The ‘moderate’ who ran death squads: how BBC and Sky sanitise the Iranian regime

A few days ago I watched Sky News with amazement as they showed Iranian propaganda images of Ali Larijani walking down the street in Iran on Al Quds Day. They kept commenting how it showed Iranian strength that he was able to walk so freely without fear of assassination, among his people.

I have long been concerned about Sky News' coverage of the Middle East but even I was a bit shocked they appeared to be regurgitating such transparent Islamic Republic propaganda without any hint of intelligent cynicism. So today, when it was announced he was killed by an Israeli strike, my heart went out to Sky News. Perhaps they’ll join the British Foreign Office and ministers at a wake in South Kensington, or at that Islamic Centre opposite my favourite Persian restaurant in London, where they mourned the deaths of Ali Khameini and Qasem Soleimani.
The BBC were no better.
Our national broadcaster’s response managed to go further still, into a kind of analytical absurdity that would be comic if it were not so dangerous. The newsreader, in a tone of concerned moderation, warned of “the slight problem here” that Israel had eliminated figures “considered moderates,” suggesting this might empower “more hardline, less experienced people” and make regime change “more complicated.”

Jeremy Bowen followed: Larijani, he ummed and ahhed, was “seen as a pragmatic figure… a man of flexibility… somebody you can do business with.” Sure, he said “some very tough things, war-like things, in recent weeks,” but who among us hasn’t?
This peculiar BBC effort to rehabilitate an Iranian regime monster is more than a little weird. It takes a man embedded for decades at the core of a coercive theocratic system and recasts him as a regrettable casualty of strategic impatience, a lost interlocutor in some imagined future negotiation. A man who once talked about an "overreaction" to the Holocaust, adding that he was "neither for, nor against" the idea that the Holocaust had really occurred, saying it was an "open question." When did Jeremy Bowen last “do business” with him? Who exactly was doing business with him? Was the BBC? Or did they mean Israel should negotiate how much annihilation it could talk them down to? How many Jews to wipe from the face of the earth? Maybe the Iranian people could negotiate access to water, the Internet, or their relatives if thy just did business with him.

John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, joined the chorus of praise on X. “I’ve met Ali Larijani several times… he always seemed clever and reasonable – the kind of person you might want to negotiate a peace deal with,” he wrote, even as he acknowledged him as “a top figure in a nasty regime.” That is where the judgement settles: he seemed reasonable. Everything else is quietly set aside.
The Israeli position, by contrast, was brutally clear. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Minister stated that Larijani and his colleagues had been central to the machinery of repression, figures under international sanction for their role in crushing Iranian dissent. The Basij leadership, he said, had overseen “brutal repression of the Iranian people seeking their freedom,” and those removed were individuals the Iranian public was “safer without.” The framing is stark, unapologetic, and true. It rests on a judgement: that the removal of key regime operators weakens the system’s capacity to coerce.
One can contest that judgement. What is harder to defend is the refusal, visible in parts of the British coverage, to engage honestly with who Larijani was.
Larijani’s career runs through the spine of the Islamic Republic. As head of state broadcasting, he presided over a monopoly that aired forced confessions extracted under duress, programmes that smeared dissidents as traitors, material produced in coordination with intelligence services implicated in the murder of intellectuals. Perhaps the BBC crew felt some sort of solidarity with a fellow national service broadcaster.
As a senior political figure, he defended the legal architecture that enforces ideological conformity, including the criminalisation of homosexuality with capital punishment (though, to be fair, the Iranian regime, like the BBC, completely accepts transsexualism as a positive life choice). He endorsed the logic behind those laws in public statements that framed such punishments as socially necessary. During periods of unrest, he aligned himself with the state’s coercive response, calling for firmness where protesters were demanding basic political and social freedoms.
Even his reputation as a “pragmatist” requires examination. Within the internal language of the Islamic Republic, pragmatism often denotes tactical flexibility in preserving the system, not any departure from its underlying principles. It is the ability to negotiate without conceding, to adjust tone without altering substance, to manage external pressure while maintaining internal control. To describe such a figure primarily as someone “you can do business with” is to collapse a dreadful record into a single, flattering attribute.
The same pattern was visible during the long years of engagement over Iran’s nuclear programme. British and European coverage frequently elevated the idea of dialogue as an end in itself, treating the existence of talks as evidence of progress. The record tells a different story. Negotiations extended timelines, absorbed pressure, and created space. Iran advanced its capabilities while presenting each incremental concession as a breakthrough. Or as Benjamin Netanyahu famously put it in a powerpoint presentation presenting thousands of Iranian secret documents Israel had seized, “Iran lied”.
This near obsession with negotiation even when it is clearly not genuine or productive shapes how audiences understand the nature of the Islamic Republic regime itself. It blurs the line between tactical variation and substantive difference. It encourages the belief that the problem lies in personalities rather than structures and barbaric ideologies.
It also explains, in part, the dissonance visible on British streets, where protests can invert moral clarity, aligning with a regime whose record is, by any consistent standard, repressive. Information environments matter. When news coverage goes out of its way to soften, reframe, or selectively emphasise, it alters public perception and dupes the masses into obedient protest.
Meanwhile Israel and the US are taking care of business. Gulf countries, no natural allies of Israel, recognise that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are in fact the people to “do business with” now that they are under fire from the Islamic Republic.