In telling people about Iran’s assassinated supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, Big Media decided some things were not worth mentioning. For example, his regime’s role in historic attacks on Americans, and the systematic rape of girls and women.
Instead, two news giants portrayed the brutal ayatollah as having had an “avuncular” image. The term means “suggestive of an uncle.” What kind of uncle from hell are they imagining?
In the new episode out today, I explain how the media turned its coverage into a gift to one of the most evil dictators in modern history.
Khamenei was a key leadership figure in 1983, when the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah killed 241 U.S. service members at Marine barracks in Beirut. He was the supreme leader in 1996, when Iran-backed groups attacked the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. A federal court found that he approved the attack.
Meanwhile, his regime’s treatment of girls and women is the stuff of nightmares. Iran marries off girls to be raped. It has long been known to have girls and women raped before executing them, as part of a twisted belief in preventing them from going to heaven. In this episode, you’ll hear from Maryam Memarsadeghi, an activist for freedom in Iran, on i24 News discussing the sexual assaults of prisoners currently held by Iran:
“What Hamas did to the hostages after October 7th in the tunnels is exactly what Iranians face in the prisons of the Islamic Republic, except that they don’t have a state like the Israeli state that will go and fight for them. Iranians live alongside the same people who have massacred and tortured them, and have done so for 47 years.”
People who get their news from big legacy media are hearing none of this.
All this only scratches the surface. Also in this episode:
Big Media avoids calling Iran’s proxies “terrorist groups,” but uses the moniker for a group Iran opposes
The BBC sent its chief international correspondent to Tehran to do propaganda for the regime
How this ties into a massive corporate shift — the potential merger of CBS and CNN — and why the panicked reporting misses the point
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Want to be heard on the 100th episode? Be in touch through the links below.
JL
P.S. ICYMI:
A Giant Gaping Hole in the Media's Iran Coverage
For months, major news agencies couldn’t find much time, energy, or space to cover the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters by the Iranian regime.