What is happening in Iran is not “unrest.” It is a popular uprising against a theocratic regime—and a stress test of Danish public service. For the third week in a row, millions of Iranians have taken to the streets without weapons, with a single demand: the fall of the clerical regime. Demonstrators are branded “enemies of God”—theocratic language for: shoot. Independent sources speak of thousands killed; even the regime has acknowledged a bloodbath. That is the difference between an uprising and a massacre.
Why is Iran exploding now? Because decades of religious oppression have strangled the economy, freedom of expression, and women’s rights. Because a young, urban Iran no longer wants to live in the ideological cage of a clerical state. And because women—at the risk of their lives—are tearing off their headscarves and saying no to coercion. This is not a “wave of protests.” It is a systemic revolt.
Yet DR arrived late—again. Only when international figures publicly asked why the mainstream media were silent did Iran finally make it onto the agenda. Not because reality had changed, but because it became embarrassing not to react. This is not a one-off misstep; it is a pattern that the Free Press Society has documented repeatedly: when a story collides with editorial preconceptions, DR comes late—and with a slant.
When coverage finally appears, reality is distorted. DR has, for example, claimed that many demonstrators supposedly “fear” that the United States, Trump, or Israel will support the uprising. That is not what Iranians say. On the contrary: Iranian sources in Denmark and across Europe state unanimously that precisely the feeling of not standing alone—that the U.S. and Israel openly support them—is a decisive reason why so many dare to take to the streets against a regime that shoots its own people. To present Western support as something the demonstrators are afraid of is not neutral journalism. It is ideological projection.
The public service problem is structural. Media research shows that Danish journalists overwhelmingly place themselves on the political left. That does not mean they lie—but when a state-funded media system shares the same underlying assumptions, systematic blind spots emerge: what fits the narrative? What does not? We have seen this in coverage of the United States, of Gaza—and now of Iran.
Iran shatters the left’s narrative. For here it is not the West that is oppressing, but Islam in state form: sharia as law, clerics as rulers. The Iranians’ cry for freedom is a revolt against religious tyranny—something that fits poorly into a framework in which Islam is primarily understood as an “oppressed identity.” That is why the story is downgraded.
The contrast with Gaza is revealing. There, DR and the rest of the mainstream filled the airwaves with stories, analyses, and activist sources, even though no Western journalists could work freely on the ground. Lack of access was not an obstacle—it became an argument for broadcasting everything that fit the narrative of the West as the villain. In Iran, the same lack of access is used to justify silence: “We can’t get in.” “We can’t verify.” That is not caution. It is selective indignation.
The failure goes beyond the coverage itself. The media also neglect the larger story: the geopolitical consequences of a fall of the clerical regime. Iran is the engine of a regional proxy system that for decades has supported Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamist militias. A collapse in Tehran would hit financing, weapons flows, training, and coordination; alter the balance of power in Lebanon; and affect the security of Israel—and of Europe. This is a story of historic dimensions. And it is treated as peripheral.
Why does this particular story disappear? Because it requires seeing Islamism as political power, not merely as identity. And because it requires abandoning the reflex of making the West the primary explanation for everything. That alternative media, diaspora networks, and podcasts currently provide more timely and often more accurate information than DR is no accident. It is a systemic problem: a state-funded media outlet without real competition and with strong ideological homogeneity has no structural incentive to adjust when reality challenges the narrative.
That is why media subsidies should be abolished. Not to “punish” DR, but because it is undemocratic to force citizens to finance a media system that again and again fails when the most important events collide with journalists’ political prism. A free media market is no guarantee of quality—but state-subsidised uniformity is a guarantee of blind spots at the taxpayers’ expense.
Iranians are not asking for sentimental sympathy. They are asking for truth. When DR once again fails to live up to its public service obligation, it is not merely an editorial scandal. It is a principled argument for the state to withdraw from the media market.
When reality contradicts the narrative, it must be the narrative that yields—not reality.
