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Digital Dialogueinto the papers. Those in power oftenassert it by shutting down a rival’smouthpiece.There’s another reason to reform thepress in Iran. Since a systematic crackdown,which has included journalists,bloggers, academics and researchers,journalism there has become synonymouswith jail and tyranny. Adoptingmore liberal press practices is likelyto do Iran far more good than harm,and here’s four reasons why:1. The work of any journalist or propagandistpale in comparison to thefar-fetched scenarios swirling inIranian living rooms, taxi cabs—and,above all, in the Iranian imagination.I’ve heard them all and, believe me,reality is not always stranger thanfiction.2. Satellite dishes are illegal but on theascent in Iran. They crop up fasterthan officials can take them down.Most of the programs they watchstream in from Los Angeles, wherethere is a lot of singing and dancing,but from where dissidents have beenunsuccessfully trying to topple theregime for 30 years. Both the BritishfundedBBC Persian service and theU.S. government-backed Voice ofAmerica have expanded their radiobroadcasts to include television. Sogreat is the audience, that essentiallythe government is not shielding anyonefrom anything.3. Foreign journalists have a difficulttime obtaining permission to reportfrom Iran or to set up bureaus there.Visiting reporters are obliged to employ“minders” from the Ministry ofCulture and Islamic Guidance, somethingthey fail to tell their viewers andreaders. This might help authoritiesfeel in greater control of the informationthat trickles out. But the newsvacuum about Iran is filled not byThe New York Times or ABC Newsbut by information disseminated byinterest groups, dissidents and othermuch more biased parties.4. What do the arrests and jailing ofjournalists and bloggers accomplish?If anything, it attracts more attentionto their work. And it reinforces theworst stereotypes everyone alreadyTehran Bureau’s home page.has about Iran. Why not breakthem?Tehran Bureau: An OnlineNews HubThe decision to create TehranBureau.com, an online news magazine towhich journalists familiar with Irancontribute stories, emerged out ofmany conversations and e-mails witha classmate from Columbia JournalismSchool. Each of us wanted to reportnews about Iran, but not in the simplisticway that country is too oftencovered by the Western mainstreammedia. As much to avoid the dangersof Iran’s factional politics as to escapethe Western news media’s bias againstIran and Iranians, we decided to takeadvantage of the Internet and set upa virtual bureau. In part, our thinkingwas guided by us knowing thatIranians are as much plugged in asany developed society.At a time when world news shouldbe more important than ever, newsorganizations continue their contraction,and to do this they’ve shutteredor scaled back foreign bureaus. Thoughthe trend in journalism is specialization,news organizations appear tobe investing fewer resources in thecultivation of editorial and reportingstaffs who can become, in effect, areaexperts.This reduction in reporting knowledgeand resources has consequences,as information slips through as newsthat shapes Western perceptions andpolicy. Four years ago, soon after thelast presidential election—the oneAhmadinejad won—a black-and-whitephotograph purporting to show thenew president as a hostage-taker inthe 1979 embassy takeover circulatedwidely in the media. To an Iranian,certainly, the person in the picturelooks nothing like him. I e-maileda professor who was working on abook about the hostage crisis to gethis perspective.“That was first sent out by an MEKaffiliatedWeb site,” he wrote back,referring to the Iranian Mojahedin, anIranian opposition group living in exile.“The two individuals in the photo havelong since been identified as a MEKpartisan who was later executed andanother student who was killed in theIraq War.” More interestingly, in theeight years Ahmadinejad’s predecessorNieman Reports | Summer 2009 47