Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Today's PGI: 5.4 Diverging Narratives

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. The supreme leader of Iran, 86 years old, killed by US-Israeli strikes. The most significant targeted killing since Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

In Washington, precision counterterrorism. In Tehran, an act of war against a sovereign state. In Berlin, an escalation nobody asked for and nobody can control.

PGI: 8.0. The highest single-story score of the day.

Then NATO said no.

Germany, France, and the rest of the alliance refused Trump's demand for warships in the Strait of Hormuz. PGI: 7.5. "This war has nothing to do with NATO," said the German position. The most significant Western alliance fracture since Iraq 2003, except this time it's happening during active combat, not before it.

Two stories. Two fractures. One runs between the West and the Middle East. The other runs through the West itself.

Today's PGI settles at 5.4, down 0.4 from yesterday's 5.8. The seven-day rolling average holds at 5.5. Fifty-eight stories across two scans. The drop isn't de-escalation. It's consolidation. Yesterday's outlier spikes gave way to a broader, lower-intensity hum of disagreement across more stories. Fewer 9s. More 6s and 7s. The perception gap isn't narrowing. It's flattening into a new baseline.

The Death of a Supreme Leader

The killing of Khamenei generated the widest narrative rupture of the day. Three regions. Three completely incompatible stories.

US coverage framed precision and strategic success. The strikes hit their target. The regime's leadership structure has been decapitated. Counterterrorism doctrine, validated.

EU coverage led with escalation risk. What comes next? Who fills the vacuum? The war just got harder to end.

Middle Eastern coverage treated it as an act of war against a sovereign nation. Not a targeted killing — an assassination of a head of state. The framing gap on actor portrayal was extreme: the US is either the world's sheriff executing a lawful strike, or an imperial power assassinating the spiritual leader of 85 million people.

Israeli officials, meanwhile, privately doubt the regime change strategy will work. That story (PGI 6.5) found three-region coverage but stays buried under the triumphalist framing. The doubt exists. The coverage of the doubt barely registers against the coverage of the kill.

NATO Cracks Open

The alliance refusal is the quieter earthquake, but it may matter more.

Trump called for allied warships in the Strait of Hormuz. Every major NATO ally said no. Germany's position was explicit: the Iran war is a US-Israeli operation, not a NATO mission. Article 5 doesn't apply. This isn't their fight.

PGI 7.5. EU-US pair. Two framings with zero overlap.

US coverage treated the refusal as betrayal. Allies failing a loyalty test during a shared crisis. The framing invoked decades of American security guarantees for Europe — you owe us this.

EU coverage treated the refusal as sovereignty. A democratic alliance choosing not to follow a unilateral war it didn't vote for. The framing invoked Iraq: the last time European allies followed the US into a Middle Eastern war, it ended in catastrophe.

Two critical differences from 2003. First, the split is public and explicit. France and Germany aren't maneuvering behind closed doors — they're saying no on the record. Second, it's happening during active combat. In 2003, the disagreement preceded the invasion. In 2026, the war is already three weeks old and the alliance is fracturing in real time.

The interest-alignment is clean on both sides. Washington needs coalition legitimacy. A unilateral war is harder to sell domestically and harder to sustain logistically. European governments need distance. Their voters don't want this war, their energy supplies are at stake, and they've seen the Iraq sequel before.

Every future coalition just got harder to build.

132,000 Children

Gaza's famine threatens to kill 132,000 children by June. PGI: 7.4. Significance: 5. The third-highest scoring story of the day.

The divergence isn't about whether children are starving. Every region acknowledges the crisis. The divergence is about who's starving them.

US coverage focused on "renewed fighting" as the causal mechanism. Fighting produces famine. The passive construction obscures agency — who renewed the fighting, and who blocked the aid?

Middle Eastern coverage named the actor: Israeli siege mechanics and deliberate starvation policy. The framing positioned the famine not as a byproduct of war but as a weapon of war. Children aren't collateral damage. They're targets of a policy.

EU coverage split between humanitarian urgency and diplomatic caution. The facts matched the Middle Eastern framing more closely; the tone matched the American restraint.

Meanwhile, Sudan is now the world's largest hunger crisis — 21 million people acutely food insecure. PGI: 5.15. Covered by Africa, EU, and the Middle East. Not covered by the US. The world's largest famine, invisible to the world's largest media market.

The FAO reported food aid funding gaps at record highs (PGI 5.38). The story appeared in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia — the regions that are hungry. It didn't appear in the US, EU, or Asia-Pacific — the regions whose funding created the gap. The people who need aid see the story. The people who could provide it don't.

The Strait That Stays Shut

Day four of the Hormuz shutdown. Oil at $99.84, flirting with $100. PGI: 6.9.

Four regions covered the story. Four causal frameworks emerged.

US coverage: Iran's aggression closed the strait. A hostile regime weaponizing global commerce.

Middle Eastern coverage: US-Israeli bombing forced Iran's hand. The strait is shut because someone started a war next to it.

EU coverage: focused on the economic fallout. Who caused it matters less than what it costs.

Asia-Pacific coverage: both sides created a crisis that 4.5 billion people are now paying for.

The downstream consequences cascade invisibly. Sri Lanka cut to a four-day workweek — the first nation-level adaptation to the fuel crisis. PGI: 4.23. Visible only in South Asia. India's oil bill hit $137 a barrel, up 93%. PGI: 4.1. Visible only in South Asia. Brent crude at $99.84 reached four regions, but the concrete human impacts — shortened workweeks, crippled budgets, rationing — stay locked inside the regions experiencing them.

Saudi Arabia is building pipeline bypass capacity for 7 million barrels daily. PGI: 3.45. Visible only in the Middle East. The world's biggest energy infrastructure project in response to the world's biggest energy disruption, covered by one region.

The River System: Where the Fractures Run

PGI-GP (Geopolitics): 6.5 — Competing Realities. The hottest tributary for the fourth straight day. Fifteen stories. Khamenei's assassination, the NATO fracture, Hormuz, Pakistan striking Kabul, Syria-Lebanon border shelling. The geopolitics stream doesn't spike anymore — it runs hot continuously. When the US and the Middle East sit 8.2 apart across seven simultaneous stories, you don't have a series of disagreements. You have two parallel information architectures processing the same planet and generating opposite outputs.

PGI-IW (Info Warfare): 5.8 — Diverging Narratives. The WEF confirmed anyone with a phone can now make deepfakes. Republicans used an AI deepfake against a Texas Senate candidate — the first party-created deepfake in a US election. The Washington Post exposed a 50,000-account Kremlin bot network. Three thresholds crossed simultaneously: technical (barrier to entry hit zero), political (parties are now using deepfakes), and military (the Pentagon wants $14.2 billion for AI weapons). The information warfare tributary runs warm not because of one story but because the tools of deception are proliferating faster than the tools of verification.

PGI-EC (Economics): 5.3 — Diverging Narratives. Every region's oil price coverage transparently serves its domestic energy policy. US coverage externalizes inflation blame to Iranian disruption. European coverage turns vulnerability into an argument for renewables. Middle Eastern coverage challenges the legitimacy of the war that caused the crisis. China tariffs at 20% (PGI 5.88) split along US-Asia lines. US job losses — 92,000 in February, the first drop since COVID — stayed invisible outside America despite being a potential recession signal for the world's largest economy.

PGI-TE (Technology): 5.2 — Diverging Narratives. The familiar bifurcation holds. AI capabilities generate consensus. AI control generates conflict. DeepSeek training on banned Nvidia chips (PGI 6.4-6.9) is either sanctions evasion threatening national security or Chinese innovation triumphing despite American restrictions. Same chips. Same model. Two stories about what they mean for the future of power. The EU's AI Act reaches full implementation in August. Trump scrapped Biden's chip export framework. Two regulatory regimes heading in opposite directions, each visible primarily to its own region.

PGI-WR (Women's Rights): 4.4 — Diverging Narratives. Gaza famine elevated this tributary through its child mortality framing. The UN confirmed sexual violence used as a weapon of war (PGI 5.0). The World Bank logged 113 new laws strengthening women's rights. Heritage Foundation's Project 2026 targets civil rights rollbacks. These stories share a common pattern: universal data, selective coverage, and geographic silos that keep domestic stories domestic.

PGI-HE (Health): 4.4 — Diverging Narratives. Sudan's hunger crisis, the FAO funding gap, and US measles at 910 cases. The health tributary reveals an attention asymmetry: wealthy-region health stories (measles, depression treatments) get wealthy-region coverage. Poor-region health crises (Sudan, food aid gaps) get poor-region coverage. The health information ecosystem mirrors the health outcome gap it reports on.

PGI-CL (Climate): 4.4 — Diverging Narratives. Tied with Health and Women's Rights as the calmest tributaries. Kenya floods killed 40 after months of drought — visible only in Africa. Seventy-five percent of tropical rainforests can't recover from fire — covered by regions with forests, not by the demand-side economies whose consumption drives deforestation. Climate stories retain a shared factual baseline (UN data, scientific consensus) that prevents complete fracture, but their geographic reach stays narrow.

The 2.1-point spread between geopolitics (6.5) and the three calmest tributaries (4.4) maps the architecture. Where violence and power are contested, narratives rupture. Where shared values or scientific data anchor the conversation, they hold — within a smaller audience.

Cui Bono: Who Benefits From the Fractures

The Khamenei killing aligns three interest structures with mechanical precision.

US defense and intelligence communities benefit from the "precision counterterrorism" frame. It validates doctrine, justifies expenditure, and positions the killing as legal under existing authorities. The frame protects institutions.

The Iranian revolutionary establishment benefits from the "assassination of a head of state" frame. It positions Iran as the victim of imperial aggression, rallies domestic and regional solidarity, and creates a moral case for retaliation that extends beyond the current government. The frame builds legitimacy.

European foreign policy establishments benefit from the "escalation risk" frame. It positions Europe as the voice of reason between two extremes, reinforces the case for diplomatic solutions, and distances European governments from a war their publics oppose. The frame preserves options.

None of these framings are fabricated. Each emphasizes real aspects of the event. The precision strikes did happen. The assassination of a sovereign leader did happen. The escalation risks are real. The interest-alignment doesn't create the facts — it selects which facts lead the story.

The NATO refusal serves a cleaner bilateral split. Washington's "betrayal" frame serves the case for American exceptionalism in security — if allies won't join, America must lead alone, which justifies expanded unilateral military capacity and reduced multilateral obligations. Berlin's "sovereignty" frame serves European strategic autonomy — the project of building European defense capacity independent of American direction, which has accelerated since Ukraine and now gets a second catalyst.

Both framings benefit their producers. Both are internally coherent. Both describe the same event. Neither acknowledges the other's logic.

The Gaza famine framing reveals interest-alignment at its starkest. US coverage minimizing Israeli agency serves the bilateral relationship and the domestic political calculus of supporting Israel. Middle Eastern coverage foregrounding deliberate starvation policy serves the case for international intervention and the regional narrative of Palestinian resistance. European ambiguity serves the balancing act between human rights commitments and trade relationships.

The oil story follows national energy portfolios with near-perfect fidelity. Every region's coverage of the Hormuz closure serves its energy policy establishment. Exporting regions blame importers for starting wars. Importing regions blame exporters for weaponizing supply. Transition-focused regions use the disruption to argue for renewables. Every editorial line maps to a budget line somewhere in its region's energy ministry.

The DeepSeek story shows the pattern extending to technology. US coverage of sanctions evasion serves the case for tighter export controls and expanded surveillance of Chinese tech firms — benefiting the enforcement apparatus and domestic chip manufacturers. Asian coverage of innovation-despite-restrictions serves the narrative of technological self-sufficiency — benefiting the domestic AI industry and reducing political pressure to comply with Western restrictions.

The Adam Smith insight holds across every major story today: narratives, like markets, are shaped by the interests of their producers. Not through conspiracy. Through structure. Every editor choosing an angle, every headline writer selecting emphasis, every bureau chief deciding what to cover — all operating within institutional incentives that point toward serving domestic audiences, domestic advertisers, and domestic power structures.

The Global Attention Index: What the World Can't See

Today's GAI: 5.52. Selective Visibility. Down 0.16 from yesterday's 5.68. The seven-day rolling average: 6.04, deep in the Information Shadow tier.

The daily score improved slightly. The structural pattern didn't change at all.

The Attention River System

GAI-GP (Geopolitics): 5.85 — Selective Visibility. The darkest attention tributary. NATO's refusal (GAI 6.10, Information Shadow) — the most significant alliance fracture in two decades, seen only by the US and EU. The 5.42 billion people living in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America don't know the Western alliance just cracked open. The war's regional spillover — Pakistan striking Kabul (GAI 5.49), Syria-Lebanon border shelling (GAI 6.19) — stays invisible to most of the world. The war is metastasizing. Most of the planet can't see the new tumors.

GAI-TE (Technology): 5.67 — Selective Visibility. The Pentagon's $14.2 billion AI weapons budget (GAI 7.07) is today's single most invisible story. Record funding for autonomous weapons — visible only in the US. 5.87 billion people who may someday be on the receiving end of those weapons don't know they're being built. Trump scrapping chip export rules (GAI 6.64), DeepSeek's sanctions evasion (GAI 6.40), the EU's full AI rulebook (GAI 6.18) — all in the Information Shadow. The AI governance architecture is being built by three powers (US, China, EU), and each can only see its own construction site.

GAI-IW (Info Warfare): 5.77 — Selective Visibility. Republicans deploying a deepfake in a Texas race (GAI 6.64) — invisible to 5.87 billion people. The first party-created electoral deepfake in US history, and only Americans know it happened. The WEF's warning that anyone can make deepfakes (GAI 5.89) — two regions. The deception barrier has fallen to zero, and most of the world doesn't know.

GAI-EC (Economics): 5.54 — Selective Visibility. India's 93% oil price increase (GAI 6.23) — visible only in South Asia. The US and the Middle East, whose war created the price spike, don't cover its impact on 1.4 billion people. Sri Lanka's four-day workweek (GAI 5.80) — the first nation to officially restructure its economy around the fuel crisis, seen by South Asia alone. US job losses (GAI 6.64) — a potential recession signal for the world's largest economy, invisible to 5.87 billion people.

GAI-CL (Climate): 4.98 — Selective Visibility. Kenya's floods after months of drought (GAI 5.80) — Africa only. Regions driving the emissions that intensify these weather extremes don't see the human cost. Tropical rainforest collapse (GAI 4.38) — covered by the regions where forests exist, not by the economies whose demand destroys them.

GAI-WR (Women's Rights): 4.72 — Selective Visibility. US femicide tracking gaps (GAI 6.21), child marriage still legal in parts of America (GAI 5.78) — both US-only stories that challenge exceptionalism narratives but never reach the world.

GAI-HE (Health): 4.52 — Selective Visibility. The brightest tributary. Medical breakthroughs (vagus nerve depression treatment at GAI 2.50) travel furthest. When no power structure is threatened by the facts, attention flows freely.

The Most Invisible Stories

1. Pentagon's $14.2B AI weapons budget (GAI 7.07). Record autonomous weapons funding. Visible to 370 million Americans. Invisible to 5.87 billion people.

2. Republicans use AI deepfake in Texas election (GAI 6.64). First party-deployed deepfake in US history. Invisible to 5.87 billion people.

3. US loses 92,000 jobs in February (GAI 6.64). First job loss since COVID. Invisible to 5.87 billion.

4. Trump scraps AI chip export rules (GAI 6.64). Reshapes global AI development landscape. Invisible to 5.87 billion.

5. Israeli officials privately doubt regime change (GAI 6.50). Internal skepticism about the strategy behind Khamenei's killing. Invisible to 5.01 billion.

PGI x GAI: The Complete Picture

The two indexes together reveal what neither captures alone.

Khamenei killing: PGI 8.0, GAI 5.62. Where it's covered, it generates the widest divergence of the day. But 5.01 billion people in Asia-Pacific, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America don't see it at all. The most consequential geopolitical event of 2026 so far, invisible to two-thirds of humanity. High disagreement, moderate invisibility.

NATO refusal: PGI 7.5, GAI 6.10. The alliance fracture generates fierce US-EU disagreement and near-total global invisibility. Only the two sides of the argument can see it. The 5.42 billion people affected by the alliance's future — everyone who lives under its security umbrella or outside it — don't know it cracked. High disagreement, high invisibility.

Gaza famine: PGI 7.4, GAI 5.62. Sharp divergence on responsibility, moderate visibility. Three regions see it and disagree violently about cause. 5.01 billion people don't see it at all. 132,000 children at risk, and two-thirds of humanity hasn't been told.

Hormuz shutdown: PGI 6.9, GAI 4.24. Four regions see it — the broadest coverage of any major story today. Where they see it, they disagree on causation. But South Asia, Africa, and Latin America — 3.46 billion people most vulnerable to energy disruption — don't see the mechanism disrupting their energy.

Pentagon AI weapons budget: PGI 4.53, GAI 7.07. Low divergence, extreme invisibility. Where it's covered, there's modest domestic debate. Where it isn't covered — almost everywhere — the most significant autonomous weapons investment in history doesn't exist. This is the "silent buildup" pattern: weapons programs that attract consensus within the funding country and total ignorance outside it.

Vagus nerve implant: PGI 2.50, GAI 2.50. Low divergence, broad visibility. The floor. When a story threatens nobody's interests and offers universal human benefit, the perception gap and attention gap both nearly vanish. Medical breakthroughs remain the closest thing to shared global reality.

Region Blindness

Latin America missed 96% of today's stories. South Asia missed 87%. Africa missed 82%.

Three regions, home to 3.46 billion people, exist in information deserts. They're also the three regions most exposed to the war's second-order effects: energy rationing, food supply disruption, fertilizer shortages. The regions that can least afford to be uninformed are the most informationally isolated.

This isn't coincidence. Media infrastructure correlates with wealth. The regions producing the most journalism see the most world. The regions most affected by the world see the least of it.

Pattern Recognition

Three patterns emerge from today's 58 stories.

The war has become the operating system. The Iran conflict isn't a story anymore. It's the background process running behind every other story. Oil prices, NATO politics, food security, AI chip policy, deepfake proliferation — all of them now route through the war. The geopolitics tributary (6.5) doesn't spike because it's been elevated so long it's the new terrain. The seven-day rolling PGI average at 5.5 represents a world that has adjusted — not to peace, but to sustained disagreement. The fracture isn't an event. It's the infrastructure.

Alliance fractures outpace narrative fractures. Yesterday's biggest gap was between adversaries — the US and the Middle East, at 8.2. Today that gap holds, but the new development is the gap within the Western bloc. NATO refusal (PGI 7.5, EU-US pair) represents something different from the US-Iran narrative divide. Adversaries are expected to disagree. Allies aren't. When Germany tells the US that its war isn't NATO's business, the shared framework that made Western narratives roughly coherent starts dissolving. The next phase of the PGI won't just measure East-West divergence. It'll measure West-West divergence.

Invisibility is the bigger problem. The PGI measures how differently the world sees the same story. The GAI measures whether the world sees it at all. Today, the GAI reveals something more fundamental than disagreement: absence. 5.87 billion people don't know the Pentagon is spending $14.2 billion on AI weapons. 5.01 billion don't know Khamenei was killed. 5.42 billion don't know NATO fractured. You can't disagree with a story you've never heard. Before the perception gap is a problem, the attention gap ensures most people never reach the argument.

Trend Line

5.4 holds in the Diverging Narratives tier. Down 0.4 from yesterday's 5.8. The seven-day rolling average at 5.5 confirms the new equilibrium.

The tributary profile shifted modestly. Geopolitics cooled from 6.9 to 6.5 — still Competing Realities, still the hottest stream, but yesterday's Karachi consulate spike (7.73) gave way to Khamenei's killing at 8.0 as a single-story peak with fewer mid-range war stories filling the space. Info Warfare held at 5.8. Economics dropped from 5.6 to 5.3. The three calmest tributaries converged at 4.4.

The GAI dropped from 5.68 to 5.52. Slightly better attention, but the seven-day rolling average at 6.04 remains in Information Shadow territory. The world's structural attention deficit hasn't budged.

Tomorrow's indicators: if Khamenei's death triggers succession politics in Iran, PGI-GP will surge on interpretation gaps — who inherits, what changes, whether the regime survives. If NATO's refusal becomes a bilateral crisis between Washington and Berlin, the EU-US pair will climb above 5.0 for the first time this week. If oil crosses $100, the economics tributary will heat as rationing stories multiply from South Asia to Africa. The infrastructure of disagreement is stable. The inputs keep arriving.

Closing Insight

A supreme leader died today. Half the world calls it justice. A third calls it war. Two-thirds of humanity doesn't know it happened.

An alliance built over 77 years cracked in public. The two sides disagree on whether it matters. Five billion people didn't hear it crack.

132,000 children face starvation by June. The regions arguing about whose fault it is can see them. The regions that could help mostly can't.

The PGI at 5.4 measures how the world disagrees. The GAI at 5.52 measures what the world can't see. Together they reveal a planet where the biggest stories generate the widest fractures among the smallest audiences, while the majority lives in silence.

The river runs. The tributaries split. Most of the world stands on dry land, hearing nothing.

See you tomorrow.