How the Media Manufactures Consent
Turning on the news this week, it seems like everyone is saying we should bomb Iran
It doesn’t matter if you turn on Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC, we are for the first time seeing the mass mobilization of media to manufacture consent for us to go to war with Iran. To no one’s surprise, going to war with Iran is vastly unpopular among every demographic and political leaning. A new poll shows 65% of Democrats, 61% of independents and 53% of Republicans oppose U.S. military intervention in Iran1. Yet from all signs, it seems like the US is preparing to get involved by moving strategic tankers and even as recently as today moving their B-2 Bombers closer to Iran. So what happens when the government wants one thing, and the popular opinion wants the opposite? You manufacture consent.
While you would expect more right wing outlets, like Fox News, to be more hawkish on going to war, you are seeing the same sentiment you would not expect from the more liberal media as well. Here is Van Jones explaining why the US needs to go to war with Iran:
Misinformation on both sides
So first let’s point out the obvious and casual racism. Iran does not blind women for “showing some hair”, in fact many women in Tehran don’t wear hijabs ever since the women, life, freedom movement that happened in 2022. There are more women stem majors in Iran than men. He also later goes on to say they chant “death to Jews”. This is also a blatant lie, as there are plenty of Jewish Iranians in Iran with the same freedoms as any Iranian. Once again, Van Jones here is mistaking Zionism with Judaism.
But forgetting about the blatant racism, let’s focus on the commentary. Whether liberal or right wing media outlets, the question in these panels never seems to be on whether we should bomb Iran or not, but on whether how hard we should bomb Iran. Another great example is how both sides are covered. So far in this first week, 639 Iranians have been killed and 24 Israelis2. However, if you were to just look at the coverage, it would seem that Iran has targeted and killed more civilians. This comes to how the news covers each side. While this is nothing new, since we have for the past almost two years seen the disparity of coverage between Israel and Gaza, the same type of narrative is being pushed extremely hard by the media.
The hospital bombing
You might have heard how Iran struck a hospital in Beersheba, Israel. I will be the first one to admit that, yes, hospitals should never be bombed anywhere and it is a war crime. However, you might not have heard that Israel actually was the first one to bomb a hospital in Kermanshah, Iran just two days prior3. It would seem that the media as a whole spent an extended time covering one side of this, while ignoring how originally the hospital struck was in Iran. Furthermore, this obviously goes without mentioning all the hospitals in Gaza that have been demolished.
The US involvement question
Now comes to the present, and what every media outlet has been talking about for the past 2–3 days. Funnily enough, not one mainstream news channel has asked IF the US should get involved, but HOW much the US should get involved. Should it be one bomb? Maybe a tactical nuke instead? Maybe we should do multiple rounds of bombing. Even the Democrats are not concerned on whether we should get involved, but on whether they should vote yes in Congress before doing it. So the question becomes why do we even want to get involved? The go-to answer is Iran is two weeks away from nukes, but as I’m sure even you all have at some point heard it, the rhetoric has been used since 1995. Not only that, Iran already signed and up until the attacks was in negotiations to reduce uranium enrichment. What’s more, is that we know negotiations work, because Iran was following the negotiations before Trump ripped it up in 2018.
One must ask themselves why now that Israel is involved in a war, the question for none of the pundits is why we can’t keep doing negotiations. Instead of condemning Israel for attacking Iran in the middle of negotiations with the US, we are painting Iran as the villain and making dropping bombs as the only solution to a non-nuclear Iran. What even is the end solution to this? Even if the US steps in, and they destroy every single nuclear facility, ultimately it does not stop but only delay Iran to develop one again. Except this time they will try to hide it even better. So then the next solution becomes changing the regime of an independent and sovereign nation. And suddenly, the US will be much more involved than just dropping a couple bombs.
The bigger picture
The point of all of this is not to just point and shame the media, but to understand how this consent structure works so that you can be better aware of it. Due to social media, we already see prominent dissent who have worked to educate the people, and that’s part of the reason why we see such strong disapprovals for another war in the Middle East. When it comes to international and foreign policy, the United States is often times uniparty and all government officials have the same stance. However, it is often hard to see and spot it, but with this conflict we can see as clear as day the switch-up as outlets and media try to make invading another sovereign country more palatable to everyday people.
Before I leave, I want to end this article by showcasing a video of people in Iran, that when we are talking about war and dropping bombs, we are referring to the death of people who are not too dissimilar to us.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/israel-iran-war-americans-poll
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israeli-strikes-on-iran-have-killed-at-least-639-people-rights-group-says/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-strike-damages-hospital-west-iran-mutual-attacks-kill-dozens