Live updates: Follow the latest news on US-Iran war
The administration of US President Donald Trump is fighting two wars right now, one abroad and one at home. Both have run into difficulties.
The first war, obviously, is the military campaign against Iran. A great deal of damage has been done to the Iranian regime, the leadership in Tehran and the country’s economy. Damage to the wider region and the world economy is, as we are also well aware, severe, while the final outcome remains unclear.
Military strategists throughout history always ask: “What would victory look like?” It’s therefore worth repeating the very perceptive view from the Roman historian Tacitus. Two thousand years ago, he wrote of a Caledonian chieftain in what is now Scotland saying of the Roman army attacking his country, “where they make a desert, they call it peace”. We may find out whether that scepticism about victory applies in Iran this year.
And that’s why the second front in the Trump administration’s war is so significant, involving the media, particularly the American media. The outcome here is also unclear, but the verbal fighting is bitter.
Brendan Carr is the Trump official in charge of communications and broadcasting licences. Formally, he is chair of the FCC – the Federal Communications Commission. Mr Carr said recently that he may cancel permits of “mainstream news” organisations for what he called their “misleading coverage” of the Iran war. He then claimed that the “legacy media” are “ratings disasters” trusted by only 9 per cent of the US population.
It is true that trust in mainstream media has declined in the US and elsewhere. A Gallup poll published a few months before the Iran war began reported that “Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low”, although Gallup put the “trust” figures differently from those quoted by Mr Carr. They found that “just 28 per cent” of Americans were “expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly”. This was down from 31 per cent in 2024 and from 40 per cent in 2020.
Mr Carr, however, went on to appear to threaten the traditional media more directly. He said on social media that licensed US broadcasters reporting what he called “fake news” have “a chance now to correct course before their licence renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest and they will lose their licences if they do not”. But that depends on where the “public interest” really lies. Broadcasters point out that more than half of the American public do not support the Iran war (PBS and ABC News polling) while a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed just 27 per cent of Americans actually do support the conflict.
Since the FCC, in effect, controls the air waves in the US, Mr Carr’s statements may set the Trump administration on a collision course with broadcasters who report that the public dislike administration policies.
A number of other senior Trump officials have joined the complaints. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth talked of “fake news” and complained that a headline reading “Mideast war intensifies” should really read “Iran increasingly desperate”. Mr Hegseth then spoke strongly in favour of a takeover of broadcaster CNN by the multi-billionaire Larry Ellison saying that the sooner he takes over the network “the better”.
Mr Trump himself complained on Truth Social (his own platform) about “yet again an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News media” concerning “the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an airport in Saudi Arabia and of no further use”. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been key targets of Mr Trump, bundled together with what he called “other lowlife papers and media [that] actually want us to lose the war”. Their reporting, he claimed, was the “exact opposite of the actual facts! … they are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America”.
Beyond these political bombardments, legal weapons have been used to open a second front of attack. The non-partisan US news organisation Politico reported recently that Mr Trump “is pressing six lawsuits against news organisations and publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Des Moines Register and CNN. He’s also suing the Pulitzer Prize board over journalism prizes it awarded eight years ago”.
These lawsuits demand compensation stretching into billions of dollars. Many legal experts suggest that however intimidating the lawsuits may be, they have little legal basis and a limited chance of success. In the case of the BBC, it is being sued in a Florida court for a television programme that was not available to American viewers. Mr Trump cannot sue the BBC in Britain since the broadcast was more than a year before the Trump administration even became aware of its content.
It would appear, therefore, that the Iran campaign and the US media campaign will continue for some time. It is unclear in both cases what “victory” – or peace – might actually look like.
