Mainstream Media Bias About A Blocked Suez Canal |
Mainstream Media Bias About A Blocked Suez Canal
It’s the same story—no shipping can get through the Canal—but the media treat it differently depending on whether Nature or the Houthis causes it.
John F. Di Leo | March 30, 2026
The week of March 23-29 marked the fifth anniversary of a rare moment in international shipping that dominated the global news cycles for a week.
On March 23, 2021, the containership Ever Given encountered a problem entering the Suez Canal. High winds, low water levels, and the sheer size of the containership (20,000 TEUs, one of the largest classes of commercial ships) caused the vessel to swing sideways and run aground, blocking all traffic in the canal and thus rendering one of the world’s most important shipping routes impassable for a week.
The world press was fascinated by the ship’s predicament. Within hours, wire services were reporting the story, video was all over cable news, and experts were interviewed discussing whether the cause was weather, pilot error, the size of the vessel, or the vessel owner’s cost-cutting (the choice not to hire local tugs as escorts was questioned).
The image of a sideways ship with 20,000 truckloads worth of cargo aboard became the source of memes on social media and jokes at comedy clubs. For a brief moment, the usually boring field of marine transportation became culturally significant.
Then the ship was righted, other ships safely reentered the channel, and the story no longer intrigued editors, broadcasters, and news anchors. It dropped off the headlines.
One might assume, therefore, that the Suez Canal, a key route in global commerce since 1869, has since been back to normal. If it weren’t, the news media would have covered it. Right?
For two and a half years now, the Suez Canal has been mostly unused by commercial vessels, because the weaponry of Yemen’s Houthi rebels—essentially a subsidiary of the Iranian ayatollahs’ rogue government in Iran—has been making the Red Sea impassable for commercial shipping. And if you can’t get in or out of the Red Sea, you can’t use the Suez Canal either.
Two and a half years.
Consider where the Suez Canal and the Red Sea are located. They’re at the northeast corner of Africa, at the point where Africa meets Asia.
Until 1869, ships traveling between the Pacific and the Atlantic had to circumnavigate Africa, sailing from Asia to Europe and back to Asia. But with the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in use as shortcuts, that trip is about two weeks shorter, using less fuel, manpower, and time. It’s also considerably safer than traversing the Cape of Good Hope.
When we think about the global economy, we tend to think of Labor and Energy, Materials and Equipment, Buyers and Sellers. All these have a cost, and reducing the energy and manpower costs of transportation through the world’s busiest trade lane has been a major godsend of the Suez Canal for a century and a half now.
But it can be argued that Time is the greatest gift of the Suez Canal. This two-week shortcut between Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula significantly reduces the transit time of millions of shipments per week. Sixty to eighty ships per week used to go through the Suez Canal, from containerships to tankers, from breakbulk to feeder vessels, enabling a more efficient supply chain for millions of businesses every week.
Since the Houthis have shut off access, that savings is gone.
Most estimates indicate that the direct financial cost to the global economy is north of a billion dollars per day because carriers must charge customers a third more per trip when each trip takes two weeks longer.
But even that doesn’t tell the whole story. When a business is built on a certain transit time, and that transit time is unexpectedly lengthened and made more costly, that business must adapt, and its customers must adapt too. With higher costs and slower delivery times, businesses lose orders; they lose customers, lay off employees, and eventually go out of business.
The Houthis’ attack on global shipping, by blocking access to Suez and the Red Sea, isn’t some distant political story to leave in the business pages; it’s a direct attack on the world community, affecting everyone on earth, from the price of food and clothing to the availability of manufacturing and distribution jobs.
On top of all this, another more than tangential issue worth mentioning in passing is the effect on Egypt. The canal runs through Egyptian territory, and that struggling, developing nation is very dependent on the $7 to $8 billion it normally earns each year in canal tolls and tugboat rentals. Egypt’s loss of most of its Suez Canal revenue these past two and a half years has had a painful impact - over time, perhaps, to a destabilizing degree.
And here is the question:
Why is it that a one-week closure of the Suez Canal five years ago resulted in global awareness, viral videos, and ubiquitous memes, but a two-and-a-half-year closure of the very same canal has produced no comparable coverage, in fact, hardly any coverage at all?
When a discussion of the Straits of Hormuz prompts a mention of the ongoing Suez Canal closure, the most common reaction is surprise, as this lack of reporting has left news consumers utterly unaware it’s happening at all.
If a week-long closure is worth reporting, but a closure more than a hundred times that long is not, how on earth do the major news services prioritize the stories they cover?
There are several possibilities.
Perhaps the complexity of global commerce is just beyond their ken, a disturbing thought since the same wire services provide what they claim to be business news coverage, so a trillion-dollar intentional hit to the global economy really ought to register for them.
Perhaps they think the Suez Canal is so far away that it must not affect their American readers, so they leave it for the Middle Eastern news to cover—though this explanation would also serve as an indictment of their understanding of economic news.
Or perhaps they don’t want to cover anything that shows Iran and Iran’s clients in a bad light, so, if the Houthis are responsible for the closure, and not the winds and tides, they have no interest in the story. One hopes that’s not the reason, but it seems the most likely, doesn’t it?
There were many good reasons for the United States and Israel to finally move against Iran this month, and the need to end the Iranian mullahs’ control of their clients in nearby countries—Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, etc.—is at the top of that list.
However, if regime change in Iran also enables the Houthis to be defanged and the Suez Canal to be reopened at last—as it must—the billion-dollar-per-day transportation savings to the world economy that result from it will, in itself, have made it all worthwhile.
This isn’t about Israel and the United States alone; it’s about every developed and developing nation on earth. Everyone uses the Suez Canal; everyone needs it.
We’ve seen the press get behind all sorts of issues before, championing political positions, demanding public support for nationwide or even global action, out of compassion for the downtrodden. Sometimes such campaigns are honorable and even courageous.
One wonders why the Houthis’ effective robbery of a billion dollars per day from all the peoples of the earth, for two and a half years now, hasn’t risen to the level of such attention in the eyes of the mainstream media.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, consultant and public speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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