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In U.S. media’s Iran coverage, essential voices are missing

Iran and its people are as complex and diverse as Americans

  • Joseph Darius Jaafari
In this photograph taken Saturday, Jan. 11, 2020, an Iranian protester prepares to throw a tear gas canister back at police in front of Amir Kabir University in Tehran, Iran, during a demonstration to remember victims of a Ukrainian airplane shot down by an Iranian missile. On Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, online videos purported to show that Iranian security forces fired both live ammunition and tear gas to disperse demonstrators protesting against the Islamic Republic's initial denial that it shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. (AP Photo)

 AP Photo

In this photograph taken Saturday, Jan. 11, 2020, an Iranian protester prepares to throw a tear gas canister back at police in front of Amir Kabir University in Tehran, Iran, during a demonstration to remember victims of a Ukrainian airplane shot down by an Iranian missile. On Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, online videos purported to show that Iranian security forces fired both live ammunition and tear gas to disperse demonstrators protesting against the Islamic Republic's initial denial that it shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. (AP Photo)

Hello and good morning Context readers! I don’t know about y’all, but I spent my snow day on Saturday catching up on all the Oscar nominations for Best Picture. I got through “The Irishman” (basically, “The Godfather,” but with Jimmy Hoffa), “Joker” (Heath Ledger still can’t be beat IMHO) and “Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood” (it was, you know, just fine). And while we wait in anticipation for the award show, there is anger on Twitter for how male-dominated the nominees all are. Not one woman was nominated for best director. Even “Little Women” (haven’t seen it yet, but I *loved* the Wynona Ryder version), which was nominated for best film, didn’t get a nod for director Greta Gerwig. Tribeca Films and Fickle Fish Films jumped in on the outrage. And despite the Academy’s attempts to push for more diversity in the award show, it seems like there’s still a ways to go. Related, today we’re going to talk about a similar topic in news coverage: reporter diversity. For the rest of the week, The Context will be answering questions that you submitted to us that require a bit of digging. As always, we love to hear from you. If you have a policy, feel free to send us a message through our Listening Post.  — Joseph Darius Jaafari, staff writer.
Iran Plane Crash Protest

AP Photo

In this photograph taken Saturday, Jan. 11, 2020, an Iranian protester prepares to throw a tear gas canister back at police in front of Amir Kabir University in Tehran, Iran, during a demonstration to remember victims of a Ukrainian airplane shot down by an Iranian missile. On Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, online videos purported to show that Iranian security forces fired both live ammunition and tear gas to disperse demonstrators protesting against the Islamic Republic’s initial denial that it shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. (AP Photo)

Last week, PA Post published a story in partnership with Yes! Media, in which I critiqued the coverage of Iran in the wake of the U.S. assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. As an Iranian-American watching from the sidelines – and thinking of my own family in Iran and across the U.S. – I immediately recognized a problem in the way American television outlets were telling the story. Mainly, they weren’t including our voices in covering the issue, as a result spreading misinformation on certain issues or, as The Intercept reported, they used people as sources who could have a financial stake in seeing a war start.

This isn’t anything new, lack of diversity in news goes back decades to the civil rights movement and how newspapers covered racial problems. More recently, it’s something media outlets had to deal with in the 2016 election, when newspapers admittedly failed to recognize or even interview people from some communities.

But a quick recap on Iran for those who really weren’t glued to the news for the last three weeks:

Gen. Soleimani was leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qud Forces — an elite and deadly military group that helped aid and support Syria’s Assad regime and stood up extremist military forces in the Middle East, such as Hezbollah. He also was instrumental in helping the American-led coalition that rid the region of ISIS. On Jan. 3, President Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport.

Afterwards, fears rose about whether or not there would be a full-on war. That didn’t happen,  but Trump imposed more sanctions on the country after a retaliatory missile strike from Iran hit two Iraqi bases where U.S. troops were stationed. Then, in what Iran says was an accident, a Ukrainian passenger jet was shot down over Tehran just hours after Iran’s missile volley.

All along, Americans heard the same rhetoric used against Iraq in 2003 now being directed at Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Iranians would see America’s attack as “giving them freedom.” Sound familiar? Turns out, that’s not how Iranians viewed the attack, as evidenced by the millions who came out across Iran for Soleimani’s funeral, even people opposed to the regime.

Coverage of the crisis in the U.S. media was problematic. For example, many commentators couldn’t understand how the same Iranians who came out for the funeral would also protest their  government the next day for shooting down the Ukrainian plane. While American pundits focused on how the Iranian parliamentarians screamed “Death to America,” little was focused on protesters in Tehran made a point to not trample on both Israeli and American flags during a march.

While in Pittsburgh last week, I spoke with a handful of Iranian Americans who agreed that the media expected them to speak for all Iranians. One man I spoke with said he was approached by a local news outlet and asked to gather his friends for a segment on how Iranians viewed Trump and the Soleimani assassination. He said he didn’t follow through because he was worried about how it would be spun by the news outlet.

Another Iranian I spoke with, who moved here after the Iranian revolution of 1979, said she and her friends thought I was a spy and were too afraid to talk to me. That fear, one of them said, was brought on by news coverage they said made today “scarier than after 9/11.”

It’s hard to blame them. Unless you were following specific Iranian-American reporters, there was little reason for anyone to know what was really happening on the ground in Iran or the reaction across the U.S.’s Persian population (which was approximately 1.5 million people in a 2012 survey).

I asked Yara Elmjouie, an Iranian-American reporter for AJ+, what he thought about the American news coverage, and he said that he couldn’t rely on major networks to paint an accurate picture.

“Both the Los Angeles and New York Times ran the Trump allegations that Soleimani was an imminent threat – that claim was plastered on the front pages,” he said. “It’s not to condemn these publications, but this kind of willingness to not doubt or present doubt in the headline of a claim of that substance is the kind of thing that lead is into the 2003 Iraq war.”

I also asked Melissa Etehad, an Iranian-American reporter at the Los Angeles Times, about how she felt about the coverage, and if she had spoken with people who felt the same way as the people I met in Pittsburgh.

Yes and no, she said.

“We have been doing a better job [at covering the Middle East], and we owe it to foreigners in newsrooms who put a brake on orientalist rhetoric,” she said. “But one thing I can’t help but notice is perhaps — when I look at TV news – I see a lot of talking heads that I do not feel represent people of color or Iranian Americans.”

I spoke with Scott LaMar on SmartTalk last week on how we are missing that context from Iranian news coverage. Here’s what I said, and you can click here to listen to the full conversation:

“I think the entire point for Americans when they … digest this news coverage is that our countries are actually quite, quite similar. You know, when it comes to politics… [Iranians are] pretty evenly split when it comes to overthrowing the regime or keep the regime, just like America [with Trump]…we are so similar in our politics and the use of religion in our politics and it’s shocking that we can’t see these similarities when it’s so glaring if you just dig a little bit deeper.”

Overall, both Iranian reporters and regular people I spoke with all had one big takeaway from the news coverage of the last few weeks: Americans need history and context in their news. And in order to do that, news organizations need to go the extra mile to understand Iran’s culture and, when possible, hire someone who is from that culture to report on it. Otherwise, things get misinterpreted easily.

My former boss, Bill Keller (a past executive editor of the New York Times who wrote two columns in support of the Iraq war nearly two decades ago), said if there is one thing we learned from the news coverage leading up to the Iraq invasion, it’s that reporters aren’t immune to naivety, and we can do better. — Joseph Darius Jaafari 

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AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

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