Exclusive; A Journalist in Iran: Journalists Did Not Allow Distortion of Reality

On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, a journalist inside Iran, who was arrested during the nationwide protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, spoke in a written interview with the Persian section of Voice of America about his experiences and analysis of the media situation in Iran. To ensure the safety of this well-known journalist, Voice of America refrains from mentioning his name. He states that an independent movement, utilizing social media, played the 'most important role' in 'revealing the nature of reformist and principlist currents of the Islamic Republic.' He notes that a new generation of opposition journalists emerged from among the heavily controlled newspapers. The following text summarizes this interview and answers questions about the state of journalism in Iran, summons, threats, and arrests of journalists, as well as this journalist's personal experiences: Journalism in Iran after 1979, particularly from 1997 to 2014, was an attempt by a young generation to achieve some aspects of citizenship rights and democratic principles. However, at that level, it was not only intolerated but was continuously suppressed by media owners who were ideologically aligned with the Islamic Republic, and journalists faced ongoing punishment from security, intelligence, and judicial institutions of the regime. After this period, coinciding with the start of Hassan Rouhani's government and the beginning of the JCPOA negotiations, the idealistic young generation reached middle age, and journalism became a profession viewed as a legitimate source of income for the urban middle class. Idealistic forces and opponents of the Islamic Republic were gradually purged, restricted, and ultimately banned from working, while the bureaucratic intellectual facade of the Islamic Republic, featuring figures like Rouhani and Zarif in the spotlight and individuals like Khatami and Hashemi behind the scenes, took control of all critical media capacities. Thus, the press became a battleground for competition between the reformist and principlist factions, neither of which violated the main red lines of the Islamic Republic. In such an environment, the bloody November 2019 (Aban 98) was censored in Iranian media, and afterward, the community of journalists working in domestic newspapers became so distorted in the discourse of principlism or reformism that even after the IRGC's intentional shooting down of the Ukrainian plane, despite evidence published on social media, these journalists in the regime's authorized media could not even doubt the incident and became a propaganda loudspeaker for Rouhani and Zarif, repeating the lie of a technical failure of the plane for three nights. After the rise of Ebrahim Raisi's government, the critical capacities of journalists who had been buried under the discourse of reform and the JCPOA in reformist newspapers no longer needed to defend the incumbent government and were allowed to criticize by the owners of these media connected to reformists. In such a context, when Mahsa Amini was killed by the ideological military forces of the Islamic Republic, there were no longer chains like those of Zarif and Rouhani's think tank binding the hands and feet of critical journalists to deceive them like in the case of the Ukrainian plane. Thus, suddenly, from the newspapers that the government believed had become uniform and aligned with the regime, journalists such as Elahe Mohammadi and Niloufar Hamedi bravely reported and did not allow the official media tools of the Islamic Republic to spread lies and distort reality. For this reason, the arrest of journalists in the new revolutionary wave in Iran, which began after Mahsa Amini's murder, has again become one of the agendas of the regime's security and judicial institutions, while such actions against journalists did not occur after the bloody November 2019. However, journalism in Iran has not been limited to official media space, and over the past decade, alongside the process of eliminating opposition journalists from the press and media, independent movements have emerged relying on new tools such as social media, paving the way for investigative and critical journalism. In my opinion, this movement has played the most important role in maintaining a critical spirit and revealing the nature of the reformist and principlist currents of the Islamic Republic for new generations of journalists. The emergence of a new spectrum of opposition journalists from among heavily controlled newspapers owes much to the efforts of that group separated from official media. This is a point that my interrogators emphasized during my detention, and I believe they realized too late how we had operated outside the authorized and official press. Saki Laghai, after several years of collaboration with various newspapers, became a journalist and then parliamentary and economic editor of ISNA in 1999. Since 2006, he has continued his professional activities focusing on Iran and human rights and joined the Persian section of Voice of America in the spring of 2021.