The Financial Times, which fancies itself as “recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy” published another article so one-sided and agenda-driven that it wouldn’t have been out of place at the Guardian.
The heroine of the FT tale (“Iranian state TV anchor becomes a symbol of resistance”, June 17) is Sahar Emami, who was delivering a live broadcast the moment the IDF struck The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), a tool in the propaganda arsenal fueling Iran’s genocidal aims.
Its various organs, as our colleague Tamar Sternthal recently showed, including Press TV, Sahar TV, IRIB Ofogh and the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, all spew antisemitic, genocidal rhetoric.
Yet, the FT reporter, Bita Ghaffari, uncritically quoted officials of the country which, let’s remember, is among the world’s most repressive for press freedom, praising her a “lioness”, a “symbol of resilience, steadfastness and unyielding spirit” a “brave-hearted daughter of Iran” and “a maiden in the battlefield”.
Here’s the one paragraph in the piece voicing criticism of IRIB, which Ghaffari describes the “conservative” broadcasting group:
The conservative broadcasting group has faced criticism from reformist politicians and many Iranians for serving as a mouthpiece for the autocratic state, which itself stifles freedom of expression. It is seen as highly selective in its coverage of international and domestic developments, such as protests that followed the death in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who had been arrested by Iran’s notorious morality police.
In addition to the fact that IRIB has repeatedly broadcast forced television confessions by Iranian dissidents extracted under torture, it long played a role as a vehicle for antisemitic indoctrination, including the use of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to base the claim that international Zionism aims to take over the world.
Germany’s Interior Ministry has described IRIB’s reporting as antisemitic,” and Berlin’s 2017 anti-Semitism report classifies the broadcaster’s German language service as stoking “antisemitic hatred.” In 2014, IRIB aired a documentary titled “Zionist Aspirations to Control the West”, promoting canards of an alleged nefarious Jewish-Zionist agenda and Jewish control of various U.S. fields, such as politics, policies, Hollywood and academia.
Further, the IRIB as a whole was first sanctioned by the US in 2013, and, as FDD reported, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned six senior IRIB employees in 2022, stating that IRIB “and its subsidiaries act not as objective media outlets but rather as a critical tool in the Iranian government’s mass suppression and censorship campaign against its own people.”
It added that IRIB “cooperates extensively with security and intelligence agencies, including Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to obtain and publicly disseminate forced confessions from Iranians, dual nationals, and foreign detainees,” with “evidence point[ing] to the use of torture, both physical and psychological; threats against family members; and degrading treatment to extract forced confessions.”
Another IRIB outlet has been sanctioned by several Western countries and the EU.
The FT concludes by reporting that Emami told viewers that the attack had “targeted freedom of speech, the truth, and the voices of women, men and children who were martyred in recent days”, talking points that an outlet which truly valued journalistic “integrity” and “accuracy” would have revealed as crude, totalitarian propaganda that’s the opposite of the truth.
