THE United States and Israel bombed Iran and killed its Supreme Leader. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. That is the sequence. Everything that followed, the deadlines, the social media threats, the talk of bombing power plants, comes from that one fact.
But open any newspaper and you get a different story. Trump warns. Trump threatens. Iran refuses to comply. Washington is the solver, Tehran is the problem. That is not reporting, but version of events that serves one side.
Iran did not randomly decide to choke off global oil supply. Its head of state was killed. Its cities were under bombardment. Closing the strait was a military response, not a tantrum.
The pattern in the coverage is not hard to explain. Western wire services have spent decades treating Washington as the default centre of every story. When Trump posts a threat, editors move. When Iran states its terms, end hostilities, lift sanctions, fund reconstruction, it gets a line at the bottom if it gets anything. Readers come away thinking Iran is being unreasonable without ever learning what Iran is actually asking for.
Meanwhile the real damage is happening to people who had nothing to do with any of this. A fifth of the world’s daily oil supply is gone. Global LNG took a similarly massive hit. Countries across Asia and Africa are paying higher food and fuel prices because of a war they had no say in starting.
That is the story editors should be chasing. Not the deadline count.
–BTSMedia.my
