The Television News Archive archives two channels from Iran: Persian-language IRINN, which broadcasts to a domestic audience, and English-language PressTV, which broadcasts to a global audience to present Iran's narratives to the world. What would it look like to use Gemini to compare their daily coverage using our Media Trends reports to explore where their narratives align and where they diverge and why? Could Gemini Deep Research help journalists and scholars better understand how states differently utilize their foreign and domestic media arms and the parallel media universes Iran is cultivating as the war goes on? No data was used to train or tune any model and only our PDF Media Trends reports were provided to Gemini, not the transcripts themselves.
The end result is quite fascinating, with this sentence from Gemini's report best capturing just how well Gemini understood the assignment: "State media in an authoritarian system during a period of total war does not function to report the news; it functions to sustain the state. The divergence between IRINN and Press TV represents an advanced execution of audience-specific strategic messaging. Over the past decade, Iranian information operations have evolved from rigid religious propaganda into multidimensional cognitive warfare, utilizing narrative framing to shape adversary perceptions and bolster domestic endurance against superior conventional military forces. … While IRINN spoke to the "Iranian soul," Press TV addressed the "global mind"."
To run this analysis, we provided Gemini Deep Research with our Media Trends reports for August 14th, 2026 for the two channels, along with the following prompt:
Attached are two deep analysis reports, one of IRINN's coverage on August 14th, 2026 aimed at Iran's domestic audience and the other for PRESSTV of the same day, which is focused on an international audience. You are an expert geopolitical analyst. Deeply compare and contrast these two reports and detail where they are similar and where they deviate and explain in detail.
Here are the two Media Trends Reports:
And the final Gemini Deep Research report: