Oh, "polarised" media now seems to be the norm around the world, and not just the US. So at one end, you have Fox News parroting Republican conservatism, while the Washington Post peddles for the Democrat Right- (here's one such example of the Washington Post engaging in pointless Trump bashing without a meaningful journalistic examination of the whole issue - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/could-ukraine-have-avoid... ). The whole idea of dispassionate, if not neutral, journalism is dead today because of corporate owned media and BigTech's stranglehold on social media through which modern "news" spreads.
Also, most politically aware Americans know that there is an unspoken bi-partisan rule in the western / US media - you can never criticise Israel without prior political approval. (AIPAC, and other Israeli pressure groups, further offer incentives through ad spends to ensure this kind of media compliancy). When you factor that too into the equation, it becomes clear why Trump has become the punching bag in the media. Out of the two actors in this conflict - Israel and the US / Trump - that the Americans / west care about, the US media can act unrestrained against only one of them. Thus, the current US administration bears the brunt. And it doesn't help that it is election season too, as that is when the US media tend to be the most polarised ...
> I'm more concerned about how people see the adversary ...
Here, you cannot ignore the other irrational actor involved - Israel / Netanyahu.
Sympathy for Iran, in the west, mainly stems from comparison to Israel whose current leaders and soldiers have unfortunately projected the worst of humanity with its vulgarity and depravity in its ongoing war. If this were just a conflict between Iran and the US, Iran wouldn't have been able to arouse so much sympathy for itself. But Israel / Netanyahu have muddied the water so much with their ongoing genocide that anyone associated with them cannot escape the taint too. You'd think their blood lust would have been satisfied with the 20,000+ children they've already killed ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167790 ) , but no, the IDF nutcases are now shooting babies too ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/10/palestinian-ba... ) - don't Iranians look like saints in comparison to that?.
(Disclaimer: I too sympathise with the Palestinians and Iranians now, where as I was indifferent towards them before).