As deadly riots burn Iranian cities, Western media ignores the shocking wave of violence, turning instead to US government-funded NGOs for data. The one-sided portrayal has helped push Trump to the brink of authorizing renewed US attacks.

Western media has ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by protesters described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “largely peaceful.” Recent videos published both by Iranian state media and anti-government forces reveal public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torching of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces and fire stations, and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities.

Instead, Western media has focused almost exclusively on violence attributed to the Iranian government. In doing so, they have relied heavily on death counts compiled by Iranian diaspora groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the regime change arm of the US government, and whose boards of directors are filled with committed neoconservatives.

In assessing the death toll in Iran, outlets throughout the US and Europe have depended on two NGOs based in Washington and funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy: the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran and Human Rights Activists in Iran.

The NED was created under the watch of the Reagan administration’s CIA director, William Casey, to enable the government to continue meddling abroad despite widespread distrust in US intelligence services. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, famously admitted, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

As the dust clears, millions of Iranian citizens are pouring into the streets of cities from Tehran to Mashhad to express their indignation at the riots, to denounce the foreign elements that helped spur the regime change rampage, and to proclaim their support for the government. But in newsrooms across the West, giving voice to these masses of Iranian demonstrators seems forbidden.