Over 30 years ago, in the northern Iranian city of Rasht, Seyed Hossein Ziabari decided to launch a magazine. Called Hatef, the Arabic and Persian for “Voice”, it was a journal of culture and society, focused especially on the endangered Gilaki language spoken in this rainy, lush valley by the Caspian. Hatef grew swiftly into a serious operation, with a large newsroom of young journalists, all squeezed into the basement of a low-rise apartment. Ziabari also had an editor-in-chief, Nasrin Pourhamrang, a calligrapher-turned-writer. Conveniently, she was also his wife.
I know Hatef very well, and not just because it became the longest-running weekly in my native Guilan province. It was run by my mother — and my father, until he died suddenly in March, at the age of 57. And so, in the most literal sense, I grew up with Iranian journalism, and all its triumphs and challenges. I saw censorship and financial hardships, outdated labour regulations and corruption.
Local firms were often reluctant to put ads in the magazine, while provincial authorities ran a covert sabotage operation against the magazine. It was just too disobedient to be given any extra lifeline. Whenever Hatef ran a story revealing institutional malfeasance, legal repercussions inevitably followed. In June 2001, for instance, the Guilan University of Medical Sciences filed an official complaint after the magazine reported that the number of HIV patients in the city of Astara had reached alarming levels.
It’s hard to get published here. Publicly distributed literature requires a licence from the Ministry of Culture. Once that’s granted, a committee for “supervising the press” actively monitors what the newspaper, magazine or website publishes. This ensures they can be disciplined appropriately when needed, and that nothing that “disturbs the public opinion” makes it to print. Those red lines are defined and readjusted rapidly: editors and reporters are supposed to have the presence of mind to know what can go out, and what should be bowdlerised.
These days, for instance, when the morality police harass women in public, newspapers are expected to either ignore them or else rehash the official talking points if something unpleasant happens: underlying health conditions; suicide; drugs. Nor can the country’s costly nuclear programme be criticised. All a journalist should write is that this is an entirely peaceful scheme meant exclusively for electricity production.
And for those who go too far? The supervisory committee has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of newspapers and websites. There’s no comprehensive inventory of the publications that have been shut down, though history offers something of a guide. Right after the revolution, in August 1979, over 20 newspapers were banned following an order by Tehran’s revolutionary court. That included Yoldash, printed in Azeri, which was closed for running a caricature of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“The supervisory committee has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of newspapers and websites.”
In April 2000, when Mohammad Khatami was president, a hardline judge called Saeed Mortazavi announced the closure of 18 newspapers overnight. To justify his spree, Mortazavi cited legal passages stating that “criminals” and “clinically insane” individuals weren’t entitled to possess instruments (read: newspapers) that could cause “accidents”.
Mortazavi didn’t stop there. By February 2004, he had personally overseen the closure or licence revocation of some 90 publications. His rampage against the reformist press came on the heels of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, whose incendiary broadsides against newspapers as the bulwark of “the enemy” at home were construed by the judiciary as a declaration of war against the nonconformist press. Mortazavi, the so-called “hangman of the press”, was himself imprisoned, in 2018, for his role in the torture and killing of four political prisoners arrested during the 2009 Green Movement. But he was released before his two-year term ended.
In a press freedom factsheet released in September 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimated that “at least” 52 newspapers had been banned by the Islamic Republic since 1979. And while print reporters can plausibly get something out, their colleagues in multimedia journalism have even less space. The tentacles of state media are so far-reaching that the idea of being a television or radio reporter presupposes that you’re an employee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the entity supervised by the Supreme Leader and with an absolute monopoly on multimedia broadcasting rights. Private broadcasters don’t exist.
The punishment for any infraction, meanwhile, can be worse than unemployment: the Islamic Republic is notorious as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. In 2022, it imprisoned at least 62 reporters. At the same time, journalism education is uncharted territory, and the most distinguished journalists are self-taught, often with degrees in other fields.
Against these odds, though, a sliver of independent, pro-reform newspapers remain. And dailies such as Shargh, Ham-Mihan or Sazandegi have been a thorn in the side of the theocracy. Military commanders, and even the ayatollah himself, launch occasional tirades about newspapers being “counterrevolutionary” outlets betraying their country.
Independent journalists have broken some big stories. Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi rattled the conscience of a nation with their courageous reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police in September 2022. They spent 17 months in prison for their work of journalism before being “pardoned” earlier this year. Years earlier, Banafsheh Samgiss, another prominent journalist, was imprisoned after reviewing a book about the role of women in Iranian music.
More to the point, the fact that this sort of reporting is sometimes taken seriously, and generates universal interest, suggests that Iranians indeed appreciate solid independent journalism. Just as important, the striking sensitivity of the Islamic Republic leaders to a free press suggests that they understand critical voices can cut through indoctrination. If people are made aware of what it’s like to live in a democracy, there’s a chance they’ll revolt for change.
Not that we should exaggerate. Many Iranians remain sceptical of domestic reporting regardless of its provenance, even stories emanating from non-governmental media. No less important, state censorship has been so forceful that many Iranians now look for their news abroad: according to one recent poll, a quarter of respondents don’t have any trust in domestic journalism.
“State censorship has been so forceful that many Iranians now look for their news abroad.”
Indeed, an increasing number of Iranians rely on diaspora media. That includes Telegram channels run by exiled dissidents; Persian broadcasters in Western capitals; and social media stars who speak the same language as their cynical followers, both literally and figuratively. Crushed by bad governance, jaded Iranians are looking for reports that don’t wrap words in journalistic euphemisms. Rather, they want journalists who have both the ability and inclination to call a corrupt politician a “bastard”.
So if the free press has never been stronger, might the media ultimately foment a more fundamental transition: including revolution in Iran? Let’s face it, over the long sweep of history, journalists have rarely precipitated radical political change absent other ingredients. But in the face of rising international isolation and domestic asphyxiation, even as the spectre of a full-fledged war looms large, one fact about Iran has hardly ever been contested. A dynamic if ailing civil society, including a press that raises a voice of dissent whenever possible, prevents the country from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East. I’m sure my father would be proud.
