Eruption of mass protest in Iran a non-story for corporate media
Photo from eshare’s photostream
2000: A tight presidential election is decided by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, cutting short a ballot recount process in Florida. The winner of the popular vote and probable winner in Florida, Al Gore, promptly concedes.
2004: In Ohio the Secretary of State chairs the state campaign of the incumbent President Bush. Lower-income communities and people of color complain of long lines in polling stations. Kerry quickly concedes. Karl Rove denied having anything to do with the death by plane crash of Michael Connell, a Republican “tech guru,” before his scheduled testimony about alleged manipulation of electronic voting machines in Ohio. His family wants the truth..
But hey, no election is perfect. The United States is the greatest democracy in the world, after all. No big deal.
Unlike, say, that country over there we didn’t invade. That fundamentalist theocracy run by that crazy guy who wants to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ (actually a mistranslation) with nukes, Iran (say ‘eee-ron’ not ‘I-ran’). When an American journalist was recently jailed by the Iranian regime on bogus charges for weeks, big media were all over the story.
Now the incumbent Ahmadinejad has claimed victory in Iran’s presidential election, but supporters of the opposition candidate have alleged electoral fraud.
See, in a mature democracy like ours, we’d agree to put an end to the bitter election season. The opposition concedes, and America moves on.
But Iran is so backward and authoritarian. The opposition candidate is still contesting the results! Even the U.S. government is concerned with the integrity of the election.
Oh, and Iranians – women, men, young and old – are taking to the streets in huge numbers in mostly non-violent protest. As you can see in this video, Iran is severely lacking in modern democracy.
Thankfully, the corporate media isn’t showing much of this trivial news. There’s nothing for us to learn from or about Iran. Even as a close follower of the press, I didn’t grasp the scope of these protests until today. Darn those blogs and alternative news outlets.
Previously on Mediahacker: Media oblivious to police attack on Iraq vets. Because veterans come home to be honored with rhetoric, not to protest and be heard.
Update: Cartoonist Matt Bors nails it below.
1):: “See, in a mature democracy like ours, we’d agree to put an end to the bitter election season. ”
2):: “The opposition concedes, and America moves on.”
3):: “But Iran is so backward and authoritarian.”
4):: “The opposition candidate is still contesting the results! Even the U.S. government is concerned with the integrity of the election.”
The quips in (1,2,3) are in my humble opinion, – immature, and do not meet generally accepted criterion for objective journalism, in a fact based story.
In Point 2, I’m afraid you’ve forgotten your recent United States History – did you live elsewhere for the huge Diebold Election debacle, re-count, etc ??
otherwise, write an Op Ed. Nice site by the way, I love the design.
keep it up!
~Omar
Great post. I’ve heard pieces of this on the internet trade winds, but this was much more solid, and i like the white haired fellow towards the end of the video.
[...] a more pointed and sarcastic look at the situation, head to the Media Hacker, a 21-year-old independent journalist and wed developer from Texas. He recaps the last decade of [...]
hey palamino,
nice bumping into this story, thanks for posting. i have been following the situation as closely as possible. i am not sure, but it seems your video was disabled, so you may want to repost it, or save that kind ov video to another account. certainly iran is cracking down on journalists, and trying to supress the story as much as possible…
are there any actions surrounding this here in austin? i would love to filom, if there are.
thanks for posting!
xoxox
skinnychef
The protests were mentioned in all of the following stories:
AP report on June 12th telling of potential for protests.
FOXNews report on June 13th with mention of protests in the lead paragraph.
June 13th report onCNN with a video link of the protests in Tehran.
June 14th NY Times report with embedded MSNBC video covering the protests in Tehran.
In all the corporate media I’ve come across, the Iran election and resulting protests have been pretty big stories. Maybe, I’m missing something?
Omar: I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying. I hope it’s clear that this post is generally sarcastic.
skinnychef: Sorry the video didn’t work for you, but it seems okay on my end. I don’t know of any solidarity events in Austin, unfortunately, but good question. The domestic anti-war/left fails to be relevant when it matters once again.
Jay: Ever the skeptic, huh? Check out this ReadWriteWeb post. Many bloggers have noticed the media’s lack of attention to the protests. I appreciate your smattering of links, but they don’t demonstrate much of anything. The election was on the 12th and the uprising only became a top story in most media on late Saturday and Sunday – probably in large part due to the ever-louder chorus of criticism in the blogosphere.
I still don’t understand the outrage. Maybe CNN could have produced a story more quickly online about the protests but this is certainly a story they were covering extensively. And apparently every other corporate media entity, including “news networks like the BBC, NPR, and the Times” was covering this.
To ReadWriteWeb’s credit they did post an update that pointed out inconsistencies in some of the stories they helped propagate.
A warning, Jay: please avoid distortion and exaggeration. There were no “inconsistencies” in ReadWriteWeb’s story. Their update simply points out that CNN is finally giving the story the attention it deserves.
Taking CNN as an example – before writing the post I checked cnn.com several times through Friday and Saturday. Human-interest, domestic, even soft news stories were in the top spot, not the largest protests in Iran in years. Since my post on Saturday night Iran has miraculously been the top story every time I’ve checked. I think the message got through to CNN.
The issue is not just the number of stories or whether a given outlet did a story on the protests. It’s how far up on the page the story appeared. Not sure why you cite the BBC, I’m not talking about them.
A human beings begins scathing his perceptiveness teeth the earliest often he bites off more than he can chew.