Media comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be from a newspaper, radio, word of mouth or television. In today’s day and age however there are new spins on media. Internet, twitter, text messaging as well as utube. It goes without saying that one may normally be able to trust what is stated or read from a newspaper or radio, but what if you couldn’t?
The people of Iran go through this daily. With the government’s fear of true events getting out and damaging their people, they rather shield them and “show their own version of events – using the same UGC, but to tell a different story, a different version of events. They would also try to make us broadcast wrong stuff so that we would lose our credibility." Says Sanam Dolatshahi, a london-based producer and presenter for BBC Persian TV.
He goes on to say that the most effective news they have is evidential news, news that has footage to back up what is actually happening. If it were not for the social media news outlets such as twitter, facebook or utube, people may never get the real stories. Instead their government may be trying to feed them fake ones.
Some believe that rule over censorship and speech has gotten stricter since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken over in 2005. He states that publishers are aware of the vetting code, and violators will be subject to both criticism and law.
Minister Mohammad Hossein Safar states “It is a clear violation of the law to give an excessive portrayal of a man and woman’s private relationships” and to “subject our youth and adults to descriptions of intercourse.” It is though this quote, found from the New York Times that we see what they want there youth to learn about and what they want to be exempt from their thoughts.
For those of you who don’t know how serious the censorship problem is in Iran, this should give you an idea it has been said that the Iranian government is trying to configure a way for Iranian people to be able to connect through what they would call the intranet, not the internet.
The reason for this comes after the government saw the damage that bloggers on web addresses were causing with free speech. They were blogging on news events, and stating their opinion on the matters. This did not make them happy so they believe that this intranet will be the perfect solution.
The catch is that through this site, the “users would not be able to access anything the authorities do not want them to see.” says blogger Hossein Derakhshan. So they may feel like they are getting somewhere but in actuality the government is still hiding what they don’t want heard.