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
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 assassinated president as the biggest fan of a state-engineered hit on a foreign leader.) Killing Iran’s head of state and hundreds of its citizens has suddenly turned Trump in Will’s eyes from an American Caesar manqué to the inheritor of the legacy of the Great Emancipator: “Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning ‘Death to America.’”
While Will offers the respectable high-church brand of war-mongering, the rest of our mediasphere is reveling in the ugly work of creating some semblance of popular support for Trump’s latest strongman escapade. Toggling over to the news coverage in The Washington Post, there’s a breathless account (supplied of course by wire-service reporters, after the paper shuttered most of its foreign desks) of how Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’s October 7 massacres brought Iran into its crosshairs: “Iran left the status quo behind,” a subhead enthuses, as if a genocidal campaign of state terror were nothing more than the handiwork of a brash tech startup. For a similarly credulous piece of reporting on the raid that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, see The New York Times’ quadruple-bylined paean to good old American spookery, “The C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.”
Of course, Trump himself has since lamented that this “pinpoint” operation also took out America’s top choices to lead the country after Khamenei’s murder. And serious students of Iran’s politics—i.e., people without any chance of a sustained hearing in Trumpian diplomatic or military circles—have observed that, however you grade the operational savvy of this particular mission, killing the supreme leader of a militant Islamic regime who openly courted martyrdom is not the strategic knock-out blow that the Trump White House desperately hopes it will be.
Yet American imperial narratives are rarely upended by mere empirical details. Instead, the fantasies of remote and painless US-engineered takeovers of the country are already flourishing in our mediasphere. The most stunning and shameless example comes, of course, from CBS News, which under the watch of new network owner David Ellison has become a replica of Fox News with fewer adult incontinence ads and blonde anchor-bots.
CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was exulting on social media over Trump’s Iran invasion and wasted little time in translating those sentiments into marquee coverage. On Sunday, the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened with an adulatory extended interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late exiled Shah of Iran, as he auditioned to be the country’s post-invasion leader.
This was a stretch on several levels—Pahlavi hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly 50 years, and his alleged popular support relies in no small part on foreign social-media bot farms, as well as a desperate mood of monarchist nostalgia among some Iranian opposition leaders. Yet 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was a jingoist Johnny-on-the-spot, feeding Pahlavi softball questions in his luxe Paris headquarters. (An early indication of the many spit-takes in waiting for hapless viewers came in the studio introduction to the segment, when the voiceover relayed the grim developments of the past weekend in Iran, and then awkwardly transitioned into the inapposite revelation that “Scott Pelley was in Paris.”)
Pelley opened with a query about Pahlavi’s leadership ambitions, which yielded a clumsy bit of evasive circumlocution. Iranians “trust me as a transitional leader,” said a man who has spent none of his time on Earth as an adult living with Iranians. “Not as the future king or future president or whatever. I’m totally focused on my mission in life, which is: Let me bring the country to the point where they can make that free choice. That would be enough for me, having said “Mission accomplished.’”
For any aspiring leader in the Middle East to be citing with a straight face George W. Bush’s infamously premature declaration of victory after his similar causeless and illegal invasion of Iraq should set off a torrent of skeptical follow-up questions from any honest journalist interlocutor. But this was Scott Pelley on Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes, so when he did manage to cite the horrific plunder and repression orchestrated by Pahlavi’s dad, he allowed the exiled prince to whitewash the historical record while also (awkwardly) reassuring viewers that state vengeance just wasn’t his jam.
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“Look, my father left Iran voluntarily to avoid bloodshed,” Pahlavi said, without of course noting that the prospective bloodshed in question would have been the shah’s own. “And he said, ‘I’m a king. A king doesn’t build his throne on the blood of his own people.’ If the nation today wants me out, I would leave. I would not turn my guns on them.” Apart from Pahlavi’s entirely ahistorical account of monarchy and his father’s reign, his “I will not turn my guns on my subjects” T-shirt could not help but raise many more questions than it answered.
For anyone other than Scott Pelley, that is. The designated war shill for this once-revered investigative journalism franchise opted instead to serve up confections like this: “When you see the courage on the streets that we’re witnessing now, I wonder how that moves you.” Pahlavi teared up repeatedly as he praised the genuine heroism of Iran’s street demonstrators, which then prompted this creaky bit of studio-voiceover explication from Pelley: “Pahlavi told us that there are units within the military and the police that would turn on the hard-line government. He says that many but not all troops could be given amnesty in a process of national reconciliation.”
In other words: Now that CBS’s choice for presumptive Iranian leader-in-waiting has done his Oprah turn before the cameras, he’s pledged to institute a US-grade crackdown on dissidents and critics. No doubt George Will and scores of TV producers and pundits across our failing imperial republic were weeping in concert—in relief over reclaiming their true vocations.
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).