There was a good article in the Telegraph on why the BBC was so restrained in its coverage until people started highlighting the issue. Ive copied and pasted below. It sums up the reality of the situation.
It has been the silence which has been so telling as hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in Iran to oppose one of the most dangerous and deadly dictatorships on earth.
While brave Iranian people have come out to revolt against the misogynistic theocratic leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – leading to dozens being killed and thousands being arrested – the usual suspects who will protest every time an IDF soldier or a Trump official sneezes, have kept schtum.
Greta Thunberg hasn’t mentioned getting on a boat. Jeremy Corbyn has instead been tweeting manically about America’s “invasion” of Venezuela. Perhaps they are confused. The Iranians shouting “Azadi, azadi, azadi”, translating as “Freedom, freedom, freedom”, want an end to the terrorist-supporting theocracy they appear to adore and want the Western freedoms they abhor.
It seems like they cannot understand these people rejecting jihadist Islam. The demonstrators of Iran, who have had more than their fill of Islamic “decolonisation”, upend this entire worldview.
Mirroring the silence of our keffiyeh-wearing faux-freedom fighters is the sad fact that it took the BBC over a week to put the story of the new revolution in Iran onto its home page – the publicly funded, most-read news website in the country. It is, thankfully, there now.
Writing on X about why the BBC has barely mentioned this uprising that has been going on for nearly two weeks, the BBC’s veteran World Affairs editor John Simpson put this down to how it was “very difficult to get correspondents in. The BBC is banned, and so are most others. It’s a bit like Gaza.”
This, of course, prompted much hilarity as the BBC quoted every cough and spit from Hamas when it came to its Gaza reporting. As Michael Prescott’s memo, first reported in The Telegraph, found: “Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.”
In contrast, even though the BBC has a Persian service which has been verifying footage coming out of Iran – and putting this on the individual accounts of the reporters – it was only on Thursday night, after celebrities such as JK Rowling started tweeting about the bravery of the Iranians, that the footage finally made it onto the BBC website’s homepage.
Before, you had to actively search hard to find anything about the Iranian demonstrations on the BBC.
This is about priorities and mindset: three months after there was a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel, the “tab” for the Israel-Gaza war is third on the BBC website – ahead of news from the UK, the War in Ukraine, the Rest of the World and Politics.
Some might argue that Iran is yet another Middle Eastern country blowing up. But Iran is a big deal and if this new revolution – or anti-revolution – continues, it impacts all of us.
Iran is sometimes called “the head of the Octopus” because of all the places where it has tentacles in its open war against the West since Ayatollah Khomeini took control in 1979. It links the Israel-Palestine conflict, via its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah; to Venezuela, through which it gets both drugs and weapons to fund its terrorist groups; to the attacks on British shipping by another proxy, the Houthis; to the Russian war on Ukraine, which it supplies weapons for.
Iran also has a big impact on Britain itself: last July, Parliament’s intelligence and security committee warned that the UK faced a “rising” and unpredictable threat from the country.
Last year, security minister Dan Jarvis revealed that since 2022 MI5 have uncovered at least 20 assassination plots linked to the Islamic Republic against British nationals and residents. There have been multiple stories about pro-Iranian camps radicalising children in the UK.
Iran, which has killed young women for showing too much hair, has shown us the danger of extremist Islam and has attempted to export it here. Some might say it has already succeeded.
The Iranian regime has currently attempted to shut down the internet and, in the next few days, there will be more bloodshed on the streets as the Ayatollah desperately attempts to cling to power, and Crown Prince Raza Pahlavi, potentially a leader in waiting, encourages more demonstrations.
The usual suspects might be confused about whose side they are meant to be on, but I am not. Azadi for the people of Iran. Azadi for us too.