BBC headlines continue to trigger outrage from social media users, with the latest being one that accompanied a report on a US mis*ile strike that hit a family home in Kuhestak, southern Iran that k*lled four people, including a child, at a wedding celebration.
Inverting the aggressor and the victim, the BBC’s headline read: “Iran attacks US targets in Middle East after four reportedly killed at wedding celebration.”
Anti-imperialist commentators dismantled the deceptive narrative structures employed, highlighting how the BBC’s obscuring of the perpetrator of the wedding bombing resulted in framing that implicitly casts Iran as the primary aggressor, while masking a fatal American attack behind passive voice and deflection.
“How the BBC reports the US bombing a wedding in Iran,” wrote rapper and journalist Lowkey, in an X post that generated over 6,000 shares.
“Pay attention to how propaganda is constructed,” wrote Alan MacLeod, a senior staff writer at MintPress.
“The US just deliberately bombed an Iranian wedding party, but somehow the BBC has managed to make Iran sound like the aggressor,” he added.
Other social media users widened their criticisms to condemn the BBC as an institution.
“The BBC is completely owned by Isr*el,” alleged @Fx1Jonny.
Accusing the mainstream media of being participants in the G*za gnocide and the illegal war against Iran, user @SiennaSnowQueen called out the framing tactics of legacy journalists who “haven’t woken up to the fact that people see [their] tricks”.
This is why a more appropriate headline would be: “Four k*lled by US bombing of wedding celebration in Iran”
