Newspapers in the United States and abroad framed the death of Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Iranian regime, in widely different ways.
The New York Times headline read “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hard-line cleric who made Iran a regional power, is dead at 86.” It added in the subheadline that the regime leader “brutally crushed dissent at home and expanded Iran’s footprint abroad, challenging Saudi Arabia for regional dominance.”
The Washington Post, which drew criticism in 2019 for writing in an obituary that an Islamic State leader was an “austere religious scholar,” used the headline “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86.”
It’s subheadline also didn’t mention any of the dictator’s crimes: “He played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic revolution, served as president in the 1980s and dominated the country for more than three decades.”
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation headline was “Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a staunch hardliner who mastered the art of playing his enemies off each other,” and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty went with “Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority, dead at 86.”
Other publications were harsher in the ways they framed their obituaries.
“Ayatollah Khamenei, who battled the U.S. and Israel for decades as Iran’s supreme leader, has been killed,” CNN said. The Guardian began with “Supreme leader of Iran who maintained theocratic rule at home and an anti-western axis of resistance in the Middle East.”
“Ali Khamenei grabbed power and held it, at bloody cost,” per the Economist, and Foreign Policy led with “Death comes to the dictator. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought his country and regime to ruin.” Time magazine used the headline “Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who built a de facto military dictatorship, killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes.”
USA Today, which ran a Reuters piece, led with “Supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran with iron fist, dies at 86.”
Christian Heiens, a political analyst in Virginia, shared images of the Times obituary for the Iranian dictator and its article headlined “Scott Adams, whose comic strip ‘Dilbert’ was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast, has died at 68.”
“The New York Times gave the ayatollah of Iran a nicer obituary headline than they did Scott Adams,” Heiens said.
