When Obama crawled into bed with Iran, so did the media. Defending the legacy of the Iran Deal has become one of the media’s projects. And so the media was caught completely unprepared by the massive protests in Iran. Instead of covering the protests, the media instead initially produced rewritten spin from the Iranian regime, like reported by frontpagemag.com.
Even now that actual coverage of the protests is underway, here are three myths to look out for.
1. The protests are about internal corruption
The protests in Iran are about corruption in the same way that they were in the USSR. They’re anti-government protests in a state where political power is inherently Islamist. And therefore so is the corruption. And they often carry an anti-Islamist tone because that is the nature of power in Iran. All abuses in an Islamic state converge on Islam.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has consolidated political and economic power into a variety of military-religious institutions that maintain that power through political terror. That’s what we’re seeing from the Iranian regime. And from the protesters against it.
It’s why the symbol of the current protests has become a woman who took off her hijab.
The media’s denial that there is an ideological component to the protests has been repeatedly proven false. But it neatly fits the regime’s narrative.
2. Iranian protesters don’t want our support
What this myth really means is that those who don’t want us to support protesters in Iran claim that by supporting them, we’re really undermining them. Somehow that same logic didn’t figure into their own support for Islamists in Syria, Egypt and across the region. Or for that matter, the regime in Iran.
Iranian protesters have made it quite clear that they do want our support. And that they want us to speak out.
3. No one knows what’s going on in Iran.
We know quite a lot about what’s going on in Iran. We can’t and don’t know everything, but this pose of manufactured ambiguity rings false. Especially when it comes to media outlets who claim to know everything that’s going on everywhere else. “It’s complicated” is universally true. But it’s not an excuse for the media’s refusal to report honestly on what’s going on.
While in the Arab Spring, the media was eager to utilize social media reports from protesters, in Iran it initially relied on the regime’s own spin.
That’s not complicated. It’s just dishonest.
