Four angles on the strike

What can we learn from the British press' coverage of Iran's latest missile attack on Israel? A comparison of four front-page stories.

Previously: How the sausage is made

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I’m going to do something slightly different with today’s edition. On my desk, I’ve got copies of four newspapers (The Sun, The Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail) and I want to dissect how each of them used their front page stories to cover Iran’s missile attack on Israel. They are all reporting the same events — and use the same photo of Iranian missiles being intercepted in the skies above Israel¹ — but where do the differences in tone and emphasis occur?

Let’s look at the headlines first:

The Guardian
Israel vows to retaliate after Iran launches missile attack
⚫ Salvo or more than 180 missiles fired at targets across the country
⚫ Air assault is 24 hours after Netanyahu ordered incursion into Lebanon
⚫ Tehran justifies strike as a ‘legal, rational and legitimate’ response

The Sun
ISRAEL UNDER ATTACK
HELL FIRE
⚫ 200-missile blitz by Iran
⚫ Tel Aviv terror rampage
⚫ RAF fighter jets scrambled

The Daily Mail
MIDDLE EAST IN FLAMES
The Iron Dome holds firm against Iran’s 200-missile blitz… now Israel vows vengeance

The Times
Middle East erupts
⚫ Nearly 200 Iranian missiles intercepted over Israel ⚫ IDF begins Lebanon ground assault ⚫ Gunman kills six in Tel Aviv

The Guardian focuses on the Israeli response and goes for a factual rather than emotional headline. The Sun’s headline has typical tabloid punchiness combined with the drama of the bullet points (“blitz” and “rampage”) as well as making sure to foreground British involvement in the events. The Mail tends to opt for longer narrative headlines that emphasise the drama and it loves an ellipsis. The Times chooses a fairly generic headline so that it can deliver more of an overview of events across the region rather than focusing on just the missile strike.

It’s worth looking at the bylines on each story. The Guardian’s report is credited to its Global Affairs Correspondent, Andrew Roth, who’s based in Washington D.C, and two reporters in Jerusalem (Peter Beaumont, The Guardian’s Senior International Correspondent) and Beirut (William Cristou, a journalist based in the city). The Sun’s dispatch comes from Nick Parker the paper’s foreign editor, who is in Northern Israel. There’s another shared byline in the Mail with Mark Nicol (the paper’s Defence and Diplomacy Editor), Andy Jehring (a London-based reporter), and Natalie Lisbona (a freelancer based in Israel) feeding into its story. The Times’ coverage is bylined to Richard Spencer, the paper’s former Middle East Editor², reporting from Tel Aviv.

So all the newspapers we’re looking at here have reporters in the region contributing to their coverage, but there’s a marked difference in how each outlet chooses to open its front page story. The Sun, with its usual tiny space for actual copy — the front page also needs to find space for a big picture of a former Strictly contestant and a box promoting a story about Nick Knowles — crammed a lot of detail into 55 words:

Israel fought off an unprecedented blitz from Iran last night after the terrorist state launched 200 super-sonic ballistic missiles. 

Defence rockets intercepted most in the skies above Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. 

At least seven people died in a terrorist attack in Jaffa.

British jets were scrambled from their base in Cyprus and Defence Secretary John… 

The Daily Mail had the most dramatic opening line:

The wrath of Iran rained down on Israel last night as the rogue state fired nearly 200 missiles at major cities across the country. 

Meanwhile, The Guardian followed its strictly factual headline with what initially appears to be a fairly straight start to its story before switching to analysis:

Israel vowed to retaliate last night after Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at targets across the country in a dramatic escalation of a conflict that appeared to be spiralling out of control. 

The Times opened with the most stripped-back intro of the four:

Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other Israeli cities last night in response to Israel’s first military incursion into Lebanon for 18 years. 

The first voice quoted in The Sun’s report is the British Defence Secretary, John Healey, probably because it wants to give its readers a greater reason to care about a foreign story — “our boys” were involved. The Times noted Iran’s statement about notifying Russia in advance of the missile attack first but Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the first person quoted in direct speech. The Guardian quoted both the Israeli military and Iranian officials indirectly on the front page with the first direct quote coming on an inside page from Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian. The Mail doesn’t quote anyone directly on the front page with the first direct quote coming from an IDF spokesman in the story’s continuation on page 6.

The Daily Mail’s approach was the most impressionistic of the four reports. Look at how it described the events:

Falling projectiles burned like comets against the night sky after they were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system. The attack forced civilians to seek shelter as giant chunks of molten metal crashed to the ground. 

Huge explosions were heard, sirens blared and Israel temporarily closed its airspace as the country came under ferocious attack. 

It’s grimly predictable that the paper rounds off its report in print with an advert for its latest exploitative podcast, 90 Seconds To Midnight: Dispatch from Beirut. The ad is illustrated with an image of a mushroom cloud.

The Guardian, meanwhile, goes out of its way to make sure readers know its team was there on the ground:

Guardian reporters in Jerusalem witnessed dozens of missiles flying towards Israel’s main coastal cities in a huge attack not long after 7.30 pm, with the engines of the rockets visible below. 

While Richard Spencer is in Tel Aviv, where missiles were intercepted and a gunman killed six people, The Times report focused more on the response from governments, ministers, and officials than giving a sense of what was happening on the streets. The Sun’s approach, though sprinkled with many more emotive adjectives, was similar — landing on quotes from political and anonymous military sources.

In contrast to the drama of its Hell Fire headline on the missile strikes, The Sun’s story includes the line “No damage, injuries or deaths had been reported by Israel late last night,” deep into the story, buried on page 5. Conversely, The Times noted in its front page copy that:

After sounding the all-clear yesterday, about half an hour after the attack began, the IDF said that although some missiles had hit, there had been no casualties. 

Despite the obvious continuities between the reports, it’s clear that the Mail tries the hardest to scare its readers, The Sun wants to appear the most connected to military sources, The Times is trying for the dry voice of a diplomatic observer, and The Guardian wants most to appear neutral in its tone.

Read any one of these reports and you’d come away with roughly the same grasp of the facts. It’s only when you compare them side by side that you can detect the small but consequential differences in emphasis, notice which voices are given greater prominence, and where dramatic licence has been applied to amplify your emotions.

If you’d like me to do these comparative analyses more often, let me know in the comments.

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1. Taken by Amir Cohen for Reuters

2. He’s now its China Correspondent but seems to have been brought back onto the Middle East beat during the current crisis.