“Home is … something you’re forced to carry with you”

“My father was on the very last Pan Am flight to leave the capital” following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Shirazi told me. He was sent away alone, she says, by parents who saw no other way to save him and give him a better future.

“My mother was a refugee who fled across Europe with her five siblings before they finally reached the U.S. Growing up with their stories, I’ve always understood that for Iranians, home is often something you’re forced to carry with you. Also, my life could have been completely different had they stayed.”

It’s a unique journalistic vantage point, that connection to the region, which finds Shirazi covering the war as both an observer as well as a kind of stakeholder. You can see it in the emotional precision she brings to work that includes a story published this week on the steps young people in Iran are taking to circumvent the internet blackout there.

When I caught up with her, she was also working on a story about Iranian college students gone missing after roundups by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. And she frequently relays insights and photos from Iranians on the ground, like the image she tweeted on Thursday of a cloud of grey smoke visible above buildings in Isfahan.

“In the U.S., the media often reduces this to a black-and-white, one-track political issue,” Shirazi said. “You’re either pro-war or anti-war. But what’s completely lost in Western broadcasts is the tangled, heartbreaking reality on the ground. The everyday Iranians I’m speaking to, who just watched their own government slaughter tens of thousands of citizens during the January protests, are living an incredibly complicated paradox.”

What TV news isn’t telling you about the Iran war

Many Iranians, she continued, are “quietly cheering” for the U.S. to not only attempt to dismantle the regime. Iranians she knows and has spoken to are “willing to turn their world upside down for a chance at freedom.” Their biggest fear: That the U.S. military intervention will stop abruptly, leaving a wounded regime in power that’s able to turn on citizens with renewed brutality.

“What many fail to grasp is that there are two parallel realities unfolding,” Shirazi said. “To the outside world, there’s only the tragedy of war. But for those inside, there’s also the quiet, stubborn presence of hope. It’s a nuance that’s often lost in translation.”

Along those lines: Shirazi adds that Western media has only recently begun to more clearly separate the Iranian people from the regime.

If she could change one thing about the way the war is being covered in the West, she says it would be how frequently the world hears directly from Iranians.

“One of the greatest challenges in Western media today is the scarcity of authentic voices from within Iran, a direct result of state-sponsored censorship and the climate of fear the regime has instilled. This is exactly why journalists have to be more diligent in circumventing communication blackouts to reach real people.”

A tall order, but not an impossible one. Bloomberg, for example, reported earlier this month that Iranians were using VPNs, Starlink terminals, and messaging networks to bypass state control to distribute war-related content like photos and videos.

Still, much of the U.S. media coverage of the war thus far feels like it’s unfolded in something of a black box, with limited access inside Iran forcing outlets to rely on things like Pentagon briefings, intelligence reports, and the occasional voice memo or video from inside the country. The result is reporting that’s built around a sky-level view of what’s happening on the ground.

Continues Shirazi: “The media's ability to distinguish between the Iranian people and the regime has improved significantly. But, for a long time, that distinction was virtually invisible. As an Iranian-American, the burden of proof often fell on me to explain that we are not our government. We’re seeing more nuanced storytelling now, but it’s important to remember that for many in the diaspora, this correction in the media is a long-overdue recognition of Iran’s true identity.”