outlook, referring to the BBC coverage of the attack on Iran, “No mention from the BBC that Israel and the US committed the supreme crime in launching a war of aggression on Iran. Instead, Clive Myrie tells us only that they ‘seek to transform Iran’. I guess that means Putin's 2022 invasion was just his way of ‘seeking to transform Ukraine’.”

Adam Johnson, who hosts ‘Citations Needed’, a podcast on media, referred to an episode of 60 Minutes on CBS News and posed the question, “And what happens to Iran’s nuclear weapons?”

“What Bari Weiss has done with the 60 Minutes: Iran has no nuclear weapons, this isn’t something the US or Netanyahu himself even claims. It’s a total fabrication, causally thrown in there by the most trusted name in news in the US,” he wrote. He referred to Bari Weiss for a reason. Weiss is a known conservative journalist and an alleged Zionist who was recently hired by the owners of the CBS network to head CBS News operations.

The voices in the American media questioning Trump’s madness on the Iran attack are in the minority. David Corn, the Washington DC bureau chief of Mother Jones, called Trump a “mad king.”

“Massive War Launched by a Man With No Plan. Again. Donald Trump is repeating George W. Bush’s catastrophic mistakes… Trump proceeded with an unconstitutional war... It is the war of a Mad King.”

Dan Froomkin, the longtime journalist and a media critic who runs the website Press Watch, told Outlook that the American corporate media coverage was “stenographic.” “The American media should be vigorously alerting the American people to how dangerous and counterproductive the war could be, to the lack of any reasoned argument in its favour, to how it would violate one of Trump’s key campaign promises and to the fact that Trump has not received authorisation from Congress as required by the Constitution,” he said.

He had a list of questions the mainstream American media could have asked.

Why would you go to war? What legal justification do you have to go to war? How can you justify going to war without getting Congressional authorisation? How can you justify going to war when the public is resoundingly against it? What do you expect to get out of going to war? How will this make things better rather than worse? How long will the war last? How does the war end? How much will it cost and how will you pay for it? Where is your supporting evidence for the war?

Independent media watchers in the US are shocked, but historical precedent suggests that the mainstream American press has always run propaganda which suited Western allies and the CIA.

"U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" is a 2002 New York Times story reported by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that relied heavily on anonymous U.S. officials claiming Iraq had sought aluminium tubes for nuclear centrifuges. The article became a cornerstone of the WMD narrative and was repeatedly cited by officials from the administration of George W. Bush as evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons.

Years later, experts and investigations concluded the tubes were very unlikely to be intended for nuclear enrichment, and the reporting became a textbook example of fear-mongering by the American press. When the war ended and no stockpiles of WMD were found, even institutions such as The New York Times acknowledged that their coverage had given too much credence to government assertions.

Similarly, long before the Iraq War and the debates over WMD reporting, Western journalism had already faced a similar test. In 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, most Western coverage described the event not as a covert intervention but as a spontaneous revolt.

The New York Times, 20 August 1953 headline: “Shah’s Troops Overthrow Mossadegh; Tehran Crowds Celebrate.”

The story portrayed the fall of Mohammad Mosaddegh as the result of loyalist forces rallying to restore the authority of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The emphasis was on crowds celebrating and royalist units seizing control of government buildings. The article made no reference to the covert role of the Central Intelligence Agency or Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, whose joint operation, later known as Operation Ajax, had orchestrated the coup.

So history suggests this is not an aberration but a pattern. When the CIA helped topple Iran’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, Western newspapers called it a revolt. When Washington prepared to invade Iraq in 2003, headlines warned of weapons that did not exist. And today, when bombs fall on Iranian cities, headlines often struggle to identify who dropped them.

Western media has repeatedly shown how easily official narratives can become journalistic consensus. Today’s coverage of the Iran war suggests that many of those lessons remain unlearned. The vocabulary has evolved, “precision strikes”, “analysis suggests” and “regime infrastructure”. But the underlying pattern endures. When adversaries act, responsibility is named; when Western powers or their allies do, language turns evasive.