(Oct. 4, 2026 / JNS)
The United Nations convened its 81st session of its General Assembly last month, with heads of government speaking between Sept. 22 and Sept. 26. As in recent years, many of the speeches and most of the media coverage focused on Israel and its alleged atrocities against Palestinians, and included efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state through staged mass walkouts. In contrast, journalists treated truly atrocious leaders, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian, as respectable peacemakers.
A BBC report covered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address delivered on Sept. 25, stating that “more than 73,920 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry,” omitting that roughly a third of them were militants.
It then added, “Last year, the world’s leading association of genocide scholars declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.”
The report failed to mention that the only presumed qualification to join the organization—the International Association of Genocide Scholars—is paying a $125 membership fee and that it doesn’t require any scholarly work for members.
The New York Times likewise published a news item on the speech. On top of the article, it featured a video of the performative walkout. It, too, cited the United Nations and nonprofits accusing Israel of genocide, a term that has since 2023 replaced the word “war.”
António Guterres remarked, “The scale of killing in Gaza is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my years as secretary-general.” Among the attendees was the delegation from Iran.
Over four days, between Jan. 8 and Jan. 11 of this year, Iran massacred protesters.
Human Rights Activists News Agency, an Iranian diaspora organization, has confirmed 7,015 identified fatalities killed by the regime, while leaked reports count the number up to 36,500. U.S. President Donald Trump suggested the number goes as high as 54,000. If true, it means that Iran killed as many protesters in about four days as Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza in more than two years of war.
Pezeshkian addressed the assembly two days before Netanyahu. The coverage of the two leaders’ speeches could not be more different. The press helped Pezeshkian to make his case for Iran as a sympathetic victim of U.S.-Israeli aggression who was in New York to end the war.
The first paragraph of BBC’s report on the speech mentioned the recent Iran-U.S./Israel war, but nowhere did the article cite the regime’s January massacre of its own people, which served as the casus belli for the conflict. BBC’s only mention of civilian deaths was the tragic attack on a school in Minab as a result of target misidentification by the U.S. military and “an attack on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz [which] killed an Indian sailor,” without identifying Iran as the instigator.
It quoted Pezeshkian stating that Iran is “ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force.”
The New York Times’ reporting on the speech was even more egregious than simply omitting the regime’s deadly crackdown on the protests. Iranian-American journalist Farnaz Fassihi, known for being deferential to the regime and hostile to the opposition, grossly understated the number of victims, writing that during the protests “security forces [killed] at least 4,200 protesters, rights groups say.”
She cast Pezeshkian as reasonable, reporting that he is under pressure from the regime’s “hardline supporters” for his willingness to reach a compromise agreement, a misrepresentation of the facts about Iran.
Following the U.N. General Assembly, Pezeshkian then went on a media tour, giving interviews to Bret Baier of Fox News and Margaret Brennan of CBS. Baier did not raise the January protests during the discussion at all, and Brennan allowed her subject to get away with lies.
Pezeshkian said: Then they hire these people, and they have armed some of them. More than 500 security and military forces in a demonstration, apparently they say it was a simple demonstration, in what demonstration 500 security and military forces get murdered? They were attempting a coup.
Brennan did not point out that Pezeshkian apparently does not know the difference between a coup and a revolution. Moreover, she failed to question why, even assuming all of these claims are true, Iran is planning to execute high school girls arrested during the protests.
Instead, she moved on. Brennan’s failure to challenge Pezeshkian is even more appalling in light of her 2024 interview with Netanyahu, in which she challenged nearly every one of the Israeli prime minister’s answers.
The disparity of treatment that the Times, CBS and the BBC extended to Netanyahu and Pezeshkian exemplifies the mood in the mainstream media. They have never given much attention to the plight of the Iranian people, but routinely withhold facts and obscure nuances about warfare to indict Israel, a year after the ceasefire in Gaza.
Journalists boast about being objective narrators of facts. In reality, they put on kid gloves with a U.S. enemy and wear brass knuckles against America’s closest partner in the Middle East.