Who’s really misreading Tehran?
Foreign Policy‘s seven-part series, "Misreading Tehran," is, for the most part, a disappointing example of the phenomenon it purports to explain — inaccurate interpretations of Iranian politics surrounding the Islamic Republic’s June 12, 2009, presidential election. Such misinterpretation has had a deeply corrosive effect on the debate about America’s Iran policy. The series starts with ...
Foreign Policy's seven-part series, "Misreading Tehran," is, for the most part, a disappointing example of the phenomenon it purports to explain -- inaccurate interpretations of Iranian politics surrounding the Islamic Republic's June 12, 2009, presidential election. Such misinterpretation has had a deeply corrosive effect on the debate about America's Iran policy.
Foreign Policy‘s seven-part series, "Misreading Tehran," is, for the most part, a disappointing example of the phenomenon it purports to explain — inaccurate interpretations of Iranian politics surrounding the Islamic Republic’s June 12, 2009, presidential election. Such misinterpretation has had a deeply corrosive effect on the debate about America’s Iran policy.
The series starts with an egregious misstatement of reality in the introduction setting up the articles that follow: "When Iranians took to the streets the day after they cast their ballots for president, the Western media was presented with a sweeping, dramatic story…. It was a story that seemed to write itself. But it was also a story that the West — and the American media in particular — was destined to get wrong in ways both large and small."
It is certainly true that much of the American media — including some of the writers featured in the "Misreading Tehran" series — got the story of Iranian politics over the last year spectacularly wrong. But that was hardly destiny. That so many got it so wrong is not the result of a "proverbial perfect storm of obstacles in producing calm, reasonable reporting about the events in Iran," as the prologue suggests. The real culprit was — and, unfortunately, still is — willfully bad journalism and analysis, motivated in at least some cases by writers’ personal political agendas.
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