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The Corporate Media Is Head Over Heels for the Iran War

Donald Trump’s attack may be surreal, unjustified, and illegal. But that’s not stopping the press from turning the propaganda dial way up.

Scott Pelley speaks to Reza Pahlavi, former crown prince of Iran, on 60 Minutes.

Our corporate media is often caught flat-footed by the many rapid convulsions in the American polity and broader economy—whether it’s the frenetic wishcasting behind the AI bubble or the collapse of the once-imposing 2024 Trump coalition. With Donald Trump’s surreal, unjustified, and illegal war of Iran, however, our press lords have regained their cognitive footing with a vengeance.

Like their yellow-press predecessors plumping for the opening conflicts of the modern American empire over a century ago, today’s establishment press is shaping yet one more narrative of interventionist impunity, out of the same hoary materials. Now, as in 1898, American leaders are posing as the selfless guardians of global self-governance; now, as then, the country professes that it will meekly deliver the sovereignty it has defiled back into the hands of a grateful and oppressed mass public on the other side of the field of battle. Now, as then, this newest imperial mission already seems fated to wreak broader havoc across the affected region—at which point, the government will move on to its next destructive adventure, and leave a rearguard contingent of freebooters and crony capitalists to clean up, albeit only in the metaphoric sense of the phrase. And now, as then, the press can’t get enough of war.

The familiar jingoistic media reset is so sweeping that even prominent supposed critics of Trump’s imperial presidency are pushing their way into the front of the cheering section. In my billionaire-ravaged hometown paper, normally reliable Trump-baiting tory columnist George F. Will has turned in a chin-jutting encomium to the rudderless Trump action worthy of William Randolph Hearst. Its headline bears eloquent testimony to Will’s palpable relief to be back in belligerent pundit mode: “At Last, the Credibility of U.S. Deterrence Is Being Restored.” The ensuing prose hallucination exults that “Iran’s regime, whose mantra since its inception in 1979 has been ‘Death to America,’ is near death by the clasped hands of Israel and America.”

That’s only Will’s second sentence. He proceeds nimbly from there to tarring critics of Trump’s surprise monarchical bid to achieve regime change in Iran as uncivilized fifth columnists: “Iran’s protesters dramatically underscored the regime’s barbarism, so those who today regret the regime’s demise reveal their barbarism.” And though Will often poses as a defender of strict constitutional obeisance (at least when it comes to overturning campaign finance laws or dismantling the regulatory state), here he waves away the idea that the intervention is a “war of choice”; it is, rather, a heroic act of national self-preservation on par with Lincoln’s refusal to permit the Southern states to quietly secede. (Yes, he really makes that comparison, though it’s somehow difficult to imagine our first........

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