Kourosh Ziabari – The National Interest: More than most countries in the Middle East and West Asia, international attention is gravitating toward Iran, which has become one of the crucial news hotspots of the world. Iran is not garnering interest because of all the fancy things typically associated with it: windcatchers and Persian gardens, millennia-old castles, saffron, carpets, or poetry; rather, it is at the heart of some of the most difficult conversations around nuclear security, terrorism, and human rights.
In a 2013 study, Elad Segev, an associate professor of international communication at Tel Aviv University, found that the centrality of Iran coverage in the media organizations worldwide is huge—maybe even outsized. On global news websites, Iran came after the United States, China, Palestine, Britain, and France as the sixth most frequently talked-about nation. On U.S. websites, Iran’s rank was even higher by then, trailing behind China and Britain as the third country receiving the most coverage.
Indeed, the research is nine years old, and trends have inevitably shifted ever since, but even if there have been fluctuations, they are arguably in favor of catapulting Iran into augmented salience and visibility. There has been the vaunted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that remodeled Iran’s relations with the international community, and the subsequent withdrawal of the United States from the deal under Donald Trump in 2018 which flung the world into a maelstrom of instability and put the spotlight on Tehran once more.
Iran’s omnipresence in the global media is not simply catalyzed by its importance as a nation or the singularity of events unfolding within its boundaries that don’t happen elsewhere. That said, rather than the reasons the Islamic Republic doesn’t slip from the news, it is the fashion in which those news packages are wrapped and purveyed that unmasks the broad contours of a chronic anomaly in reporting on the country: disinformation and misinformation.
Those who have followed Iranian affairs independently can testify there are acute flaws when it comes to portrayals of the nation. These are not negligible instances of inaccurate reporting but, in the preponderance of cases, deliberate attempts to churn out disinformation and misinformation to kowtow to sundry agendas. These deformities are so overwhelming that they alter the ways the global public perceives Iran, blight the Iranian public’s self-awareness, derail the calculations of the Iranian leadership on different matters, and hoodwink the international community into understanding and reacting to Iran misguidedly.