Gone nuclear
DONALD TRUMP: Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier …
- Nine Network, 22 June 2025
Hello, welcome to Media Watch. I'm Linton Besser.
And tonight we stand at a precipice, the world watching with trepidation the fallout of an unprecedented US strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Yesterday, news Donald Trump had bowed to the pressure and fired bunker-busting munitions at multiple sites in Iran said to house Iranian nuclear facilities and fissile material.
By Sunday afternoon the first of Iran's retaliation, a major salvo of missiles targeting the Jewish state:
TREY YINGST: …. We're gonna get inside here, stay with us, Trace …
- Fox News, 22 June 2025
The US bombing campaign dubbed Midnight Hammer came just two days into the two weeks Trump had publicly flagged as a potential window in which Tehran might snatch a diplomatic exit.
So was the world's media being used by a cunning if mercurial president to catch the Iranians off-guard?
… his two-week deadline appears to have been something of a ruse, perhaps intended to lull Iranian officials into believing they had time to talk their way out of it.
- BBC News, 22 June 2025
Since Israel began its ballistic missile campaign against Iran 10 days ago, the world's media has been marshalling resources to meet the moment.
MATTHEW DORAN: Even though the missile didn't hit this property directly, it hit just a short distance away. All of the windows in the house have been completely blown out …
- ABC News 7pm (Sydney), 22 June 2025
But there were few equivalent pictures from inside Iran in the immediate aftermath of the US attacks with internet blackouts and almost no independent journalists on the ground. The vacuum being filled on social media with war pictures from the frontlines of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and images many months old, now among those being fact-checked by BBC Verify:
Let me make it easy for everyone.
Every single video and image that is currently going viral online claiming to show the aftermath of US strikes on Iran's Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites is false.
- X, Shayan Sardarizadeh, @Shayan86, 22 June 2025
And in this fog of war, it appears Channel Nine might already have taken a wrong turn reporting a promise of retaliation from Iran's leader:
LAUREN TOMASI: 'Americans should expect greater damage and blows than ever before in history'.
- Nine News, 22 June 2025
It was quite the scoop because it was missed by every other major press organisation on the planet including CNN and the BBC, and as far as we can tell he had made no such public comments at all about the bombing.
In fact, the regime exercises tight control over public communications across Iran by clamping down on the internet and the free press.
Instead, according to a US-funded Persian news service:
… the Islamic Republic's state-run media is broadcasting scattered news from within the country, and the rest is a bombardment of news and propaganda about the effects of Iran's attacks on Israel.
- Radio Farda, 20 June 2025
Israel also knows the importance of propaganda in conflict, having blocked the world's media from entering Gaza for the past 21 months and on Tuesday last week it struck Iranian state TV.
To get some sense of what is happening inside Iran, the ABC's Middle East Correspondent Allyson Horn in the midst of her maternity leave reactivated her contacts inside the country via encrypted message:
ALLYSON HORN: It was already hard to talk with people on the ground in Iran. Foreign journalists are rarely allowed in …
ALLYSON HORN: But in pockets of connectivity I've reached some of my contacts …
FARAH: This American attack, I can't stop my tears, I can't stop my tears. This is a war. Nobody knows what will happen next.
- ABC News (Sydney), 22 June 2025
So, what does the bombing mean for Australia? And has the media done enough to ask tough questions of the Albanese government?
The ABC's Melbourne radio host Raf Epstein thinks not.
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: There has not been nearly enough questioning. What of our intelligence agencies asked of America's intelligence agencies. What is going across the desk of the national security committee of Cabinet … We're not even asking questions about whether or not it's illegal, we're not even asking questions about what the intelligence is …
- Insiders, ABC, 22 June 2025
Twenty-four hours later the foreign minister fielded these very questions on ABC News Breakfast:
JAMES GLENDAY: Do you know if any American facilities in Australia, for example Pine Gap, were used to carry out these strikes?
PENNY WONG: James, again, we don't comment on intelligence matters.
- ABC News Breakfast, 23 June 2025
In these earliest days of this dangerous new escalation, some of what we'll be told as is so often the case in war will be wrong, either innocently inaccurate or deliberately deceptive, which adds all the more gravity to the duty of the press to provide sound information and yes, to be asking the right questions.
Because whatever trust the media has banked in times of peace, it cashes out in times of war.
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