WhatsappPolitical groups so passionate about “freeing” Palestinians haven’t organized to support a country of 90 million people seeking freedom from an oppressive regime.
The muffled response of legacy media and so-called human-rights groups to the massive, momentous Iranian uprising, especially in comparison to their hysterical activism during the Gaza war, exposes profound hypocrisy.
Media coverage of Iran has been paltry by comparison to daily front-page coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Data show that whereas news about the Gaza war regularly made the front pages, legacy media have seldom regarded the protests in Iran as equally important.
The media has downplayed the importance of unrest in Iran, attributing it merely to cost-of-living issues. Thus, headlines like NBC’s “Protests in Iran over economy turn deadly” omit the fact that Iranian protesters don’t just want better economic conditions. They want to depose the regime that oppresses them.
Legacy media have also declined to cite death tolls, hiding behind “need to verify” policies, which were blithely ignored when publishing fake Hamas fatality figures. Indeed, during the Gaza war, media outlets such as the BBC often produced headlines like, “More than 25,000 now killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says,” without a hint of doubt as to the credibility of the terrorists’ numbers.
These double standards exemplify anti-Israel bias on the part of legacy media—not surprising, since surveys show these journalists are overwhelmingly left-leaning and Democratic Party members.
Likewise, political groups so passionate about “freeing” Palestinians have made no declarations and have not organized any significant events to support millions of Iranians seeking freedom.
While true liberation movements should transcend geopolitics, neither legacy media nor anti-Israel activists demonstrate sympathy for those suffering under Islamist autocracies. Rather, their agenda is focused on ushering in a new world order, based on the destruction of Western democracies, crushing capitalism and supporting those they deem “oppressed” by designated “oppressors”—to which latter category, apparently, Iran’s mullahs do not belong.
Legacy media provide little coverage of the Iranian protests. During Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, daily front-page stories covered all aspects of the conflict. War coverage comprised 20% to 30% of content during peak news cycles. In contrast, the protests in Iran merited just five to 10 articles a week in legacy media outlets, with no front-page dominance for the first seven to 10 days of the demonstrations. Articles on the protests consisted of just 2% to 5% of news cycles.
Legacy media try to justify meagre coverage of the Iran protests, citing lack of independent journalists, dangers to journalists, and the internet and telecommunications blackout in Iran. For instance, CNN stated: “The countrywide communications shutdown makes it difficult to assess what is happening on the ground.” But these same conditions existed in Gaza during the media’s blistering—and fact-free—criticism of Israel during its war against Hamas. Shame obviously does not inhibit such hypocrisy.
Legacy media downplays Iran protests, attributing them to socio-economic conditions. In fact, the demonstrators’ real objective is to topple Iran’s Islamist regime. Protesters regularly chant “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to Khamenei!” and burn pictures, symbols and buildings associated with the Islamist regime. Nevertheless, weeks into the protests, headlines in The New York Times still asserted that “Severe Inflation and a Currency Crisis Provoke Protests in Iran’s Biggest Cities,” and ABC insisted that “Protests in Iran sparked by economic woes now nationwide.” As Iranian activist Mahtab Gholizadeh said “Separating these protests into ‘political’ or ‘economic’ is misleading. Almost everyone understands that the political structure of the Islamic Republic has produced the economic collapse.”
Why do legacy media insist on “verifying” data in Iran, but not in Gaza? For instance, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson claimed social-media footage must be carefully verified before reputable outlets can use it. But lack of verification never stopped the BBC and other legacy media from regularly publishing misleading casualty figures from Hamas during the war. Indeed, according to a study by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analyzed BBC coverage from October 2023 to October 2024, the network attached the phrase “Hamas-run” to the terrorists’ casualty figures in 1,155 articles—almost as often as casualty mentions appeared.
Leftists with an anti-Israel bias control mainstream media reporting. Surveys in the United States have shown that journalists lean left ideologically compared to the general public. U.S. journalists are three to five times more likely to call themselves liberal than conservative and 10 times more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. A study of NPR staff revealed 86 of their journalists to be registered Democrats with no Republicans.
Clearly, such a tilt explains the tendency to criticize Israel rather than support it. Thus, it’s no surprise that left-leaning journalists skewed coverage on the Gaza war to overlook “liberator” Hamas’s daily war crimes, while refusing to refute blatant lies of genocide and starvation tactics by the alleged “oppressor”: Israel.
Why do “pro-Palestinian” political groups show no interest in a free Iran? Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, the BDS movement, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and similar campus groups have remained silent on the Iran protests. Accordingly, no widespread university campus protests have condemned the Islamist autocracy or throngs of students or celebrities championing the demonstrators.
Iranians’ struggle for freedom doesn’t fit the radical leftist narrative. According to leftist doctrine, liberation struggles are only legitimate when it’s “oppressed” peoples, such as people of color, fighting white, Western “oppressors.” Hence, the Palestinian cause is legitimate and worth defending because it is “oppressed” Arabs—1.2 billion strong—fighting tiny “white-colonial-oppressor” Israel. The oppressed Iranian protesters’ quest for freedom doesn’t merit attention because their ruthless, autocratic Islamist regime is apparently even more oppressive.
The struggle for freedom is universal. These are not issues of superficial racial “identity” or fake definitions of “oppressors” or “oppressed.” Israel is by no factual reality a colonizer, oppressor or majority white—quite the contrary on all three counts. Some 90 million Iranians are trying to liberate themselves from one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, and they’re being murdered on their streets in cold blood. They are surely worthy of attention and support from the media and champions of human rights.
