Mainstream Media Bias About A Blocked Suez Canal

It’s the same story—no shipping can get through the Canal—but the media treat it differently depending on whether Nature or the Houthis causes it.

John F. Di Leo | March 30, 2026

The week of March 23-29 marked the fifth anniversary of a rare moment in international shipping that dominated the global news cycles for a week.

On March 23, 2021, the containership Ever Given encountered a problem entering the Suez Canal. High winds, low water levels, and the sheer size of the containership (20,000 TEUs, one of the largest classes of commercial ships) caused the vessel to swing sideways and run aground, blocking all traffic in the canal and thus rendering one of the world’s most important shipping routes impassable for a week.

The world press was fascinated by the ship’s predicament. Within hours, wire services were reporting the story, video was all over cable news, and experts were interviewed discussing whether the cause was weather, pilot error, the size of the vessel, or the vessel owner’s cost-cutting (the choice not to hire local tugs as escorts was questioned).

The image of a sideways ship with 20,000 truckloads worth of cargo aboard became the source of memes on social media and jokes at comedy clubs. For a brief moment, the usually boring field of marine transportation became culturally significant.

Then the ship was righted, other ships safely reentered the channel, and the story no longer intrigued editors, broadcasters, and news anchors. It dropped off the headlines.

One might assume, therefore, that the Suez Canal, a key route in global commerce since 1869, has since been back to normal. If it weren’t, the news media would have covered it. Right?

For two and a half years now, the Suez Canal has been mostly unused by commercial vessels, because the weaponry of Yemen’s Houthi rebels—essentially a subsidiary of the Iranian ayatollahs’ rogue government in Iran—has been making the Red Sea impassable for commercial shipping. And if you can’t get in or out of the Red Sea, you........

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