US Media Keen on Iranian Unrest—Less So on US and Israel’s Role in It

Reuters (1/14/26): “Asked what he meant by ‘help is on its way,’ Trump told reporters they would have to figure that out.”

When protests against high inflation swept Iran in late December, the usual international suspects wasted little time in endeavoring to hijack the unrest—which prompted a violent government crackdown—for their own purposes.

On January 10, Donald Trump—fresh off his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—took to his preferred social media platform to showcase his signature manic reliance on random capitalization and exclamation points: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” A few days later, another encouraging message: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

The protests have since dissipated, without any successful “help” thus far in the form of regime change or US/Israeli military attack, although Trump has dispatched a “massive fleet” to the Middle East “just in case.” The Iranian government, which blames the US and Israel for fueling the bloody upheaval, has put the death toll at 3,117 (Al Jazeera, 1/21/26), including state security personnel. The Canada-based International Centre for Human Rights—aptly described by prominent Mideast analyst Mouin Rabbani as a “faux human rights organization”—claims that no fewer than 43,000 Iranians were killed by government agents. In between those two extremes, all manner of other numbers have also been flung about.

The US establishment media, ever on hand to assist with the vilification of Iran and pave the way for imperial aggression, have jumped at the chance to expose alleged government savagery. This diligence hasn’t generally been deemed necessary in the case of, for example, the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip—which most media can’t even bring themselves to call a genocide. The mass slaughter in Gaza, which proceeds apace under the guise of a “ceasefire,” has officially killed over 70,000 Palestinians since October 2023, although last year UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned that the “real death toll” might already have reached 680,000.

‘Sparked by economic grievances’

It’s unlikely that the New York Times (6/25/26), reporting on a pro-US country, would use the expression “citizen uprising” to describe a situation where “government buildings, commercial properties, mosques and police stations were set on fire.”

In the realm of politically motivated reporting, however, Iranians are far worthier victims, and in its January 25 requiem, “How Iran Crushed a Citizen Uprising With Lethal Force,” the New York Times grieved:

Across Iran, funerals are taking place. Parents are burying children. Children are burying parents. Siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates and teammates are attending burial processions.

The country’s “plunging economy” made an appearance in the second paragraph of the article as the initial catalyst for the protests. No further relevant economic or historical context was provided in the ensuing 69 paragraphs.

The Wall Street Journal’s January 26 condemnation, “Iran’s Protest Crackdown Looks Deadlier by the Day,” only offered a vague reference to “economic grievances” as the instigator of the protests, citing “rights groups” as the source of the estimate that “10,000 or more” people were killed in the crackdown. A CNN dispatch (1/17/26) headlined “Blood on the Streets” ended with the following reflection on Iran’s dire financial predicament: “The harsh reality of life today in Iran guarantees that the protests will soon reignite.” NBC News (1/25/26) noted that “the demonstrations were sparked by economic grievances as the rial currency crashed and inflation soared.”

‘Economic statecraft’

The Wall Street Journal (1/20/26) touted “US financial pressure” as a “nonmilitary means of reprimanding Iran,” because, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, it already “worked” in Iran: “Their economy collapsed…. This is why the people took to the street.”

But the US corporate media by and large fail to consider why, exactly, it is that Iran is in such economic disarray—an arrangement that happens to have more than a little to do with US “help.” As Al Jazeera (1/13/26) has pointed out, decades of US sanctions against Iran have “crippled” the lives of Iranians, and “played a central role in the country’s economic crises that were the primary trigger for the current spate of protests” in the first place.

Funnily enough, US officials have even admitted as much. And yet the Wall Street Journal (1/20/26) was perhaps the only major US media outlet to publish US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent comments, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, that sanctions on Iran had

worked because in December, their economy collapsed…. This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.

Britain’s Guardian (1/23/26) newspaper managed to print a few additional lines from Bessent’s remarks: “We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.”

It’s reminiscent of a scene from the first Trump administration in 2019, when then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted to the press of the charming effects of coercive economic measures against Venezuela: “The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour…. You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.”

‘Still squeezed’

Al Jazeera (1/13/26): Iran’s middle class is “now 28 percentage points smaller than it would have been in the absence of sanctions.”

Meanwhile, anyone needing a reminder of the inherent lethality of such forms of “economic statecraft” need only recall the 1996 assessment by then–US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright of the estimate that US sanctions had thus far killed half a million Iraqi children: “We think the price is worth it.”

Al Jazeera (1/13/26) reviewed some of the effects of sanctions on Iran over the decades, from a spike in plane crashes due to the government’s inability to import new aircraft, to skyrocketing prices for essential medications, to the collapse of the rial and a diminishing GDP. Incidentally, sanctions have also created “opportunities for corruption, forcing trade and finance into grey and black channels,” and lining the pockets of an elite minority.

(It’s perhaps worth mentioning that, back in 2014, the New York Times—1/22/14—deigned to feature the opinion of Iranian-American filmmaker and writer Beheshteh Farshneshani that the impact of sanctions on Iran had been “devastating,” resulting in soaring poverty levels and widespread hardship.)

In a January 26 writeup, the Associated Press devoted a smidgen of space to the understatement that the Iranian economy is “still squeezed by international sanctions,” preferring to focus on the calculation by “activists” that at least 6,126 people were killed in the crackdown on protesters.

Mossad ‘with them in the streets’

The Jerusalem Post (12/29/25) quoted Mossad’s message to Iranians: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

The AP report also sought to discredit Iranian allegations of US and Israeli intervention in the demonstrations, specifying that Iran’s UN ambassador had given “no evidence to support his claims” to that effect.

Were the US media in the business of habitually placing the news in proper political context, of course, claims of US/Israeli intervention in Iran would hardly be regarded as dubious. But the establishment press is not fond of reflecting on the fact that the Islamic theocracy came to power as a result of the overthrow in 1979 of the Shah of Iran, an obsessive purchaser of US weaponry, whose torture-happy reign had been enabled by the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against the democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh. Israel’s track record in the country includes killing Iranian scientists and lots of other people.

Those skeptical of current Iranian government “claims” might take a moment to glance at English-language Israeli media such as the Jerusalem Post, which on December 29 reported that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had “posted an unusual Farsi message urging demonstrators to act, saying it is with them in the streets.” On January 8, the Israel Hayom website quoted Israeli minister Amichai Eliyahu on current covert operations in Iran: “I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now.”

And on January 16, the Times of Israel conveyed comments by Tamir Morag, political correspondent for the right-wing television station Channel 14, according to which “foreign actors” were arming the Iranian protesters. The Times observed that Morag had been “careful in his report not to explicitly implicate Israel in the alleged weapons transfer,” but had been “more flippant” on social media:

We reported tonight on Channel 14: Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed. Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.

The US media, on the other hand, have steered clear of even reporting what the Israelis themselves are saying. Ditto for what Mike Pompeo (proponent of Venezuelan “suffering”) said on January 2, when he took to X to wish a “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets,” and went on to add: “Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

‘A pared-down Iran’

The Wall Street Journal‘s Melik Kaylan (1/16/26) wrote that “there’s a distinct possibility of civil war after regime change” in Iran; for him, that’s a feature, not a bug.

As for what the corporate press is saying, the Wall Street Journal (1/16/26) went so far as to run an opinion piece titled “A Fractured Iran Might Not Be So Bad.” Melik Kaylan, whose bio lists his beat as “culture and the arts,” argued that various ethnic groups should secede from the country because “a pared-down Iran would pose a diminished risk to Israel,” among other perks.

In Kaylan’s cultured view, “for the sake of regional and world peace, the best option may be to help secession happen and thereby take a downsized Iran…off the geopolitical chessboard entirely.” Why stop at regime change when you can just remake the entire regional map?

Trump, for his part, has not only deployed a “big armada” (Axios, 1/26/26) to the Middle East, but also imposed—what else?—new sanctions on Iran following the crackdown on protests. The president has furthermore announced 25% import tariffs on products from any country that persists in doing business with the Islamic Republic. And as the US doubles down on economic warfare, with the tacit assistance of a media establishment that can’t be bothered to say too much about it, don’t expect regional or world peace anytime soon.