The Iranian regime has always known that the surest way to weaken the United States is not to defeat our military, but to erode the American public‘s will to support its own.
And in the 90 days since Operation Epic Fury began, the regime has found its most effective vehicle for that campaign: much of the Western press.
Turn on most major US news outlets (Fox News and The California/New York Post excepted) and you will hear, almost verbatim, the talking points Tehran has been pushing on state-controlled Press TV and in the Tehran Times since February.
The US is “losing.” Trump has “no plan.” The strikes were “a failure.” Gas at $4.50 a gallon (a dream for California!) is proof the war was a mistake.
The US is “losing.” Trump has “no plan.” The strikes were “a failure.” Gas at $4.50 a gallon (a dream for California!) is proof the war was a mistake. Samuel Corum – Pool via CNP/ShutterstockAmerica is the ‘aggressor.’ Israel dragged us into someone else’s war. The regime cannot be toppled, so we may as well negotiate with it. The price at the pump matters more than the centrifuges at Fordow.
The president himself pointed it out.
On Truth Social this week, he laid out the entire racket: “If Iran surrenders, admits their Navy is gone and resting at the bottom of the sea, and their Air Force is no longer with us, and if their entire Military walks out of Tehran, weapons dropped and hands held high, each shouting ‘I surrender, I surrender’ while wildly waving the representative White Flag… The Failing New York Times, The China Street Journal, Corrupt and now Irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the Fake News Media, will headline that Iran had a Masterful and Brilliant Victory over The United States of America.”
It reads like satire, but it’s a precise description of the coverage Americans are getting.
It is information warfare, and it is working.
The Soufan Center documented in April how Iran’s regime is running one of the most effective influence operations in modern memory — viral Instagram clips, AI-generated battlefield footage, embassy troll accounts taunting the American president, and slick rap videos.
Researchers at Clemson exposed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) network of at least 62 accounts impersonating Texans, Californians, and Brits to seed regime narratives inside our own discourse.
It reads like satire, but it’s a precise description of the coverage Americans are getting. Getty ImagesThe media is only one front. The same regime that funds Hamas and Hezbollah has spent the past two years bankrolling the campus encampments and pro-Hamas street protests that have convulsed American cities since Oct. 7, 2023.
In July 2024, the Director of National Intelligence took the extraordinary step of publicly confirming it: Actors tied to the Iranian government were “posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.” The chancellor of Syracuse University said publicly last fall that he believed Iran’s regime was behind the demonstrations on his own campus.
The Hezbollah flags at Columbia, the Hamas headbands at UCLA, the chants of “Death to America” outside the White House — none of it is organic. It is Tehran, running its playbook on American soil.
The regime knows it cannot beat the US military. So it is fighting on the only terrain where it has a chance: on American hearts and minds.
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And our press corps — some too partisan, or too eager to make Donald Trump look bad — has volunteered as the delivery system.
Lenin had a phrase for people who serve a hostile cause without being paid. He called them useful idiots.
The consequences are real.
When American anchors hammer “gas prices” night after night while glossing over the thousands of military targets degraded, the senior nuclear scientists eliminated, and the missile program set back by years, they manufacture a war-weariness that did not exist on its own.
It reads like satire, but it’s a precise description of the coverage Americans are getting. AFP via Getty ImagesWhen pundits float “letting the regime stay in power” as the reasonable middle path, they hand the regime a lifeline.
When journalists treat the IRGC that murdered our soldiers in Iraq; plotted to assassinate American leaders; and that props up Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as a legitimate counterparty, they launder 47 years of bloodshed against Americans
There is a word for media that root against their own country in wartime. It used to be unprintable. It should still be.
Americans deserve honest coverage of this war including its costs, its setbacks and its civilian toll. What they are getting instead is a nightly recitation of Tehran’s press releases pretending to be hard-hitting analysis.
The mullahs pay handsomely for influence operations around the world. The biggest one — from some in the American media — they get for free.
Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.
