“THE first casualty of war is the truth,” was spoken, in one of its iterations, by a senator in 1918 appalled at a new level of censorship in the US after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. In this new “war to end all wars” in Iran, the corporate media censorship of truth is even heavier and done in broad daylight, making the truth not just a casualty but a fatality.

The lies are more transparent in what Max Blumenthal has termed Operation: Epstein Fury, as opposed to Trump’s GI Joe 4th grade Sergeant Rock cartoonish “Operation: Epic Fury.” In this war, where the excuses are a rerun of the Iraq war weapons of mass destruction (in both cases false) it is truly second time as farce, though for both Iraq and Iran the result is tragedy.

Ultimately this war is about control of the world’s energy supply as the most effective way of maintaining fading US hegemony.

You will hear little of this in the US media, inflamed with its holy war against “backward” “Muslim” Iran, words openly stated on Fox News, but on the more “liberal” media argued under the banner of “democracy.”

While you were watching the already biased coverage of the war, Larry Ellison (the largest personal donor to Israel’s IDF which has led the Gaza genocide) and his son David took over Warner Brothers giving them access to CNN and completing a far-right zionist “media coup.”

They now control or have major interests in CBS, CNN and Tik Tok, which had introduced the genocide to American youth and which has now expunged those videos, as well as Comedy Central.

The propaganda is at such a level that when the Iranian foreign minister appeared on the major networks explaining that Iran was striking back in self-defence, one corporate media quisling then asked why they would attack foreign countries. He had to explain that Iran was attacking US bases in those countries from where missiles and drones were being launched against them, and that was their lawful right to protect themselves.

The idea in the corporate media is that anything short of abject surrender is Iranian aggression.

On CNN, the supposedly neutral, straight-ahead network, retired army Brigadier General Steve Anderson called the country’s inhabitants “Uranians” as if they were from another planet which for him, since they are not in the American-Israeli orbit, they are.

One of the similarities between the “right-wing” Fox News, the “centre” CNN, and the “left” MSNBC is that it is difficult to find any moment when all three — whose median audience age ranges from 67 to 70 — are not on a commercial break. The news is fitted around and made to conform to the selling imperative which also includes plugging their own network, even as all of their ratings fall.

While “Desert Storm” featured the emergence of CNN, the Iraq war was about the dominance of Fox. Epstein Fury, however, may be about the emergence of alternative news and podcasts on the most dominant network ratings-wise — YouTube, which in daytime ratings dwarfs all the others.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a female anchor — looking like Hillary Clinton — explained that the war which Israel and the US started “was to stabilise Iran to where it was no threat,” ignoring the fact that one of the reasons for the timing of the war was that Iran had made major concessions to the US over its nuclear programme, and that the war was started the very day these concessions were to be announced in order to circumvent the negotiation.

The Hillary Clinton lookalike then wondered “who was going to take over the leadership” when the war ended, echoing the liberal hope for “democracy” in Iran. That is, democracy at the barrel of a gun when really what the US is hoping for and the media is cheering on, a la Hillary Clinton in Libya, is a failed and divided oil state that the US can plunder.

CNN then dragged out Brett McGurk, the former National Security Council adviser, partly responsible for George W Bush’s illegal war on Iraq and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. He explained that the campaign was to stop Iran “from spreading terrorism all over its borders,” an accusation that more accurately describes Israel, at war at various times with Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Iraq and Yemen.

On Fox, following a press conference in which the aptly named Secretary of War Pete Hegseth practically declared the war won because, he claimed, the US now controlled Iranian air space, the network responded with its own “expert,” Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff, who along with Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and Nancy Pelosi is a hawkish supporter of the cultish Iranian overthrow group MEK. Keane duly echoed the sentiment that Iran could no longer strike back, but this was interrupted by cutting to Tel Aviv where a correspondent wearing a flak jacket and helmet could barely be heard over the sounds of sirens signalling incoming Iranian missiles.

Finally, the network cut to an ad extolling the powers of Botox to manage chronic migraines, with of course no mention of the fact that it is the threat of global war and economic meltdown which may be inducing the migraines in the first place.

The best, most varied and accurate coverage of this war is by Al Jazeera, available all day online, which after the Hegseth presser mentioned that the attacks on Iran were, as in Iraq, also attacks on its hospitals and heritage sites, as well as running a crawl underneath the anchor that mentioned a UN report focused on illegal Israeli acts, and finally noted the similarity between Hegseth’s glib announcement that the war was over and George W Bush’s Iraq “declaration of victory that didn’t succeed.”

YouTube, another alternative, is owned by Google whose parent company Alphabet has a spinoff company that has contracted, despite employee resistance, with the Pentagon. The network remains open for the time being, though this is subject to change. Recommended podcasts for alternative views of the war are George Galloway’s Mother of All Talk Shows, Max Blumenthal’s The Grey Zone and, for a global economic perspective, Dialogue Works with Michael Hudson and Richard Woolf.