We are lucky the news still tells us what happened.
Who, where, when. But if you stop there, you are missing the game. There is no major outlet that is not owned or shaped by billionaires, and that reality leaks into coverage whether they admit it or not. Luckily the red flags are not hard to see.
Once you see what is missing as much as what is printed, the story changes fast.
So Associated Press covers a rally for Iranian self determination and calls it an “anti Iran” demonstration.
That was the first thing that caught my eye.
Anti Iran. Like people woke up and said, yeah, screw the country, the food, the culture, the people. That is not what happened. That is like calling someone anti American because they are against the CIA flipping governments. Lazy at best. Dishonest at worst.
AP isn't lazy.
What the protesters were actually saying is simple.
Iran is not broken because Iranians cannot govern themselves. It is broken because outside powers keep putting their thumb on the scale and then acting shocked when the whole thing tips over.
Foreign interference wrecks democracy. It ends badly every time.
Then the article hands you this cute little history snack about 1953. Just a nod. Cold War fears. Communists. Ooo scary.
Meanwhile the real story is that Iran had a democratically chosen prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalized oil so his own country could benefit from it. Britain and the US lost money, panicked, and engineered a coup. They paid people to riot, ran propaganda, destabilized the country, and installed a dictator.
That is not a theory. It is in declassified documents.
But the article smooths that over like an unfortunate misunderstanding. Oops. History happens.
That framing matters, because if you pretend the US just stumbled into Iran by accident, then every future intervention can be sold as stability, humanitarian concern, or protecting civilians. Same pitch, different decade.
Finally, you zoom in on the most chaotic moment of the rally. Yelling. A truck. Confusion. Suddenly the whole protest looks unhinged.
Now the crowd is the problem. Not the history. Not the pattern. Not the fact that we keep lighting fires and blaming the smoke on the locals.
No lies. Just selective facts, bad labels, and a tone that quietly tells you who to side with.
And somehow, once again, it is never the people with the power.