Andy Gorel is the Managing Editor of AllSides. He has a Center bias.
In times of war, the chaos touches all: the governments, their citizens, and the media, too.
As if garden-variety forms of media bias aren’t enough in times of peace, the fog of war provides an additional shroud. It’s not just domestic forces vying for influence that add to the noise, but foreign actors and their histories as well, many of which we, as Americans, may not fully understand.
Wading through the deluge of information, which is often flush with conflicting reports, war is hard to cover. There’s so much going on that even the major outlets can’t keep up at times. As a small independent team, AllSides has to curate our coverage thoughtfully. And with the war’s international nature in scope, a more thoughtful assessment of outlets and their biases has been necessary as well.
As we’ve said or implied many times in recent years, the AllSides L-C-R spectrum is not the be-all and end-all of bias and its nuances. Our scale principally refers to American politics, and seeks to show a complete picture of the viewpoints and narratives around domestic issues. But still, for the more attuned reader, it is really just a jumping-off point, and not a holy book.
For instance, the libertarian magazine Reason (Center), the establishment classic The Wall Street Journal (Center), and forward-looking British journal UnHerd (Center) may all be rated Center, but often present very different perspectives or biases.
When foreign political forces enter the arena, the margin for difference within our five bias categories increases greatly. It’s often most clear with state-funded or state-adjacent news agencies, as the ideology of their funders is generally easy to deduce.
In the case of Iran, the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera (Lean Left), Turkish state media Anadolu Agency (Center), and Kremlin-funded RT (Lean Right) have often presented coverage with similar framings that stand in contrast to a lot of US media.
On these international issues, AllSides’ mission does not change. Our team aims to give readers as full a picture as we can deduce from credible reporting, full stop. Because of this, we have often mixed in coverage from “adversarial” sources such as the aforementioned, as well as Israeli/Jewish sources like Haaretz (Lean Left), The Times of Israel (Center), and The Forward (Lean Left), and mainstream Western sources.
Over the course of the past month and a half, the AllSides news team has done this on many occasions.
Many Iranians Celebrated Khamenei’s Death, But There Was Mourning, Too
At the beginning of the war, when the US assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, mainstream Western outlets were eager to highlight the celebrations from the Iranian diaspora across the globe. On the other hand, a few outlets AllSides has rated, including NBC News (Lean Left), Anadolu Agency (Center), Al Jazeera (Lean Left), Associated Press (Left), noted that there was significant public mourning within Iran as well.
We published a Headline Roundup highlighting that duelling narrative, and also one that highlighted the celebrations across the globe and split framing from some outlets, both on March 2. While it’s hard to tell exactly how popular the Iranian regime is, or was, it was well-documented that there were both celebrations and mourning, so we did our best to present that split to our readers.
Is Iran a Formidable Foe?
A day later, our team identified another interesting split. Several sources from the left had offered differing opinions on whether the US and Israel could roll right over Iran, or whether they were in over their heads. We laid out three sources from the left clearly as presenting opinions on a “pro-West” to “pro-Iran” spectrum.
Pro-West: Lina Khatib, a Lebanese scholar based in London, in Prospect Magazine (Left bias), described Iran as a “paper tiger” that is “at its weakest point” since its establishment in 1979.
Lean Pro-Iran: Chris Hedges (Left), who served as The New York Times’ (Lean Left) Middle East bureau chief during his tenure with the paper from 1990 to 2005, described Trump’s war on Iran as a “suicidal folly.” He wrote, “Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe…. Despite Iran’s relative military weakness, when set against the combined forces of the US and Israel, it can inflict a lot of damage. It will do this as swiftly as possible. Hundreds of American troops will likely be killed.”
Middle Ground: David Ignatius (Center) of The Washington Post (Lean Left) opened by writing that previous US administrations always thought “the risks of war [with Iran] were too great” and expressed skepticism that the Trump administration fully understands what its endgame is for Iran. Ignatius said he “loathe[s]” the Iranian regime but warned readers not to “misjudge” its “staying power.”
Read the full Headline Roundup and the authors’ perspectives here.
Al Jazeera Highlights Iranian Reports and Context
Many times throughout the conflict, Iranian state media have been out front reporting from the region, and Western outlets have republished its claims with caution. Iranian government officials have often shared updates or official statements that have made it into Western media in bits and pieces, if at all.
In several such cases, Al Jazeera (Lean Left) has been particularly useful in presenting more thorough context from the Iranian government and its reporters.
For instance, when Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Al Jazeera highlighted his political experience and standing within the Iranian system, and reported on the ground when Iranians held mass demonstrations in support of their new ruler. The latter was widely disregarded by Western media, with American media, in particular, ignoring the story. In mainstream US media, AllSides only found coverage from Christian Science Monitor (Center).
Read more about Al Jazeera and its funding sources.
L-C-R Still Matters
As an American news company, we still compose almost all of our Headline Roundups with our L-C-R bias ratings in mind. As the war has been carried out by President Trump’s administration, all kinds of interesting splits and, at times, double standards have popped up within the American right-to-left spectrum.
Because of how many outlets we have rated, we are often able to find competing ideological or international biases that slot in well to juxtapose against US media, regardless of where on our L-C-R spectrum the narratives are coming from. Per their noted biases above, RT (Lean Right) could be juxtaposed with The New York Times (Lean Left) and The Wall Street Journal (Center), or Al Jazeera (Lean Left) with Fox News (Right) and Forbes (Center).
Some outlets that are a bit more of a wild card have been useful, too.
You never really know what you’re going to see from UnHerd (Center). ZeroHedge (Lean Right) carries a pro-America tilt, but is often critical of its institutions, especially regarding certain stories coming out of the Near East. The American Conservative (Right) and Tucker Carlson (Right) have emerged as some of the loudest conservative voices against the war – often to the point where their published takes resemble something you'd see from an unabashedly pro-Arab outlet like Middle East Eye (Left).
Knowing where a source stands regarding US politics and how it covers certain foreign stories can be very telling.
Continue to Get the Full Picture with AllSides
We’ve been very busy since the beginning of the war on February 28, and so has our site. Over the past month, our site has seen major spikes in traffic, and we are very grateful for the trust that readers have placed in us during times like these. We do our best to consume as much as we can and turn it back to our readers so they can cut through the noise and better understand the world around them.
We are going to continue to cover the developments in Iran the best we can – you can check out our Iran daily updates blog to judge for yourself how we’ve done over the past month and more.
And while this coming year will include no shortage of both domestic and international stories that will require our treatment – from left to right or otherwise – if you like what you see, you should consider becoming an AllSides Sustaining Member. Sustaining Members receive our premium weekly newsletter, The Insight, and also unlock additional uses of our Bias Checker tool, which provides article-level bias ratings on demand.
Read a free sample edition of The Insight about the Iran war here.
With team members of all different biases and backgrounds working on our day-to-day content operations, AllSides really is a village. That includes our readers, too – we thank you for your continued support, interest, and belief in what we do.
Andy Gorel is the Managing Editor of AllSides. He has a Center bias.
This piece was reviewed by Julie Mastrine, Director of Communications and Bias Services (Lean Right), Emanuel Macuixtle, Policy Analyst and Research Assistant (Left), and Editor-in-chief Henry A. Brechter (Center).
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