The public deserves to know when Iran war reporting is stifled

Journalists covering the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran should be telling their audiences not only what they know but what they were prevented from finding out, and by whom. That doesn’t just mean an occasional editorial bemoaning threats to press freedom. Those are valuable, but on their own, they turn speech suppression into a side issue. The reporting itself should include acknowledgment and explanation of how censorship impacts what the public sees and reads.

The censorship infrastructure surrounding this war is extraordinary. On the American side, self-proclaimed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has virtually eliminated press access to the military and limited press credentialing to journalists who pledge to remain official stenographers. As a result of his policy, the press corps covering the Pentagon is composed of Trump-aligned outlets like One America News, Turning Point USA’s Frontlines, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service.

It’s arguably not the worst outcome for serious reporters to get their time back so they can dig through public records instead of listening to Hegseth’s lies and weird pep talks. But if they try, they’re sure to run into problems caused by the Trump administration’s widespread gutting of public records and transparency mechanisms, elimination of government websites, and blatant noncompliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

Some of the same outlets excluded from the Pentagon are likely to face harassment from Brendan Carr’s Federal Communications Commission and others within the administration eager to use their leverage over corporate transactions to deter criticism.

The administration’s war on leaks is sure to accelerate as whistleblowers seek to expose the embarrassing mistakes and awful human rights abuses that the war is almost certain to bring. After the raid of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home over her source’s alleged Espionage Act violations, further intrusions on newsgathering seem inevitable. Trump has reportedly been looking for an opportunity to take it one step further and prosecute a journalist under the same archaic law.

The congressional subpoena of journalist Seth Harp, for identifying a military official leading Trump’s attack on Venezuela, likely foreshadows what’s to come for journalists who publish news the administration seeks to conceal about the war.

The administration’s efforts to distort the concept of “doxxing” to criminalize reporting on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abduction spree may prove to have been a practice run for tactics to silence war correspondents. President Donald Trump has claimed that kitchen cabinets threaten national security during peacetime — imagine what he’ll say about investigative journalism while at war.

Attacks that don’t silence critics directly are apt to lead to self-censorship. Sources won’t come forward at risk of federal investigation. Corporate news moguls will tone down their coverage to avoid government threats to their more lucrative holdings. Smaller outlets and independent journalists will hesitate to risk incurring life-altering legal fees.

Sure, some journalists and whistleblowers are courageous enough to risk everything to tell the truth, but we shouldn’t be dependent on heroism for uncensored reporting.

On the Israeli side, the censorship is often even more direct. Israel’s military censor, which reportedly banned publication of 1,635 articles and partially censored another 6,265 in 2024, will be back at it — likely emboldened by U.S. backsliding under Trump. Journalists who disobey the censor — which also prohibits them from reporting they’ve been silenced — risk arrest.

Stories that aren’t killed by the censor are deterred with the threat of being blown to bits. Israel has systematically targeted news outlets and individual journalists in Gaza, as well as Iran. There’s no reason to assume Iran will be any different — an Iranian state media complex has reportedly already been bombed. Add to that the “accidental” killings of journalists resulting from unwillingness to take basic measures to protect civilians.

And then there’s Iran itself, which, to paraphrase Hegseth, didn’t start this war but is sure going to censor it. The remnants of the regime are likely to lash out to violently stifle all sorts of dissent, including journalism that doesn’t parrot their narratives.

Iran — which ranked 176th out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ global Press Freedom Index last year — is intolerant of adversarial journalism during peacetime and will surely escalate censorship now, as we saw during the Israel-Iran war last year.

Since the start of the current war, Iran has already blacked out phone and internet access, as it did during its horrifically violent suppression of January’s uprisings. It will almost certainly continue to do so, thereby severely limiting the information that comes out of the war’s primary battleground, and leaving journalists and news consumers to gauge the credibility of competing government narratives.

None of this is unprecedented in isolation — the George W. Bush administration used highly restricted embed access in Iraq as a propaganda tool, subpoenaed reporters, and floated prosecuting them under the Espionage Act. The Obama administration pursued more Espionage Act cases against whistleblowers than all prior administrations combined. The Biden administration extracted a plea deal from Julian Assange over WikiLeaks’ exposure of Iraq war crimes. But all of that is going to be on steroids now, in terms of both scale and brazenness.

Journalists will find a way to report the news and investigate government abuses and lies, despite it all. Lawyers and activists will do what they can to help. But it’s unrealistic to expect reporters to overcome this multipronged attack entirely.

What they can and should do, even if it feels awkward, is let the public in on the obstacles they are dealing with and how the lack of reliable information during modern conflicts harms us all, allowing politicians to lie their way into wars that enrich their friends while killing schoolchildren.

If reporters are going to quote Pentagon spokespeople or news releases, the public deserves to know who the reporter was not allowed to interview and what documents they were not permitted to review. It’s vital context without which the reporting is arguably misleading. And reporters from the U.S. — which is somehow still the least censored of the three main parties to this war — may be the only ones who can provide it.

It might not fix the secrecy surrounding this war, but it could lead to greater demand for transparency and greater skepticism of official narratives in the run-up to the next “forever war.” Maybe it could even help avoid the next one altogether.