War & Media · March 28, 2025
The Face of War Has Gone Missing
Over 2,000 people died in Iran. More than 250 journalists were killed in Gaza.
And yet, on your screen, there were only missile launchers, fighter jets, and defence ministers
giving press conferences. Somewhere along the way, the human being quietly vanished from the war.
Ravish Kumar | Translated & Adapted
Where Did the People Go?
On February 28, America and Israel launched strikes on Iran. In the days and weeks that followed,
you could find no shortage of footage — fighter jets taking off from carriers, warships cutting through
oceans, missile systems painting streaks across night skies. Armies pressed their own videos into the
world's news feeds, and those videos became the accepted truth of the war.
But here is what you did not see: the places where those jets dropped their bombs. The people underneath.
The screaming. The running. The faces of mothers outside a school that no longer existed.
One month into the conflict, it is worth pausing to ask why. Was it an accident of logistics?
A failure of access? Or was it a deliberate, systematic effort to make sure you felt nothing —
that you remained unmoved, uninvested, unbothered — even as thousands of lives were being shattered
in a country far away?
"A careful effort was made so that, no matter what else you worried about — the cost of cooking gas,
the queue at the ration office — you would feel no sympathy for those being killed."
250 Journalists Killed. Most of Their Names You Never Heard.
Before talking about the faceless dead in Iran, it is worth remembering another category of
the missing: the journalists of Gaza. The Guardian newspaper built a dedicated page on its
website for them — every name, every photograph. Where there was no photograph, a bullet-proof
press vest stood in its place. A press vest as gravestone.
Source: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) — over 250 journalists have been killed in Gaza
since the conflict began. Between 2023 and 2025, CPJ documented 203 journalist killings attributed
to Israel.
cpj.org
These were the people who stood among Gaza's unarmed civilians and reported what was happening.
They were the only reason the world knew anything at all — knew the names of families wiped out
in a single strike, recognised the faces of children who would not see another week.
They reported until bombs fell on them too.
Ansal Sharif · Hamza Mustafa · Thuraya Fatima · Husam al-Masri
· Maryam Abu Daqqa · Muhammad Salama · and 244 more.
Israel barred international journalists from entering Gaza from the very beginning. Those who were
inside — local, Palestinian, freelance — were the only witnesses. And then they were killed too.
Not one by one, but two hundred and fifty times over. And still, none of their photographs was shown
repeatedly, insistently, the way the face of a single soldier from one side tends to be.
Iran's 2,000 Dead, and the Names We Were Never Given
Iran released photographs of the girls killed in Minab. It made posters. The incident was
genuinely horrific. But those images — and the deaths of nine sailors — were made to stand in for
the entire Iranian civilian toll. A nation-sized tragedy reduced to a handful of photographs.
Over 2,000 people were killed in Iran during this conflict. Their stories, their names, the
neighbourhoods they lived in — none of it reached us. The families of the Minab girls were not
permitted to speak publicly. No journalist walked through the rubble of their homes. Instead,
Iran's own state media repeatedly released AI-generated videos depicting
how Trump might attack, how devastation would unfold — synthetic grief in place of documented grief.
Iran struck a steel plant. Iran's food supply chain was attacked — a vegetable market in Larestan
was bombed, reportedly to starve the population into rebellion. Medical services in cities like
Mashhad and Shiraz were reportedly disrupted. We do not know the true scale. There is no ground
report. There is almost no image.
Iran is the world's tenth-largest steel producer. Targeting its industrial and food infrastructure
alongside military sites is a documented tactic of economic warfare. No independent media
verification of civilian casualty figures has been possible due to access restrictions.
Humanize. Dehumanize. The Oldest Game in War.
There are two words that define how war is communicated to the public: humanize and
dehumanize. In every conflict, the side with greater media power works to dehumanize
those being bombed — to ensure that viewers feel no connection to the people dying, feel no
instinct to oppose the war. And a handful of courageous journalists work to humanize — to bring
back the human stories that states want erased.
During the Vietnam War, media scholar Daniel Hallin documented in his book
The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam how American television coverage actively
promoted the war effort. Enemies were called "vermin," described in terms that stripped them of
human identity. The purpose was precisely this: to prevent the television audience from forming
any emotional bond with those being killed — and to instead breed the appetite for their killing.
Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (1986). Hallin's research
analysed network scripts and broadcasts to show systematic dehumanisation of Vietnamese civilians
and the enemy in American TV news.
One exception stands out: in August 1965, CBS correspondent Morley Safer travelled with American
marines to Cam Ne village. What he broadcast — soldiers setting fire to thatched homes while
elderly villagers and children remained inside — became a landmark in war journalism. "Burning of
Cam Ne" is still available on YouTube. It was almost singular in its honesty. A later comprehensive
analysis of all major US network coverage found that while hundreds of South Vietnamese villages
were destroyed, almost none had their stories reported.
When the public is dehumanized enough, it stops being citizens and becomes a crowd — willing to
cheer for bombing runs the way it cheers for a cricket match.
The Embedded Journalist and the Asset Balance Sheet
During the Iraq War, the Pentagon's "embedded journalist" programme placed reporters inside
military units, riding tanks to the front lines. Television news from inside those tanks turned
war into spectacle — America's firepower showcased like product advertising. That war was waged on
the premise that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons. That premise was never proven. Hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis were killed. The embedded journalists were reporting military prowess while
the foundational lie went largely unchallenged.
A journalist from the Boston Herald, writing about his experience embedded with a US unit,
described identifying three Iraqi soldiers who were then shot dead by a sniper nearby. The account
raised a question that has never been satisfactorily answered: can a journalist embedded with one
side of a war report that war with any neutrality at all?
Source: Nieman Lab, Harvard University — analysis of embedded journalism ethics and the Pentagon
Embed Program (2003–2004).
niemanlab.org
On March 26, the Wall Street Journal published a report on American military assets
damaged or destroyed in the conflict — billions of dollars of equipment catalogued with concern.
The human beings at the other end of those assets did not receive a comparable accounting.
When Fox News asked Trump whether Iranians had food and water, he responded by telling the
anchor she was beautiful and reminiscing about a lunch they once shared. That exchange,
too, became news.
The Missing Ground Report
What are people eating in Tehran, in Beirut, in the cities of southern Iran right now?
What do the streets of Mashhad look like today? How overwhelmed are the hospitals?
Which neighbourhoods have lost power, or water, or both? Is there a ground report — any
ground report — answering these questions? There is not.
In Gaza, when children began dying of malnutrition and starvation, the press was denied entry.
The world learned of it through the same Palestinian journalists who were being killed one by
one. At Harvard University, students knelt in the cold and read aloud the names of dead
Gazan children onto plastic sheets. That act of naming — that insistence on the human —
generated global sympathy and protests across dozens of cities. That is precisely why
the naming is withheld. Naming is dangerous to those who are bombing.
In Gulf states hosting American military bases, people who filmed the aftermath of strikes
were arrested. Meanwhile, the American Secretary of Defense stood before cameras to teach
journalists how to write headlines. "Be patriotic press," he said. "Take pride in your country."
India's Press: A Study in Voluntary Silence
In 2024, American journalist Tucker Carlson — an unlikely figure in this story — released
a documentary called The Bibi Files, directed by Alexis Bloom. Originally produced
inside Israel, the film investigates corruption allegations against Prime Minister Netanyahu
and raises pointed questions about how Hamas managed to breach one of the world's most surveilled
borders on October 7. Carlson, hardly a progressive voice, nonetheless asked the questions.
No Indian news channel would broadcast this film. Even if Carlson offered it for free.
There would not be the courage. In a country of 1.4 billion people, with one of the largest
and most historically vibrant press traditions in the world, the media's role in covering
this war — in documenting war crimes, civilian casualties, or even asking basic questions —
has been negligible. Turn the pages of any mainstream Indian newspaper from the past month.
Count how many ground reports there are. Count how many names of Iranian dead appear.
What you will find instead is wall-to-wall coverage of leaders: Trump on the aeroplane steps,
Trump before boarding, Trump after landing. A defence secretary. A foreign minister. An
analysis of geopolitical implications. The Indian press has become a kirtan recital —
devotional performance for those in power, with no room for the voices underneath the bombs.
The press abandoned its purpose. And so the public abandoned the press.
Both now serve someone other than the truth.
The Question We Must Sit With
Many people who consume war coverage daily consider themselves compassionate. Sensitive.
They feel sorrow at personal losses, tenderness toward animals, outrage at individual cruelty.
And yet, when it comes to the bombing of a country they cannot locate on a map — 2,000 dead,
5,000 wounded — they feel nothing. They discuss it with the detachment of a stock market
bulletin.
This is not a failure of character. It is the outcome of a system — media and state together —
that has very carefully ensured you never saw a face, never heard a name, never had the chance
to feel anything. The dehumanization was not accidental. It was administered.
Animals, for all the contempt the word carries when applied to humans in war, do not drop bombs.
In that specific sense, they remain more humane than we have allowed ourselves to become.
Facts
The United States and Israel conducted strikes on Iran beginning February 28, 2025. This article
was written one month into the conflict, on March 28, 2025.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more than 250 journalists
have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began. CPJ documented 203 of those
killings as attributable to Israel between 2023 and 2025.
The Guardian newspaper built a dedicated memorial page on its website for journalists
killed in Gaza, listing names and photographs. Where no photograph existed, a bullet-proof
press vest was used as a placeholder.
Israel did not permit international journalists to enter Gaza from the outset of the conflict,
leaving local Palestinian journalists as the primary — and most endangered — witnesses.
Iran reported over 2,000 civilian deaths as a result of American and Israeli
strikes. Independent verification of this figure has not been possible due to media access
restrictions inside Iran.
Iran is the world's tenth-largest steel producer. Strikes reportedly targeted
its steel plant and a food-supply market in Larestan, alongside military infrastructure.
Daniel Hallin's 1986 academic work The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam
documented how American TV news systematically dehumanised the Vietnamese enemy and civilian
population during the Vietnam War.
Morley Safer's 1965 CBS report "The Burning of Cam Ne" — showing US marines setting fire
to Vietnamese village homes while elderly residents remained inside — remains one of the few
honest ground reports from that conflict. A subsequent comprehensive network study found
that hundreds of destroyed South Vietnamese villages received no coverage.
The Pentagon's embedded journalist programme during the 2003 Iraq War placed reporters
inside military units. The war's stated justification — Iraqi chemical weapons — was
never verified.
On March 26, 2025, the Wall Street Journal published a report cataloguing
American military assets destroyed or damaged in the Iran conflict, framing losses
in billions of dollars of equipment.
The Bibi Files (2024), directed by Alexis Bloom and released on Tucker Carlson's
platform, investigates corruption allegations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and questions the security lapses of October 7.
Criticisms
Israeli government and military: Over 250 journalists were killed in Gaza
— a toll that defies the logic of accident. Barring international press from entering Gaza
from the start ensured that the scale of civilian destruction would remain invisible to the
world. This was not a policy of caution; it was a policy of concealment.
The Iranian government: In January 2023, the Iranian state killed thousands
of its own citizens during popular protests and systematically hid the death toll. Today,
the same government presents itself as a victim of unjust bombardment — and it is right
to do so — but its credibility is fatally compromised by its own record of silencing families
who lost children in state violence.
The American government and Trump administration: Bombs funded by American
taxpayers are destroying Iranian homes and Iranian lives. When a journalist asked President
Trump whether Iranians had access to food and water, he responded with a compliment about
her appearance. This is not eccentricity. It is the studied contempt of a leader who has
concluded that human consequences carry no political cost.
Western mainstream media: A month of coverage produced almost no ground
reports from inside Iran, no sustained accounting of the 2,000 dead, no hospital photographs,
no footage from destroyed neighbourhoods. The same outlets that loudly championed civil
liberties inside Iran during the 2022 protests went largely silent once Western bombs
started falling. The hypocrisy is structural, not incidental.
Indian news media: In a country of 1.4 billion people, not a single
mainstream television channel or major newspaper produced meaningful ground reporting on
civilian casualties in this war. Coverage consisted almost entirely of government statements
and geopolitical commentary. The Indian press has traded independent journalism for proximity
to power, and in doing so has rendered itself useless to its audience on the most consequential
stories of the era.
Military and state information apparatus broadly: Military officials from
multiple countries walked through bombed sites performing the role of journalists — naming
cities, describing threats, drawing comparisons — while actual journalists were barred from
those same locations. This is not press management. This is the state replacing the press.
