MSM could be a war casualty

‘Truth is the first casualty of war’ is a long-held axiom, but independent and bold journalism can play a corrective role. However, that is not how it happens in real situations of war most of the time. Under coercion or persuasion, the mainstream media (MSM) becomes an amplifier of the state’s war propaganda. The manufacturing of consent becomes even fiercer. Part of this is due to the impracticality of getting accurate information regarding claims made during conflicts. Most information is generated by state actors who disseminate it selectively.

Even then, proactive journalists and platforms can question official versions through logic, by obtaining information from whistleblowers within the system, and by using publicly available sources. The MSM largely suspends that role — and, even worse, becomes a collaborator in national security propaganda mostly. One reason MSM had its credibility eroded is that social media exposed the brazen manner in which it colludes with governments and political parties across the world.

The current war of choice launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran is both an opportunity and a crisis for the MSM — it could end up as a war casualty by toeing official propaganda and becoming a carrier of misinformation, or it could try to emerge as a corrective force.

At the moment, with a wider catchment of information and opinion, it is social media, independent journalists, data crunchers, and open-source intelligence trawlers that are filling the information gap deliberately created by state actors. While strategic commentators, professional editors, and reporters who toe the state line only reinforce their own echo chambers, social media is unravelling war propaganda in real time.

Western “free” media had already prepared this slant for the big war through its obfuscating coverage of the Israeli offensive on the civilian population of Gaza since October 2023, through the selection of words and headlines that cover up for Israel and blame the Palestinians. Acts of violence by the West are often reported in the passive voice, without revealing upfront who the perpetrator is. But such twisting of daily facts is peripheral to the deeper manipulation of the information environment — such as the complete manufacturing of the story of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, which ushered in an endless war.

The Western media, which swaggers with hubris while judging journalism in the developing world, has been a sheer mouthpiece of the security establishment at every critical juncture.

The high impact of social media is forcing some marginal changes in MSM behaviour in the U.S. Independent voices, from across the political spectrum — whatever their motivations may be, ideological or material — have made the vertical propaganda of the American strategic establishment untenable.

Tucker Carlson alone has brought to the American public discourse points of view that the MSM had refused to carry. His interviews with Vladimir Putin in February 2024 and with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in July 2025 — conducted in the immediate aftermath of the first Israel-Iran war — made alternative perspectives available to the American public at scale. They were watched millions of times, a feat that no MSM channel or journalist in the U.S. can dream of. So much so that it may well be one reason why state actors in the U.S. and Israel acted in panic to start this war before shifts in public opinion made it impossible.

American MSM is being dragged by circumstances to raise some elementary questions about the war, but it largely tends to follow the security establishment’s line. There is no sign of introspection. It is no accident that The Washington Post called for the punishment of whistleblower Edward Snowden — not because he said something wrong, but because, as the paper’s editorial board put it, his leaks caused “tremendous damage to national security” by exposing intelligence operations it deemed lawful.

The paper made this demand after winning a Pulitzer Prize on the back of the very information he provided — becoming, in the process, the first newspaper in American history to editorialise for the criminal prosecution of its own source. Julian Assange, who published the documentary record of American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was hunted across jurisdictions for over a decade.

War is waged on truth as surely as it is waged on the enemies of the nation. The Western MSM has been a willing combatant in that war for too long. The Iran conflict could be yet another turning point for the Western MSM — whether it intends to be an unsung casualty or a fighter for truth.