Torsten MAYER-ROTHBARTH

Creative Director

When the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February, killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, senior military commanders and an unknown number of civilians – hitting hospitals, schools and cultural heritage sites – the question that organised much of Western coverage was: what happens to oil prices?

It is worth sitting with that for a moment.

Iranians had already suffered a US-Israeli bombing campaign last June, leading the regime to harden even further. Thousands of Iranians had died in January, shot in the head and torso by their own government during the largest protests since the 1979 revolution. Now, the current military campaign is adding to that death toll, striking the infrastructure ordinary Iranians depend on and erasing the country’s leadership in a matter of days. And the frame through which much mainstream media, certainly in the US, chose to process this was: will my commute get more expensive? Can I still afford to take a plane for my holidays? How expensive will our heating become?

This is not a failure of individual journalists. It is a structural problem – a way of packaging the world that places Western consumer comfort at the centre of every story and measures all other human experience by how much it disturbs that centre. And oftentimes, it reflects media moguls’, businesses and politics’ interest in avoiding the fundamental questions about what holds our world together.

We have seen this pattern everywhere. In Gaza, where the humanitarian catastrophe is filtered through the lens of regional stability and arms supply negotiations. Across the African continent, where conflicts and famines surface in Western coverage primarily when they threaten commodity supply – but where we remain largely indifferent to the daily cost of the economic arrangements we benefit from. In South America, where decades of political interference, resource extraction and debt structures engineered in Washington and Brussels have produced the instability we then report on with bewilderment, as if the causes were local and the consequences ours to manage.

The suffering itself is rarely the story. The disruption to us is the story.

This framing is not neutral. It trains entire populations to see themselves as the injured party – inconvenienced consumers rather than participants in a system that structurally depends on inequality to function. The $2 shirt, the cheap oil, the uninterrupted shipping lanes: these are not natural conditions. They are the product of arrangements that cost other people enormously, and which history has already judged more than once.

We know this. The colonial era taught us where that logic ends. The last century taught us what happens when democracies look away from inconvenient truths long enough. We are not without precedent, and we are not without warning.

Here is what is also true: the democratic societies of the United States and Europe are not finished projects. They are, at their best, experiments in collective self-correction – systems designed, however imperfectly, to absorb criticism, acknowledge failure and course-correct. That capacity is precisely what is at stake when the media frames the world mostly through the lens of our convenience.

If we want those societies to continue developing – to grow more just, more resilient, more worthy of the values we claim – then we need journalism that helps us see the whole picture. Not because the suffering of Iranians or Congolese or Venezuelans should move us only when it threatens our gas prices, but because that suffering is connected to choices we make, policies we fund and supply chains we depend on. Acknowledging that connection is not self-flagellation. It is the beginning of informed citizenship.

The discussion can change. It has changed before, when enough people demanded a different frame. The abolition of the slave trade in the US did not begin in parliaments – it began when enough people insisted on seeing the full picture of what their economic comfort required. The same logic applies now, at a different scale and speed.

We can talk about Iran without leading with the Strait of Hormuz. We can talk about Central Africa without waiting for commodity prices to spike. We can talk about South America as a region with its own political agency, its own history, its own future – not merely as a source of instability that occasionally washes up on our shores as a migration crisis.

None of this requires less journalism. It requires better journalism – journalism that treats the world’s people as protagonists of their own stories, not as background noise in ours. The inconvenience is not ours. The question is whether we are willing to see whose it actually is – and what that knowledge asks of.

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Given its quality and pertinence, we are publishing here an unsolicited reader’s contribution.

Photo credits: Shutterstock/Steve Travelguide