Part I: The Ethics of the Frame
Nauseating and disgusting are too weak to describe my reaction to Democracy Now!’s recent reporting on Iran.
Strong language demands strong evidence. This essay is an attempt to provide it. I write it reluctantly. It is, however, long overdue.
For decades, I regarded Democracy Now! as one of the few American news organizations willing to ask difficult questions when others preferred comfortable narratives. It earned that reputation by scrutinizing wars sold on false pretences, exposing the abuses of powerful governments, and giving voice to those ignored by much of the mainstream press. Whether one agreed with its politics or not, its reporting reflected something increasingly rare: a willingness to distrust official narratives.
That is precisely why this broadcast disturbed me. Not as an isolated lapse, but as part of a gradual decline that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
This is not an essay about one program, nor is it an attack on Amy Goodman or her team. Democracy Now! is the case study through which I want to examine a much larger problem, from the perspective of someone who has spent years living with the consequences of the Islamic Republic rather than merely analysing it.
For years, I have worked alongside the families of Flight PS752 victims. I have witnessed a regime that imprisons journalists, executes protesters, persecutes women, exports violence and intimidation beyond its borders, and repeatedly transforms human tragedy into political theatre. I have also experienced, in a far milder form than countless Iranians, what it means to become the object of persecution by that machinery.
I remained engaged with the society it was reshaping while resisting ideological capture. That distance helped shape my perspective as a filmmaker trying to understand power rather than serve it.
As a filmmaker, I have spent much of my professional life thinking about something journalists rarely discuss openly: the frame.
Every film begins with a decision about where to place the camera. Every cut excludes another possibility. Before a question is asked, an editor has already decided where the audience will enter reality.
Meaning is not created merely by what appears on screen. It emerges through framing and editing. Move one scene earlier. Delay another. Hold a shot longer. Remove a reaction. Change the order in which information reaches the audience. Without altering a single fact, the meaning changes entirely.
Journalism operates under a similar discipline. Editors make decisions audiences never see: where to begin, what to omit, which interview to air first, which image to linger on, which claim demands challenge, and which passes without interruption. None of those decisions alters a single fact. Together, they determine the story those facts appear to tell.
Facts do not arrange themselves into truth. Editors arrange them in pursuit of truth. The ethical challenge is not just deciding what is true. It is deciding what deserves emphasis, what requires context, what must be challenged, and what cannot responsibly be left outside the frame.
That is why the Democracy Now! broadcast unsettled me so profoundly. Nothing essential in it was fabricated. That is precisely the problem.
The distortion did not arise from falsehood. Nothing has been invented. Only assembled differently. It arose in the edit: in the arrangement of facts, the realities left outside the frame, and the weight assigned to one truth over another. Its moral foundation had been stretched so thin that it became transparent to those who understood what was missing.
The broadcast opened by telling viewers that “millions” of Iranians had attended Khamenei’s funeral. That was not the only defensible way to report the event. Associated Press described the Tehran procession as attracting hundreds of thousands of mourners. Reuters, while describing the ceremonies as massive, consistently avoided endorsing multi-million attendance figures, instead reporting hundreds of thousands visible in aerial footage and cautioning readers against treating turnout as evidence of political legitimacy. Democracy Now! chose the regime’s preferred characterization of the turnout despite the existence of more cautious reporting by major independent news agencies. That editorial choice deserves scrutiny.
Millions attended Mussolini’s rallies. Millions filled Nuremberg. Millions mourned Stalin. Millions marched for Mao. Millions fought to preserve slavery during the American Civil War. None of those crowds settled the moral question.
Crowds establish attendance. They do not establish legitimacy, morality, or historical truth. Nor does a frame filled with people explain the process that placed them there. Journalism begins where counting ends. The real question is: What machinery of power produced the spectacle?
Funerals, rigged elections with pre-approved candidates, military parades, choreographed ceremonies, and endless images dressed to look like national unity are not merely political events. They are instruments through which power presents itself as natural, inevitable, and legitimate.
Every dictatorship eventually learns to direct. It casts its heroes, choreographs its crowds, and decides who never enters the scene. It chooses the stage, controls access, choreographs movement, determines who may speak and, most importantly, decides what remains outside the frame. Independent journalism should resist that choreography rather than merely document it.
Instead, I watched a broadcast that seemed content to describe the performance while asking remarkably few questions about the production behind it. The crowd became the story. The stage remained almost entirely unexplored. That omission was an editorial decision.
If the purpose was only to reinforce Democracy Now!’s familiar critique of American foreign policy, it was intellectually shallow. If it reflected a deeper editorial worldview, it was far more troubling. Either way, the people of Iran became secondary to the narrative.
That was when I realized my disagreement with Democracy Now! had very little to do with politics. It had everything to do with journalism, its ethics and its principles.
That is where this investigation begins.
Part II: The Funeral Becomes the Story
Every broadcast begins with an editorial decision. Long before the first question is asked, someone has decided where the audience will enter the story.
Democracy Now! chose the funeral.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about that. Khamenei’s death would naturally dominate international news. His funeral, attended by vast crowds, was unquestionably newsworthy. Any serious newsroom would cover it.
Viewers were introduced to millions of mourners, emotional interviews, descriptions of national unity, and repeated references to anti-imperialist sentiment. The spectacle unfolded almost uninterrupted. Every image carried the appearance of spontaneous history. Almost none of it appeared as political production. Only much later did the broadcast briefly acknowledge the machinery of repression that had helped make such a spectacle possible.
That sequence matters. It establishes the audience’s emotional orientation before the first critical question is raised. Viewers are invited to witness grief before they are invited to understand the object of that grief. The edit carried a deceptive simplicity: American imperial power killed the ayatollah, and millions gathered in solidarity with his anti-imperialist leadership. That narrative fits neatly within Democracy Now!’s established ideological preoccupations. It also pushes millions of Iranians who have struggled for democracy for decades to the margins of their own story.
Suppose a broadcaster opened with millions attending Augusto Pinochet’s funeral, Slobodan Milošević’s funeral, or Nicolae Ceaușescu’s had he died in office. Imagine lingering on mourners, flags, solemn ceremonies, and emotional interviews before explaining who these men were or what their governments had inflicted upon their own people. Then imagine introducing their victims only as an afterthought, interpreted through the claims of the regimes that persecuted them.
Many tyrants, from Idi Amin to Ayatollah Khomeini, professed anti-imperialist positions. Such rhetoric does not absolve tyranny. Yet in this broadcast, it appeared sufficient to suspend the scrutiny Democracy Now! routinely applies elsewhere.
My criticism is not that Democracy Now! fabricated the funeral, invented the crowds, or manufactured the interviews. It is simpler than that. The broadcast devoted extraordinary emotional investment to the ruler’s death and political position while devoting comparatively little to the lives destroyed under his rule. Amy Goodman spoke naturally and humanely about Khamenei’s death and the atmosphere surrounding the funeral. Yet when the discussion eventually reached Iranians killed, imprisoned, and brutalized under his rule, they appeared briefly, almost as qualifying context. Almost as though acknowledging them were sufficient to satisfy the obligation of balance. Viewers were then presented with the regime’s explanation that many protesters had been armed or directed by Israel and the United States, and had attacked police stations and public buildings, without presenting evidence to support the allegation.
The Khamenei supporters filling the frame were treated as expressions of genuine anti-imperialist conviction. The victims whose blood may have stained those same streets were filtered through the regime’s claim that they could have been foreign agents. That inversion is precisely what left me with the reaction I described at the beginning of this essay.
How a journalist reports the death of a tyrant, and how the same journalist reports the fate of the tyrant’s victims, reveals more than political preference. It exposes editorial priorities and the decay beneath them.
Authoritarian regimes understand cameras, symbols, and choreography. They know that images create emotional certainty long before facts receive scrutiny. They also know how to speak in language that resonates abroad: resistance, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, sovereignty. These ideas carry genuine historical and intellectual weight. They also provide authoritarian governments with vocabulary capable of softening the perception of their crimes.
The Islamic Republic understands this audience. It need only offer the familiar language of anti-imperialism, and critical distance begins to collapse. The vocabulary becomes production design. Scrutiny is replaced by recognition.
Once viewers accept spectacle as the natural starting point, everything that follows is interpreted through it. This is not unique to Iran. Every authoritarian system learns to govern through images as much as through institutions. The tragedy is that institutions such as Democracy Now! can become participants in the performance while imagining themselves to be its critics.
The question independent reporting must ask is not, What am I seeing? It is, Why am I being shown this? A camera records only what stands before it. It cannot photograph fear, coercion, or the silence of those already imprisoned. It cannot record the absence of those too frightened to speak. By the time a soft-spoken local correspondent appears on screen, water cannons may have washed blood from the streets and body bags may already be stacked in morgues across the country.
The camera cannot show the mothers whose children were murdered, the dissidents who cannot safely approach a foreign correspondent, or the citizens excluded from an officially sanctioned public event. Those realities do not disappear because they remain outside the frame. They become the journalist’s responsibility.
The Islamic Republic wanted the funeral to become the story. Independent journalism should have made the funeral the evidence.
Part III: The Questions That Were Never Asked
Every interview is also a record of the questions that remained unasked. Journalists are judged by the answers they obtain. They should be judged just as carefully by the questions they never think to ask, because those omissions reveal the assumptions shaping the exchange.
This is where my disappointment in Democracy Now! deepens into disgust.
The correspondent reporting from inside Iran repeatedly described an atmosphere of anti-imperialist conviction, national unity, and devotion to Khamenei. He also portrayed the atmosphere of solidarity among regime supporters who as he put it, “were not paid to attend”. There is nothing inherently objectionable about reporting those observations. They may accurately reflect the people standing within his chosen frame.
The question is whether they accurately reflected Iran. Those are very different propositions.
At no point were viewers clearly told that these images existed within one of the most tightly controlled political environments in the world. Reporting from inside the Islamic Republic is not equivalent to reporting from London, Toronto, or New York. Access is negotiated. Movement is constrained. Certain interviews become impossible. Some neighbourhoods cannot simply be visited. Political prisoners cannot be interviewed. Families under surveillance cannot safely speak. Those who have suffered the worst abuses are often the people a correspondent cannot freely approach.
None of this invalidates the reporting. It defines it. Concealing or neglecting those constraints damages its credibility. For viewers familiar with the realities of reporting under authoritarian rule, the fact that Democracy Now! may even operate with less state scrutiny raises obvious questions.
Transparency matters because audiences deserve to understand the limits within which the reporting was produced. Those limits do not invalidate the journalism. They are part of its context. Supporters of Democracy Now! deserve to know the conditions under which reporting from Iran is produced. The lens is not the problem. The edit is. The illusion that it has shown us the whole country is.
As a filmmaker, I know that every frame excludes more than it contains. The edge of the image is never the edge of reality. Everything outside it continues to exist. Every honest documentary eventually confronts the limits of its own frame. Journalism bears an even heavier obligation to do the same. One exists within the managed boundaries of state tolerance. The other begins where those boundaries end.
Then came the moment that disturbed me most. When the discussion finally turned to the protests that have shaken Iran over several decades, viewers heard the Islamic Republic’s claim that many protesters had been armed, funded, or directed by Israel and the United States, and encouraged to attack police stations and public buildings. That claim demanded immediate scrutiny. It received little.
No obvious follow-up asked what evidence supported it. No reference was made to findings by international human-rights organizations documenting the overwhelming use of lethal force against vast civilian demonstrations. No distinction was drawn between isolated incidents of violence and the regime’s much broader assertion that popular dissent itself was a foreign conspiracy. Nor were viewers shown the disturbing images that emerged after extended internet blackouts.
The claim entered the broadcast. Skepticism did not.
This is where the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore. I have watched Democracy Now! challenge American, Israeli, and other Western officials with relentless skepticism, nuance, and sophistication. It built its reputation by treating official narratives as hypotheses rather than conclusions. It suggested a much larger failure: the suffering of Iranians had become subordinate to an outdated anti-imperialist reflex rooted more in the politics of the 1970s than in a serious engagement with contemporary authoritarianism.
Confronted with one of the world’s most sophisticated and vicious propaganda machines, Democracy Now!’s instinct for skepticism appeared strangely diminished.
Imagine the roles reversed. Imagine Democracy Now! reporting from a Donald Trump rally after political violence in the United States. Imagine a correspondent calmly repeating Trump’s claim that protesters were directed by foreign enemies, offering little challenge, evidence, or context before moving on. By the same logic, January 6 becomes little more than a “love fest.”
Democracy Now! would almost certainly ask: Who says so? What evidence exists? Who disputes the claim? Who benefits from the narrative? Those were precisely the questions missing here.
This is not a demand that Democracy Now! become less skeptical of Washington. It is a demand that it become equally skeptical of Tehran, even when Tehran speaks the language of anti-imperialism. If the program cannot do that, it should confine itself to its quarrel with American power rather than exploiting the Iranian people as faceless supporting characters within it.
Independent journalism cannot distribute skepticism according to ideology. It must apply the same standards regardless of who holds power.
That is the standard Democracy Now! spent decades building its reputation on. It is also the standard by which it must be judged.
The tragedy is not that Democracy Now! criticizes the West. It should. The tragedy is that it conveniently failed to apply the same skepticism to one of the world’s most accomplished authoritarian regimes.
When skepticism becomes selective, reporting begins to resemble ideologically driven advocacy.
Part IV: The Aesthetics of Ideology
The easiest criticism would be that Democracy Now! has become sympathetic to the Islamic Republic. I do not believe that. The problem is more serious. Nor do I believe Amy Goodman or her colleagues admire the regime’s brutality, religious authoritarianism, persecution of women, political executions, or systemic repression. Nothing in their history supports that conclusion.
The failure is subtler, more profound and, for that reason, more dangerous.
Every journalist works within a framework. We all decide, consciously or otherwise, where our skepticism naturally resides. The finest reporting interrogates that instinct. The weakest mistakes it for truth.
For decades, Democracy Now! built its reputation by challenging official narratives of American power. It questioned wars, intelligence agencies, corporate influence, surveillance, torture, and interventionism when many others did not. Much of that work deserves respect. It demonstrated that journalism fulfils its purpose only when it confronts power rather than accommodating it.
When anti-imperialism becomes the primary lens through which every international conflict is interpreted, authoritarian regimes discover something useful. They no longer need to persuade democratic audiences that they are democratic. They need only persuade them that they are resisting Western power.
That substitution changes the moral question from How does this government treat its own people? to How does this government position itself against the West?
The first belongs to human rights. The second belongs to geopolitics. The distortion begins when the second displaces the first. Democracy Now! moves between the two depending on which better serves its ideological purpose. Journalism becomes the façade. Ideology becomes the structure. The result is not propaganda in the conventional sense. It is something more difficult to detect: truthful facts arranged into a misleading reality.
History offers uncomfortable examples. Segments of the democratic Left have repeatedly extended moral sympathy to movements whose hostility toward Western imperialism was mistaken for a commitment to liberation. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba, Ortega’s Nicaragua, and other authoritarian movements attracted admirers who saw anti-imperialist resistance more clearly than domestic repression. Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for Khomeini remains one of the clearest examples of how anti-imperialist expectation can blind otherwise brilliant thinkers to emerging authoritarianism.
Their political systems differed. Their crimes differed. Their histories differed. The pattern did not. Opposition to Western power became evidence of moral legitimacy. It never was.
The Islamic Republic has learned this lesson well. It speaks fluently in the language of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and national sovereignty. Those ideas possess genuine intellectual and historical legitimacy, but they do not become morally virtuous because an authoritarian state invokes them. A regime that imprisons journalists, murders protesters, executes dissidents, terrorizes women, and exports violence does not become progressive because it opposes Washington or fills the streets with crowds.
That is why Democracy Now!’s reporting on Iran is so unsettling. It did not simply report Iran. It appeared, however unintentionally, to accept the regime’s preferred framing while producing an editorial outcome consistent with its own ideological framework.
The protagonist quietly changed. So did the point of view. The story was no longer primarily about millions of Iranians living under authoritarian rule. It became a story about a state resisting external power. The irony is difficult to miss. A news organization that defines itself through opposition to imperial power ends up reproducing one of imperialism’s oldest habits: treating another people primarily as instruments in its own political story.
Colonialism is not only the occupation of territory. It is also the occupation of narrative. It is the habit of interpreting another people’s history primarily through one’s own ideological needs. An anti-colonial worldview can itself become colonial when it strips people of their own agency and recruits them into someone else’s political struggle. That, in my view, is precisely what this reporting does to Iran.
Independent journalism must understand governments, but its first duty is to understand the people governed by them. Governments already possess spokespersons, institutions, budgets, and carefully constructed narratives. Ordinary citizens possess none of these advantages. Power already has a voice. Journalism exists to hear those who do not. That is why it must begin not with ideology, but with curiosity; not with certainty, but with skepticism; not with governments, but with people.
When those priorities are reversed, the frame narrows. The people disappear. Power remains. Journalism may continue reporting accurate facts while telling a fundamentally untrue story.
Part V: Beyond the Frame
There is a reason I approached this broadcast as a filmmaker rather than only as a viewer. For most audiences, a frame is what they see. For those of us who construct images, it is equally defined by what it excludes.
Every shot carries two stories: the one inside the image and the one that has disappeared outside it. Every cut is also an argument. The slightest shift in framing and perspective fundamentally changes the narrative.
The ethics of journalism begin there. Not with ideology, political loyalty, opposition to one government, or sympathy for another, but with the knowledge that every editorial decision enlarges one reality while diminishing another. Every opening paragraph, interview, headline, image, and omission rearranges the audience’s understanding of the world.
That responsibility has never been greater.
Authoritarian regimes no longer depend primarily on censorship. They compete to shape reality itself. They understand that controlling the narrative is often more valuable than controlling territory. If foreign journalists reproduce the spectacle while failing to interrogate its construction, the regime has already secured an important victory.
Not because anyone necessarily lied, but because too few people asked the right questions.
This essay is ultimately not about Democracy Now!. In my view, this organization has abandoned much of the moral discipline that once made it indispensable.
Journalism begins in the edit. Journalism does not exist to authenticate power. It exists to examine it. It does not exist to admire spectacle, but to investigate who built the stage. It cannot explain governments responsibly before it understands the lives of the people governed by them. The first question should therefore never be, What does the state want us to see? It should always be, Who is missing from the frame?
Beyond the edge of the frame stand the mother whose son never came home, the father wandering through morgues unzipping body bags in search of his son’s remains, the political prisoner whose voice cannot safely be recorded, the journalist who cannot ask the question, and the young woman whose name survives only because someone refused to let it disappear.
Those are the people journalism was created to serve.
When the powerful become more visible than the powerless, reporting drifts from its purpose. When governments occupy more space than citizens, the frame becomes too small. When an audience leaves knowing more about the funeral of a ruler than the lives of those who struggled beneath his rule, something essential has been lost.
I began by saying that Democracy Now! left me nauseated and disgusted. I end with disappointment, because the kind of journalism it once represented remains necessary, perhaps more necessary today than ever.
But that journalism cannot ask difficult questions only of governments it already understands and distrusts. It must seek difficult answers from unfamiliar powers as well. A regime may appear seductively persuasive through the language it uses abroad while reproducing the same patronizing and exploitative machinery it claims to oppose.
If Democracy Now! is what it claims to be, its first loyalty cannot be to ideology or geopolitics. It must be to the truth, however inconvenient, and to the people whose lives depend on it.
The frame will never contain the whole truth. Journalism’s responsibility is to keep widening it until those pushed outside can finally be seen.
Babak Payami
July 8, 2026