Information warfare: how to process information from Iran, China and Hamas without relaying it

In this context, the raw resumption of press releases, reports or official declarations poses a central journalistic challenge: how to inform quickly without becoming the involuntary relay of propaganda devices breaking with the standards of freedom of expression?

Several press defense organizations warn against the temptation to treat these statements as facts, when they should be systematically presented as assertions by interested actors, subject to rigorous control of information coming from organizations or states violating the fundamental freedoms.

In China, the press and broadcasting remain subject to tight censorship, with journalists imprisoned and explicit guidelines on what can and cannot be reported, including a ban on Chinese journalists freely quoting foreign media.

An investigation by Reporters Without Borders thus describes a media apparatus transformed into a multilingual “megaphone” of the Party line, through networks like CGTN, in more than 65 languages. In such an environment, official dispatches cannot be equated with independent sources, but must be treated as elements of political discourse.

In Iran, the tight control of the press and the repression of dissident voices also complicate the task of foreign editorial staff. Analyzes of the coverage of the Iran-Israel-United States conflict highlight that official Iranian stories are often relayed in Western media, which accentuates the risk of repeating elements of propaganda without contextualizing them. Here again, the challenge is not to silence these speeches, but to clearly attribute them, to compare them with other sources and to point out areas of doubt.

With Hamas, the question arises particularly acutely in the coverage of the war in Gaza. Studies have documented the way in which the organization regulates journalists’ access, imposes local “sponsors” and controls the images and figures broadcast, particularly on victims, to the point that certain editorial offices have taken up reports subsequently denied by independent investigations. This discrepancy reminds us that any data coming from an armed actor must be treated as a claim, not as a reference statistic, according to the IGCS.

For many media specialists, the role of editors is not to ignore these statements, but to place them within a framework of “information under constraint”. A media specialist speaking on France24 thus underlines that the images and figures released by Hamas as well as by its adversaries are part of a “war communication strategy” and require independent verification, in particular via social networks, NGOs or investigations of open source intelligence.

Several media outlets have also formalized internal charters on the way of attributing information coming from authoritarian regimes or armed organizations, insisting on formulations such as “according to the Iranian authorities” or “affirms Hamas”, rather than presenting these elements as established facts. Recurring debates also take place within editorial staff on how to deal with videos staged by armed groups, which some propose to only broadcast in the form of contextualized screen captures, to limit the desired effect of terror or propaganda.

In this debate, press defense organizations recall that transparency on the origin of data and the working conditions of journalists has become information in itself. Reporting that reporters worked under escort, that access to a site was restricted or that the figures provided cannot be independently verified, allows the reader to gauge the degree of uncertainty linked to environments where freedom of expression is limited.

Faced with these constraints, the response does not only come from the “fact-checking” technique, but also from an assumed pedagogy towards the public. Hence the need to make the limits of verification appear in the body of the articles themselves, rather than relaying information without the context of the source.

This approach involves renouncing the illusion of certainty of information coming from authoritarian regimes or terrorist groups. It also involves diversifying sources – independent experts, NGOs, satellite images, university surveys – to reduce the relative weight of declarations from states or armed groups that control their media landscape.

In the end, the question is not whether the media are “wrong” to report information from these regimes, but under what conditions they can do so without renouncing their requirements for verification and transparency. It is in this articulation between clear attribution, comparison of versions and pedagogy of uncertainty that journalistic responsibility plays out in the face of stories imposed and communicated on a large scale by authoritarian powers.