Watch out for the regime

The word   regime, in journalism, is a devil's burden. Applied to a system of government, the negative connotation is clear. And the war of the United States and Israel against Iran makes it evident. Journalist Alan MacLeod explains it: global Western media, with a redundancy loss, tend to ignore a key fact in this conflict: the current hostilities were not started by the Persian country. That the New York Times sent a newsletter titled “Iran chooses chaos” portrayed the victim as the main actor in the news and not as a passive subject (and this is independent of the qualifiers, all negative, that its theocratic government deserves). The media speaks of the Iranian regime, and it is evident that the label fits its anti-democratic political system. Now, shouldn't we also refer, in fair measure, to Netanyahu's Israeli regime, which also presents a personal hyper-leadership that despises the institutions that could limit it? And, depending on what sauce we attribute to the word, Trump is also governing the United States in a disturbingly autocratic manner, but no one speaks of an American regime.

It is evident that I would rather live in the United States or Israel before Iran, and that there are gradations. But in the end, the definition in Catalan of regime is “a political, economic and social organization of a state”, nothing more. But the connotation everyone assumes as negative. And CNN, Bloomberg, the Financial Times or the Washington Post already apply the regime label asymmetrically as a lever for the delegitimization of a country that has been the recipient of an attack. The same happens with Lebanon. When CNN writes a headline like “Hezbollah drags Lebanon into war against Iran” it is scandalous that it does not include the missing term in the equation: Israel, which is the one this time that attacked its northern neighbor first. Subtleties of mental frameworks, which affect the presumed balance in the journalistic narrative of a complex conflict.