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Before all the images of smoldering cities, of hooded men tortured and beaten, and of bloodied bodies lying in the dust, there was Colin Powell holding up a vial.
On February 5, 2003, the then-U.S. secretary of state appeared before the United Nations Security Council and made a case for war with Iraq. Powell claimed that U.S. intelligence had shown that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax; Powell brought a small vial to illustrate how just one teaspoon of the biological agent could kill. Later — after the U.S had invaded Iraq, toppled the Hussein regime, contributed to the deaths of at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians, and failed to find any weapons of mass destruction — Powell admitted to regretting his UN speech. But the photos of that pivotal moment have lived on, a prime example of how U.S. leadership misled the public to galvanize support for an unjust war.
Now, the government doesn’t even attempt such pretense. On June 21, Donald Trump unilaterally authorized direct strikes on Iran. The White House didn’t spend months leveraging its influence over mainstream media to whip public sentiment into a war-hungry frenzy. It didn’t need to. That’s because we’re living in a new paradigm, one in which the government and media’s consent manufacturing apparatus has been eclipsed by something far more powerful: brute force.
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In 2003, the majority of Americans supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Most also believed the faulty intelligence reports, heavily amplified by mainstream media, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, prior to Trump’s June 21 bombardment, 60 percent of Americans did not want the U.S. to directly partake in a military offensive in Iran. As the headline of one Current Affairs piece put it, “The War Hawks Aren’t Even Trying To Persuade Us Anymore.”
Of course, the abruptness of the Iran strikes were in large part enabled by the past two decades of propaganda, in which mainstream media cast the Middle East as a two-dimensional region of violence and chaos, with Iran in particular painted as uniquely evil. In doing so, corporate news outlets helped to manufacture consent for the U.S.’s forever wars, as well as Trump’s recent attack on Iran.
US spies have assessed that Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapon for over 20 years.
Noam Chomsky, who helped popularize the theory of manufactured consent, touched on how mainstream media has long portrayed Iran as the U.S.’s bogeyman, telling The Nation in a 2019 interview:
The media almost reflexively adopt the basic framework of state doctrine.… According to state propaganda, Iran is the guilty party. The United States has to decide whether and how to respond to Iran’s provocations and general malice. The liberal media, in their most critical stance, frame it differently — both sides are increasing tensions.
What the events of the past week have underscored, however, is that this one-sided framework, in which news coverage adopts the state’s talking points, doesn’t adequately capture the complexity of our current political and media landscape.
According to reporting by The New York Times, Trump closely monitored social media sentiment and Fox News broadcasts before authorizing the U.S. strikes, with advisers lamenting to the Times that the right-wing channel’s unqualified praise of the Israeli military operation and stream of war-hungry guests were showing Trump only one side of the debate. The president also reportedly asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were “playing” in the media.
Notably, TV hits are not reliable gauges of public sentiment, and they are not interchangeable with actual opinion polls. But Trump, a former reality TV star, understands how to harness the power of the media spectacle. He is, above all, a great showman. That TV ratings could have played even a marginal role in Trump’s choice to engage in a direct act of war with Iran is a staggering deviation from the previous playbook of executive power. It shows just how powerful the oligarch-owned media apparatus has become.
But a discussion of TV ratings fails to capture how mass media flexes its true power in 2025 — it’s no longer just about the ratings, but about how broadcast clips are circulated and amplified on social media. The internet makes the news instantaneous, omnipresent, and relentless. Trump knows this, and so he’s taken another unique approach: posting as diplomacy. On Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, Trump has narrated U.S. attacks and foreign policy positions in real time. Rather than announcing major policy decisions in press releases or media briefings, he posted them on Truth Social: announcing the “very successful attack” on Iranian nuclear sites, declaring a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, ordering Israel to stop launching missiles, and floating the possibility of regime change in Iran (before later walking back his statements to reporters).
That TV ratings could have played even a marginal role in Trump’s choice to engage in a direct act of war with Iran is a staggering deviation from the previous playbook of executive power.
Nine years ago, during Trump’s first term, these types of posts — back then, posted on Twitter — were often written off as the hubristic ramblings of a capricious man. They might be. But it’s also clear that Trump’s direct-to-consumer style is feeding a larger spectacle, crafting an illusion of dialogue between himself and his supporters, and fueling his image as a man with unparalleled control over the levers of global power.
Trump doesn’t need to go through the “official” channels to drum up support for a war; his strategy is to act first, in whatever way he wants, then address his audience directly to mold their perception of events in real time. In the constant news cycle, attention is power, and Trump is indisputably good at capturing it.
That’s not to say that the framework of manufacturing consent — the idea that the state and corporate media work together to advance elite interests through subtle messaging, at the expense of the working class — is no longer useful. It still helps us understand much of the mainstream media’s biased approach when covering Trump’s attack on Iran. A perfectly revealing moment arrived Tuesday morning, when Trump spoke with reporters on the White House lawn.
“Israel says that Iran violated the peace agreement, the ceasefire agreement. Do you believe that Iran is still committed to peace?” ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott asked the president — a leading question that framed Iran as the sole aggressor.
Astoundingly, Trump didn’t take the bait.
“Yeah, I do. They violated it but Israel violated it, too,” he said. “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and dropped a load of bombs the likes of which I’d never seen before. The biggest load that we’ve seen. I’m not happy with Israel.”
Trump’s response was perhaps the most direct rebuke of Israel we’ve seen from a sitting president in years.
Is Trump’s unhappiness enough, though, to change his foreign policy approach? Will the U.S. stop arming Israel and cease funneling funds to its destructive rampage in Gaza and beyond? Or is this just another Trumpian spectacle — a display of disapproval for the watching public, unmoored from life on the ground?
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