Going Vertical
Playing by the rules may lead to flawed reporting, but it gets at “one version of the truth,” said a former foreign editor at a major U.S. newspaper. But that’s a shaky argument. When the self-censored reporting of a Tehran-based foreign correspondent is published by a mainstream newspaper of record, and cited widely, it becomes much more than just one competing strain of a story. In fact, until the recent proliferation of blogs, that one self-censored version was often the only one that filled the news vacuum. I’m not advocating that news organizations abandon foreign bureaus in authoritarian countries–only that they supplement their reporting from those places and use their websites as platforms to present deeper work and multiple voices that don’t all fit in the daily print paper.
Bill Rempel, a former senior editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, once told me that ideally he’d like big news developments from Iran reported independently, by separate reporters, even if they turned up different stories or conclusions. Rempel said the stories could play side by side, so that readers could take a look and make up their own minds.
Using new digital tools and resources makes that possible and affordable. And doing it means we no longer have to accept self-censored, misleading reporting, like the kind that helped Khatami–the president when Dan De Luce was thrown out of Iran–receive such glowing coverage from foreign correspondents who played by the rules.
Reading the news during the Khatami era, I felt there was a gap between what I saw in mainstream media here and public opinion in Iran. I took up this theme in my master’s project at Columbia Journalism School. The problems I encountered helped explain why I thought I was getting a clearer and more nuanced picture reporting on Iran from New York.
My not being there had distinct advantages in the Internet age, when technology opened up many new avenues of communication and allowed new voices to be heard. In an article for Nieman Reports a few months after Tehran Bureau was launched, I explained that one of my primary motivations in setting up “the virtual Iran beat” was to assemble a staff of reporters and editors who spoke Farsi.4 This meant we could tap into a more extensive network and speak to more Iranians, even if we were not based in Tehran. And free of the filters that limit Internet access from within Iran, we could read Iranian bloggers–those who write in Iran and those who live in exile.
That was the idea, anyway. Before the 2009 post-election crackdown, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, blogging about Iran. Most were very opinionated, but even blogs with a strong point of view could be useful for possible story leads or a different perspective on an issue. When Iran’s internal factional war spilled into the open, even more valuable information began to appear online–often posted by one faction seeking to discredit another. Tehran Bureau was well positioned to scan this wide range of views, along with the Iranian press, to help inform the reporting by our staff. To date, the online resources for us are relatively rich because Iranians are as much plugged in online as any developed society. As the academic Omidvar explained:
Networked digital media is permitting conversations that could never have taken place before, between people who would have never come into contact with each other, with often dramatic results that no one could have possibly predicted adequately.