Iran and a hard place
Jun 22nd, 2009 | By Nunzia Rider | Read more in: Politics
This last week has been oh so hard on us journalists. Seriously. It’s terribly difficult for us to focus our attention on the same story day in and day out for a week. Hell, it’s hard enough for us to stick with one thing for a few hours.
I’ve been looking for a shiny object since about Tuesday, and I wasn’t even in the newsroom when the election “results” in Iran came in and Iranians started filling the streets over the weekend.
My first thought, of course, upon seeing the Iranians in the streets protesting what they were certain were fraudulent election “results,” was “Why the hell didn’t we do that in 2000?”
But alas, our government pretty much counts on us to be complacent. We’ll write fiery things on blogs and letters to the editors, and a handful of us will go out once or twice to protest, but basically we’ll just sit back down on the couch after a few days and see what shiny object my colleagues have found to take our attention away from what we thought had been bothering us.
Our government — left or right — counts on that, and we rarely disappoint.
Jon & Kate — big announcement about life-changing decisions coming! And whatever happened to that Natalee Holloway?
But I digress. Actually, it’s a little more than a digression. I’ve just let you in a dirty little secret of journalism. Most of us have what used to be called short attention spans but is now called Attention Deficit Disorder. We get bored quickly, even when tens or hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets of a major world city demanding that an election be overturned and held again — this time with proper safeguards to make sure the vote and the counting is fair. And even when the government of that country starts shooting at the protesters.
Well, OK, the blood will draw our attention back in for a little while. But a few dozen deaths? That won’t keep us for long.
And maybe I’m being a little too hard on us. We were all pretty much shut out of actual reporting from Iran rather quickly by the government there. Several reporters found their visas unrenewed and were forced to leave the country. The ones who remain were ordered to stay in their workspaces and limited to one report — from that workspace — each day. Really fucking hard to do much actual reporting like that.
Not Iran, not even 2009, but you get the point.
But still we’ve been able to be more or less accurate, if oftentimes a bit late, getting the news out. Thanks to social media like Twitter and Facebook, along with some very clever Iranians who are doing what they have to to get their video and reports out of the country despite their government’s best efforts at preventing that from happening, the news is coming to the world.
It’s a little slow sometimes because, for no reason that I can discern other than perhaps sheer assholishness, there is no shortage of people willing to fake video and photos and reports, and I’m not even talking about people with an agenda here. I’m talking about plain old everyday assholes. It’s difficult to sort through all this, to make a determination about what’s true and what’s not, what’s accurate and what’s been embellished or even made up.
Tonight I watched hundreds of Tweets from hundreds of Twitterers rapidly posting all the information they could find. I jumped dozens of links and found, sadly, that most of it linked to bullshit. A photograph of a woman shot to death in front of a cell phone camera that was so photoshopped even John McCain could have told the difference. A report from Iranian television that left out crucial details. And these were from the people with agendas.
And still we stick to it. Studying the images, the reports until our eyes blur. Our reporters in Iran try their best to confirm information. Our Iranian stringers do the same, all the while wondering when the Basij are going to pick them up and carry them off to who knows where.
I have no idea what all this is leading to, what it all means. My AWOP colleagues Michael Hinckley of the Fearless History channel and Wil Robinson of the International channel are far more attuned to that than I am. Me, I’m more suited to tell you that here in the United States, the Republicans are fucking insane to be pushing for a forceful response. They need another reminder that they lost in November because Americans were fucking sick and tired of their tantrums, and so is the rest of the world. But damn, Michael’s already written that piece too. Doesn’t leave me much to say.
Except maybe this. Barack Obama has struck exactly the right tone in his response, no matter what the nattering nabobs of nonsense are saying on the air.
He’s told the Iranian government “to understand that the world is watching,” and, for the first time in all the times we’ve used that phrase, it really is.
And that includes my colleagues — and me. We’re watching and reporting what we see, although sometimes a good car chase in late afternoon Los Angeles would be a welcome respite.
AWOP contributing editor, politics
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re: ‘why the hell didn’t we do that in 2000?’ that’s what i wanna know. at the time i was still in the States and my first inclination was to rush down to DC and call ‘bullshit’ but after checking the Web, i couldn’t find any calls for action to do the same. and being chickenshit at heart, i certainly didn’t wanna be the only one or at best, one of a handful of dissenters, all of whom i imagined would be totally mocked (at worst on nationwide TV).
IMO we have reagan to thank, at least partially for this. i remember when he marginalised protesters, lumping them all under the dreaded ‘hippie’ label (after he orchestrated the release of the hostages). anyway, we only have ourselves to blame for the eight years of evil bullshit that followed. and i’m sure that bu$hCo, stupid as they were, counted on this, our reluctance to step up.
great post, BTW.
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News Writer
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June 22nd, 20092009-06-22T13:54:41ZF jS, Y at 9:54 am2009-06-22T13:54:41Zg:i a
Thanks, R. And welcome to my new home.
These Iranians are passionate about their lives. Some days I wonder if we Americans are passionate about anything other than contact sports and our need to feel superior. We’re certainly not passionate about our government, ridiculous teabaggeries notwithstanding.
And you know how much I love to blame Reagan for anything I can get away with. He helped destroy anything that was left of our spirit, for sure, but the “hippie” label had been cast upon us long before. These days, when we have a big “rally,” it’s more party than protest. Such a shame.
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Now that Obama has come out more forcefully, no doubt the repubs will claim victory (or “why didn’t he do it sooner”) like the morons they are.
The thing is – it’s no longer about an election. It’s about human rights. Now the US can (without claims of interference) make a strong statement about respecting human rights (something that Bush/Cheney would have had little credibility in).
Personally, I think the media (uintentionally used by the CIA in a plot hatched and put into motion before Obama took office) blew the election issue out of proportion to manufacture a revolution.
But (and perhaps this was their intent), the regime has made a fatal mistake by cracking down – now the clerics have moved it from a protest about a stolen election to flat-out human rights abuses, a la Myanmar, Zimbabwe, etc. Nice company.
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Michael Hinckley
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June 23rd, 20092009-06-24T02:46:53ZF jS, Y at 10:46 pm2009-06-24T02:46:53Zg:i a
Well neocons have to hang onto something and claim wins wherever they can, especially as economic indicators seem to be in flux right now (jobless rates still climbing, though not as steep; home sales up but prices down; ten or so banks who have already repaid the bailout but dozens more who went belly-up, etc.). This one speaks to the GOP’s old saw that Democrats are wishy-washy in the manly, rough-and-tumble world of international intimidation…I mean “foreign policy.” Of course, they forget that George H.W. Bush said nothing about the social fractures occurring in the Soviet Union in the late 80’s and early 90’s and it all turned out all right; Poland is part of NATO and Georgia is an ancillary state, Eastern European countries are being accepted into the EU at an accelerated pace (or were before the 2008 financial melt down) and so on. Makes you wonder what the Middle East, and particularly the Persian Gulf will look like in ten years or so.
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These are interesting times, to borrow a phrase. Frankly, I’m wondering what the whole world is gonna look like in a decade or so. Everything is changing, and quite rapidly. Maybe we won’t even need a decade to have a world old folks like me will be hard pressed to recognize.
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I don’t mind admitting to photoshop blindness. Tell us more about the Neda video.
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Didn’t mean to say that the video was photoshopped or altered in any way — the video is absolutely real. But in the wake of the video and the attention it got, a series of still photographs purporting to be of the dying Neda were sent around. They were badly photoshopped. One showed her with a bloody face, when the video clearly shows that not to be the case. And honestly, that one image as she is dying with her eyes looking up and to the right … that is way more powerful than a bloody image.
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