Legitimacy, Threat, and Victimhood: Comparative News Framing of the 2026 US–Israel War Campaign against Iran in Western and Middle Eastern Media

Abstract

For decades, there has been an argument among analysts that the discourse of Western foreign policy has frequently posited military action against hostile states as a means to achieve stability in the Middle East. In early 2026, as the US-Israel military campaign against Iran escalated, there were conflicting claims on the legality and justification of the war. Opponents have claimed that the campaign is a breach of international law, while proponents refer to the UN Security Council resolutions on nuclear non-proliferation. Also, academic and media analysts have reported trends in Western media reporting, which, as they see it, are biased toward official sources and underreport civilian deaths, and which they refer to as structural bias instead of intentional malpractice (African News Agency, 2026). They are performing beyond the coverage of the war, as they have seemingly been part of the making of its excuses, laundering its legality and whitewashing its human price. The United States and Israel coordinated air and missile attacks on Iran on 28 February 2026, targeting the military, nuclear, and strategic command centres. One of the first attacks killed the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Al Jazeera, 2026). In just a few hours, a US Tomahawk cruise missile hit the elementary school of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls in Minab city, Hormozgan Province, during school time. More than 175 people were killed in the explosion, and almost all of them were schoolgirls between seven and twelve years old (The Guardian, 2026; Wion, 2026).
The Minab school incident which the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described as a war crime and crime against humanity had been covered differently by the media. The New York Times published a report headlined ‘Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid US Strikes on Iranian Naval Base’ (Wion, 2026), and linguistic analysis indicates that this headline uses passive constructions and attributes agency to the analysis as against the military men on the field. These framing decisions align with larger trends in media studies, where reporting on civilian casualties of allied or Western military strikes are more likely to adopt passive voice or nominalization than reporting on casualties caused by adversary actions. However, scholars are skeptical about whether this is a conscious bias, institutional habit, or a compliance with sourcing conventions. The overarching concern of this research is anchored on how the Western and Middle East news media differently frame the US-Israel war against Iran to justify military intervention, frame threat perception, and establish victimhood. To realise the objective, the study compares critical discourse analysis of the coverage of six outlets over three months of the initial period of the campaign. The theoretical framework combines the framing theory by Entman (1993) as the main analytical lens with strategic narrative theory as a supportive framework, which will be operationalised using the legitimation strategies proposed by van Leeuwen (2008).
Notably, the second section of this paper is an overview of framing theory and strategic narrative theory as mutually reinforcing analytical approaches, including the limitations of each and the importance of their combination. Section three describes the methodology, such as the case selection, the sampling strategy, and the four-step analytic framework. The fourth section includes the comparative analysis of the three thematic dimensions of legitimacy construction, threat framing, and victimhood attribution. Section five presents findings in the context of existing media and war literature, specifically the propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky (1988), the idea of grievable life by Butler (2009), and Orientalism by Said (1978). Section six draws conclusions regarding journalism ethics, audience reception, and future research.