Oh, no doubt.

Some of that is just down to people having limited bandwidth - I follow intl news relatively closely, from a wide range of sources, and know that I’m still only getting a tiny fraction of the most important news events of a given day/week.

The other bit is that there are a bunch of regions in the world where outsiders barely have a fighting chance at understanding the nuances and undercurrents at play, especially if we don’t speak the native language (and is a super bummer for Iran, bc Farsi is just so pretty) - Iran is definitely one of those places. You can know the about the shia/Sunni divide, the centuries of colonial fuckery in the region (driven by all kinds of shifting geopolitical reasons), the contributing factors behind the rise of IS/AQ/Daesh/whatever…and still barely scrape the surface in terms of being able to understand some of the motivations behind current events.

That said: yeah, most media sucks and a good chunk of people are so stunningly uncurious that they wouldn’t even be able to find Iran on a map.