The one-dimensional portrayal of Iran and its impact on the war

🎥 As we move into week two of the war on Iran and get into the mechanical reporting of new missile attacks and mounting death tolls, it’s sometimes easy to forget the suffering of a population that in many respects resembles our own. Iran is a rich, vibrant, resilient, and diverse country that has been choked by 45 years of sanctions and defined by the acts of its authoritarian regime.

In an interview with EnterpriseAM, Iranian journalist and Columbia University media studies scholar Kourosh Ziabari discusses the profound shifts in Iranian society, the media's portrayal of Iran and the current conflict, and the enduring resilience of Iran’s civil society.

Speaking to us from New York as the US-Israeli war on Iran entered its fifth day, Ziabari argued that the “one-dimensional” portrayal of his home country by Western, and often regional, media outlets has misinformed the public and effectively dehumanized a nation of 90 mn people, paving the way for the bombs now falling on Tehran.

Challenging the ‘robotic narrative’

Ziabari, who grew up in Iran before moving to the US in 2022, contends that the West’s perception of Iran is trapped in a narrow loop of security-centric talking points. “All we hear is: nuclear, proxies, and missiles,” Ziabari tells EnterpriseAM. This reductionist framing, he argues, intentionally ignores the elements of life that define the Iranian experience, such as art, food, culture, and music.

By stripping away the domestic reality of Iran — its vibrant student movements, its scientific achievements, and its everyday civil society — the media creates a vacuum where only the state exists. “When a country is reduced to its leadership or its military capabilities, the indiscriminate suffering of its civilians becomes far easier for a foreign public to rationalize,” explains Ziabari.

The reality on the ground is very different. “After the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, activists actually transformed life in Iran in a very tangible way that we had never seen before. They defied the government and convinced the administration of President Pezeshkian to refuse to pass into law the legislation intensifying the hijab restrictions after the killing of Mahsa Amini. Step by step, Iranian civil society made gains, set new benchmarks, and achieved new milestones,” explains Ziabari.

Tehran Design Week, held in November 2025, is a case in point. The event, which brought together product design, fashion, graphics, and contemporary crafts in the Iranian capital, was by all accounts a staggering show of creativity, representative of a new Iran led by fearless young people who are breaking taboos. And it’s not just design week; it’s concerts, jazz festivals, fashion shows, and even raves that are being depicted on Iranian Instagram accounts. In a rare article on the changing face of Iranian society. The New York Times called it “grassroots change from a new generation of Iranians who connected to the outside world through social media.”

Fast forward to war

“Iranian civil society has always found ways of reasserting itself and manifesting its ingenuity, but all of this has been undone. It has unraveled overnight because you have an active war situation in which many of these new venues that people were posting about, along with Unesco heritage sites, have been destroyed. Coffee shops, bookshops, Enqelab Square, where there is a huge cultural center opposite Tehran University, have all been severely impacted.”

Ziabari describes the current situation as one of the most challenging periods of his life. The personal toll is intensified by the difficulty of maintaining contact with family in Rasht due to severe internet restrictions.

“Observing this much civilian suffering is not something I can come to terms with,” Ziabari says, noting that his concern extends to all victims of injustice, from Ukraine to Gaza. He critiques the current geopolitical discourse, suggesting that lofty academic ideals of objectivity, democracy, and international law “have been pretty much buried.”

A country is being carpet-bombed, and thousands of civilians are being killed. “Unfortunately, even when civilian suffering is on full display, when the indiscriminate illegal nature of this war is clearly recognizable to everyone, we are still seeing that there are voices actively trying to rationalize and sugarcoat, invoking euphemisms to say that it's not a war, it's a military operation.

On the diaspora celebrations of war

“Clearly there are [mns] of Iranians who are in favor of a democratic change and a transition away from the Islamic Republic, but I don't believe that they ever asked foreign powers to come and intervene. We cannot export democracy to countries which we do not understand or for whose culture we do not have any appreciation,” Ziabari said. He also cautions against giving too much weight to the diaspora monarchists. “They are the ones who have been actively campaigning for not just war, but before that for sanctions, for pretty much the immiseration of Iran because they are not the ones who are ultimately impacted and affected.”

The path forward

For Ziabari, the path forward requires the media to stop being “stereotypical” and to start portraying Iran “for its good, bad, and ugly.” He argues that more nuanced, multi-dimensional coverage would highlight the resilience of a civil society that is capable of driving its own change without “foreign recipes.”