As I write this on March 12, we have entered the 13th day of the unprovoked war launched by Israel and the United States against Iran. Every day we are inundated with information, opinion, and visuals on this constantly developing war with no end in sight.
Yet, through all this information overload, what is missing is the story of the people who pay the price, the so-called “collateral damage”.
On the very first day of the coordinated strikes by Israel and the US on Iran, we heard news of the targeted strike in Tehran that killed not just Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family but several top military leaders as well.
Only later were there reports of the devastating strike on a primary school in the southern city of Minab in which an estimated 175 were killed, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 11.
This story ought to have been on the front pages of newspapers around the world alongside the killing of Iran’s top leadership. But it was relegated either to the bottom of the front page or an inside page.
The treatment of what is clearly considered a war crime exemplifies, in many ways, the attitude of Western media about wars that are in lands away from their own frontiers.
Some days after this killing of children, the New York Times did its own forensic investigation and suggested that the school had been struck by a US missile, one of several that had targeted the base of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard close by. Other media organisations like CNN and Al Jazeera also conducted similar investigations and at the end of it, the consensus was that not only was it a US missile but specifically the long-range Tomahawk that struck the school. Yet the New York Times report does not emphasise that the majority of those killed were children.
Also, predictably, none of this information in the American mainstream media made a difference to the narrative of the US government, which either denied it (President Trump even suggested that it was Iran that targeted the school), or avoided an answer saying it was being investigated. The pictures and videos in these reports were quite damning.
For people following the war closely, it was only social media and some reports in the British press and independent digital news platforms like Drop Site that gave the full picture of that atrocity.
Verification or excuse?
Western mainstream media claims that they will not publish anything that they cannot independently verify. Yet routinely, the statements made by the Israeli defence ministry about casualties caused by attacks by Iran, for instance, and earlier during the still on-going military campaign by Israel on Gaza, the same media apparently did not feel this need to “independently” verify.
In fact, a look back at the coverage of the attack on Gaza by Israel since October 2023 shows repeatedly that much of the Western media routinely repeated what Israeli authorities put out. But information coming out of Gaza, such as the death toll including the number of children and women killed, was always qualified by phrases like “according to the Hamas-controlled health authorities”. For readers, perhaps this is not important. But what this clearly signifies is a doubt about the figures whereas the numbers put out by the other side are taken as credible.
Coming back to Minab, if a newspaper like The Guardian in the UK could access videos and photographs to bring home to people the gruesome outcome of this attack, it is inconceivable that other mainstream outlets in the US could not do the same.
The only conclusion one can come to is that the decision not to investigate the human tragedy in Minab was not because of the internet ban in Iran, but because the performance of war was considered more important than the human tragedy.
Think for a moment if on March 1, the front pages of the main newspapers and television channels in the US had carried the pictures of the destruction of the school, that included the colourful backpacks and little limbs of the dismembered girls strewn across the site, what would have been the reaction of the American public?
Or take the photograph that appeared a few days later, of graves being dug to bury these children, used on the front page of the Indian Express in India but not used prominently in major media outlets in the West. What would have been the reaction?
I ask because in the 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam war, it is generally acknowledged that one of the photographs that fuelled the anti-war sentiment in the US was that of a nine-year-old girl running away from her village on which the US-backed South Vietnamese forces had dropped a napalm bomb. Her clothes had been burned off, as was the skin on her back.
That photograph, now remembered as the “Napalm girl”, repulsed people around the world. Incidentally, a recent documentary The Stringer has raised questions about the credit given for that photograph. It was generally accepted that it was Nick Ut of the Associated Press who took the photograph. Yet according to this investigative documentary, the credit should go to a local stringer.
Indian media’s problem
Often it is one photograph, or a detailed report on the human cost of war, that turns the tide during a war bringing home the reality that the real cost of war is always borne by ordinary people who had nothing to do with starting it.
Yet, it is almost a norm, including here in India, to cover war and conflict almost as if they are video war games or a “performance” as Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in his column in Indian Express. There are reports about the armaments used like missiles, about successful “precision strikes” on specific targets and the damage. For example, the story of how Israel determined when to attack on Iran was reported in Financial Times and The Guardian, which detailed how Israel’s Mossad and the CIA became certain that top Iranian leaders would gather on Saturday. And now, much of the reporting is about oil supplies, the stock markets, the impact on the economies of various countries etc.
What remains mostly missing is the story of people. Take the instance of the Israeli strikes on the oil storage facilities in Tehran. The result was not just the huge fires that were visible all over the city but the black poisonous smoke that enveloped it, and the acid rain that fell on a city with an estimated population of 10 million. The long-term impact of this one strike on the air, water and soil in and around Tehran and how it will manifest in the health of people, especially the vulnerable, is yet to emerge.
Yet, this too was a story with barely any follow-up. In Western media, the visuals were provided by one reporter from CNN who got permission to report from Iran. Otherwise, you had to depend again on independent sources or social media to tell you the full story such as this report in Drop Site.
Only when this war ends will we be able to assess the real impact of Western media’s sanitised reporting on this war on the public in the US and elsewhere. But some general observations can be made even now.
One, that such reporting reminds us that a media that is corporatised, that caters to those who fund it, will decide what is newsworthy based on what they want. This has become a reality not just in the West but also in India.
Secondly, the emphasis on verifying independently has become a useful excuse to play down stories from places where the Western press does not have feet on the ground. Surely, enterprising journalists from Western media can find ways to get stories with the human angle. If such stories do not appear, there must be a reason beyond logistics and so-called verification.
Third, in every country, even those that claim their press is free, the political and social norms that dominate also determine to some extent how journalists report. Perhaps we cannot generalise about a “Western” filter of coverage of this war, but if today you contrast what appears on Western news channels with a network like Al Jazeera, that is based in the region, you can see the difference.
What is worth noting also is that the Indian media is almost totally dependent today on reports from the Western media. Look at any newspaper over the last 13 days. All the reports on the war are attributed to Western news agencies or newspapers like the New York Times. In fact, it is surprising that Indian media does not use more stories from Al Jazeera that has correspondents in Iran.
Let me end with this telling quote from the Columbia Journalism Review:
“In January, after the US invaded Venezuela, CJR wrote that a press focus on military maneuvers ‘seemed to come, disappointingly, at the expense of attention to the humanitarian cost of the attack.’ Reporters covering this new war will find, as they have in recent months, that ‘it’s difficult to get voices out of Iran,’ Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University, told CJR the other day. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, reported an ‘internet blackout’ in Iran on Sunday, with national connectivity at 1 percent. But journalists must navigate a moral blackout, too. In the days and weeks to come, as the Iranian people endure more hardship, it’s crucial that the press bear witness to their suffering. As de Pear put it, ‘The reporting of wars seems to have been inverted; what the powerful say and do is being reported first, and the killing of innocents is mentioned in passing, if at all.’”
This report was originally published in the Newslaundry and can be accessed here.