Media wars, Iranian style

Trying to restrict foreign media, the government bans satellite dishes and blocks Internet sites. But Iranians tend to ignore CNN anyway.

By Cameron Abadi

Read more: Iran, Politics, Middle East, News, Islam

Sept. 28, 2006 | TEHRAN, Iran -- At the end of August, Reza Hashemi, the manager of an apartment building in northern Tehran, received an upsetting letter from the police. The note contained an ultimatum: Remove the satellite receivers from the roof, or we'll remove them for you. For a few days, Hashemi assumed it was an empty threat. A law against satellite dishes had been on the books in Iran since the mid-1990s, but it had mostly gone un-enforced -- even though it was an open secret that many Iranians used the technology to receive "un-Islamic" television shows from abroad. Then the police came knocking at a neighboring building.

"They came with an empty truck," Hashemi said. "When they left it was full of satellite dishes." So he went door-to-door in his building, breaking the bad news to his tenants. "At other buildings, they came with hammers and destroyed them right there." At least on one occasion, he said, the police didn't even bother with the tools. Last week, an Iranian wire service distributed a photo of a police officer casually dropping a dish off the ledge of a skyscraper rooftop.

Satellite dishes have not been the only target. A law passed by the Iranian Parliament this spring bars Iranians from appearing on foreign-produced broadcasts. Jamming unapproved radio signals and Internet sites is common practice.

Indeed, the Iranian government appears intent on defending itself against foreign efforts, a number of them from the United States, to break its media monopoly within the country. Recently, President Bush delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, which reiterated his administration's hope for regime change in Tehran and was addressed directly to "the people of Iran." Earlier this year, the U.S. Congress committed $50 million to the development of a new Farsi-language satellite television channel. It will join the numerous private broadcasts hostile to the Iranian regime already produced by Iranian immigrants living in California.

For their part, the Iranian people seem largely indifferent to the battle between the international media and their own government for their hearts and minds. In fact, when considering the issues of the day, Iranians display a strong will of their own. Many Iranians will consult a range of foreign and domestic media outlets -- but ultimately dismiss professional journalism altogether. Instead, they often devise their own idiosyncratic analyses of current events, drawing on a long Iranian tradition of conspiracy theorizing. "Iranians," says Professor Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, "have developed their own special language for dealing with the world."

The widespread cynicism with which Iranians approach the news media is largely a product of the country's distorted media landscape, where news outlets are ubiquitous but objective news reporting is rare. "We don't have a free market," a journalist from a conservative Iranian wire service admitted. "The government sets the tone."

The government's control of the news media is nothing new. "Iran has experienced only two short periods in its history when the press has been able to function relatively unfettered," said Vasij Naderi, a professor of law in Tehran. "The years between the end of World War II and the coup against Mohammed Mossadeq [in 1953], and the months after the election of President Khatami in the late 1990s."

But even the Khatami-led reformist period of the late 1990s never managed to wrest domestic television from the hands of the state. Without a satellite dish, television viewers in Iran have access to six stations, all of which are staffed at the discretion of the Islamic government. Unsurprisingly, broadcasts are exceedingly pious. In one "Dr. Phil"-type segment, a cleric warned about the evils of abortion and praised a young boy who had memorized the Koran. News reports are also strictly on message with the government. U.N. resolution 1701, a cease-fire agreement, is routinely characterized as a Hezbollah victory, while Israel is exclusively referred to as the "Zionist regime."

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