Foreign broadcasters walk a fine line in Iran

AP foreign, Monday June 29 2009

JILL LAWLESS

Associated Press Writer= LONDON (AP) — Inside the studios of BBC Persian television, dozens of journalists have been working around the clock at their computers and telephones, trying to report the news to Iran — or, according to the government in Tehran, stirring up trouble.

Since Iran's disputed election on June 12, the BBC and a handful of other Farsi-language broadcasters around the world, from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, have supplied millions of Iranians with independent reports in their own language about the country's most serious turmoil since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

A 24-year-old student in Tehran said channels like BBC Persian and Voice of America "are the only true sources for the news for us inside Iran."

"During the demonstrations that happened on Saturday, which everybody in Iran knows what happened on the streets of Tehran and some other major cities, the state TV channels were showing comedy classic movies," said the student, who didn't want his name used for fear of reprisals.

Iran's religious government has accused foreign broadcasters — the BBC in particular — of fueling unrest during and after the contested election that returned hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The BBC, VOA and other broadcasters say Iran has been jamming their television signals and have added new satellite paths to get around the blockage. The BBC and VOA also broadcast to Iran on short- and medium-wave radio and through Web sites that are sometimes blocked.

"We provide independent news," said the BBC's Iranian affairs analyst, Sadeq Saba. "That is why we are so popular in Iran. And that is why the Iranian government doesn't like us."

Foreign-based Farsi radio and TV broadcasters have gained increased importance for millions of Iranians since the election, as the country's Islamic authorities have moved to deprive people of independent sources of news. Facebook, Twitter and other Web sites have been blocked, text messaging has been cut off and cell phone service in Tehran is frequently down.

"I don't fully trust VOA or BBC Persian, but at least they are much better than the state TV channels," said a 57 -year-old shopkeeper in the northeastern city of Mashhad. "At least they don't hide the news."

Inside BBC Persian's offices overlooking the stone buildings and red double-decker buses of central London, the station's young Iranian staffers interview Iranians over the telephone, try to check elusive facts and edit footage from international broadcasters and Iranian "citizen journalists" whose videos of protests and street clashes have provided some of the most powerful images of the conflict.

BBC Persian television began broadcasting in January and before the election produced eight hours of programing a day — since increased to 11. The station is getting more than 6,000 e-mails a day, along with a flood of calls and text messages.

"It's been an intense couple of weeks," said the station's special correspondent, Kasra Naji. "I'm working 10, 12, 13 hours a day."

Like other broadcasters, BBC Persian says it's hard to know how many people inside Iran are watching, but it believes its audience is in the millions.

Youth-oriented Dutch station Radio Zameneh has also seen its profile rise since it switched its focus from underground music and alternative literature to politics in the days since the election. The station's 90-minute daily broadcast by shortwave and satellite appears to have developed a significant following — an Iranian diplomat accused the Dutch government, which funds the station, of meddling in Iran's internal affairs and financing propaganda.

In Los Angeles, home to a large Iranian community, Farsi-language radio station KIRN has opened up its phone lines to let Iranians in the U.S. share news gleaned from friends and family back home.

There also is an appreciative audience for Menashe Amir's Farsi-language broadcasts on state-run Israel Radio. From a spartan radio studio off a narrow Jerusalem alleyway, broadcasts a mix of popular Persian music, interviews with exiled Iranian intellectuals and chats with Iranians themselves — via a switchboard in Germany to get around a ban on calls from Iran to the Jewish state.

Amir, 69, has hosted Israel Radio's only Farsi-language broadcast for the past 50 years, but says the last two weeks have been the most memorable in his career.

"Every human being in the world should be concerned with what is happening there," said Amir, who left Iran in 1959 and has not visited since the 1979 revolution.

It's difficult to know the size of Amir's audience, but his daily hour-and-a-half long broadcast reaches well beyond Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. It's enough of a presence that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has name-checked the "Zionist broadcast" as among those behind the unrest.

The job of journalists in Iran has got a lot harder since Ahmadinejad's opponents began protesting against an election they claim was rigged. Hundreds of people have been detained, and at least 17 have been killed.

Foreign journalists in Iran have been prevented from moving around freely and told to stick to their offices. On Sunday — days after Khamenei singled out Britain as the most treacherous of the Western powers meddling in Iran's affairs — the BBC's full-time correspondent in Tehran was ordered to leave the country.

Iranian authorities refused BBC Persian permission to have journalists in Tehran, although BBC's English-language service has an office there.

Like the BBC, VOA says its TV signal has been jammed and has added three new satellite paths to allow transmission. It also is using YouTube, radio, Twitter and Facebook to help provide Iranians with information.

"We're coming up with a lot of different ways to get in there," said VOA's director of public relations, Joan Mower.

All the foreign broadcasters deny interfering in Iran's affairs. The BBC says it goes to great lengths to maintain standards of fairness and impartiality, even though many staff members are worried about close friends and family in Iran.

"It's not easy," said the BBC's Saba. "They are not covering a conflict in Russia or Ecuador. They are covering a conflict in their own country."

The BBC has been careful never to claim the election was rigged, and tries to verify images it gets from Iran by comparing different footage of the same event and interviewing eyewitnesses over the phone.

At Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — a U.S.-backed broadcaster which also is not allowed to have an office in Tehran — journalist Golnaz Esfandiari said it was "getting increasingly difficult to get information from Iran."

"People are facing pressure," she said, adding that despite that, "lots of them are willing to speak to us, because it's one of the only platforms where they can express themselves freely and where they can inform others about what's going on in their city, how they feel about this crisis."

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Associated Press Writers Arthur Max in Amsterdam, Karel Janicek in Prague, Foster Klug in Washington and Aron Heller in Jerusalem contributed to this report.