NBC and CBS Sold You a Funeral for 20 Million Mourners. They Left Out the 5 People Israel Just Killed in Lebanon.
15-20M expected mourners in TehranBiggest state funeral in Iran's history5 killed in Lebanon, last 2 daysAl Jazeera named the strikes in its own headlineOwner: Comcast
๐Decoded
Fifteen to twenty million mourners. A ten-kilometer procession. The biggest funeral in the history of the Islamic Republic. NBC's headline: "Huge crowds turn out in Tehran for funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei." CBS ran: "12-hour funeral procession through the streets of Tehran for slain supreme leader underway." Both accurate. Both, on their own, incomplete.
While that procession moved through Tehran, Israeli jets struck roughly ten sites in Lebanon over the same days most networks spent on funeral logistics. Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health counted five people killed in just the two days before the funeral's climax -- five people, killed despite a ceasefire framework Israel and Lebanon had signed only a month earlier. In most of the big live-blogs, that's a line buried under the mourning coverage, not a headline of its own.
One outlet didn't let it slide: Al Jazeera's own headline read "Iran war updates: Day one of Khamenei funeral ends, Israel bombs Lebanon" -- the strikes in the same sentence as the spectacle, not underneath it. You can run the mourning story and the killing story in the same breath. Most networks chose not to.
We're not saying skip the funeral -- fifteen million mourners is real news. We're saying that when the cameras are pointed at a spectacle that size, the five people who died a country over need someone to say their number out loud. This week, that was mostly Al Jazeera's job alone.
โFive people killed under a ceasefire got a paragraph. Twenty million mourners got the headline.โ