I went to Iran in 2017 - the regime wants just one thing, Western media are giving it to them.
International broadcasters want to 'hold people to account and show both sides of the argument'. Totalitarian regimes use that to enable repression.
My former BBC Newsnight colleague and experienced war reporter Mark Urban has written an excellent substack post about the decision by the BBC and others to send reporters to cover Iran’s 47th Anniversary celebrations of the Islamic Revolution. I respectfully disagree with his conclusions and wanted to add some perspective as someone who supported these kinds of Iran trips when I was in the BBC but has subsequently come to think of them as misguided.
A bit of background from me - I went to Iran as a senior manager for BBC News in 2017, to hold discussions with officials about re-opening the bureau there which had been closed after the 2009 uprising. I’ve not written publicly about this trip before. It was clear from those meetings - which never produced a concrete outcome - that what the regime craves more than anything else is the validation of serious international coverage in English. They completely reject any coverage by BBC Persian - and indeed the BBC is required to promise in advance not to use any of the material it gathers for use by its own Farsi service, staffed by people whose families are being actively persecuted by the regime inside Iran. This is a trade-off I now regret agreeing to; at the time I made all the arguments Mark does in his piece about needing to hold Iranian officials accountable for audiences in English, and the value of gathering any material on the ground, no matter how flawed the conditions. But I don’t think now the game is worth the candle.
I want to disentangle disputing the fact of the deployments from criticising the BBC’s Lyse Doucet personally. I can think of nobody better qualified than Lyse to thread the needle of reporting from Iran under restrictions while holding the Iranian regime to account. In her long form and live reporting she did this as skillfully as you would imagine. Inevitably though, copy repackaged in London for social media platforms ended up doing exactly what the Iranians wanted - for example a post on Instagram describing scenes of national celebration and family festival for the 47th Anniversary. This is exacly the kind of both-sides commentary that the regime count on when they let international broadcasters in, and it creeps in when producers who aren’t on the ground with Lyse herself are called on to repurpose content for platforms where lengthy context cannot be given.
What do we learn from the sit-down interviews with Iranian officials - where international broadcasters are supposedly ‘holding them to account’? They have taken no responsiblity for the deaths of tens of thousands of their own civilians, indeed they broadly deny this has happened at all. They merely restate regime talking points - about supposed Zionist and US interference in their internal affairs. Put simply this is a regime that lies compulsively and reflexively about everything, including killing its own people, and I have come to doubt very much the value of the ‘holding to account’ argument. It involves giving them exactly what they want - sit-down interviews with the BBC, Morning Joe and CNN, which makes them feel they have normalised their transgressive violence. Billing these interviews as ‘exclusives’ simply fulfills the regime’s public diplomacy goals; Iranian officials are playing on broadcasters’ natural competitiveness since nobody wants to sit by and watch while other networks take the access on the conditions demanded.
In his piece Mark says that ‘a significant part of the Iranian public still back its Government including its repression of dissent’. I no longer believe this to be true - the scenes we are seeing now are more like late period Romania under Ceaucescu or East Germany under Honecker - the remaining people celebrating the Revolution are directly tied themselves or via their families to the IRGC and its affiliates, or are acting under duress in other ways. There is no longer a significant part of the Iranian population that freely continue to support this regime other than those who are directly or indirectly benefiting from its criminal violence, smuggling and network of internal repression. In allowing the impression to be created otherwise, international broadcasters are being gamed - having their own concerns about impartiality and ‘showing both sides of the argument’ to be played against them by a regime that doesn’t care about these issues at all, but sees them as a means to manipulate the West into leaving it in place for longer.
We will see in the coming weeks whether military action materialises and whether indeed the revolutionary regime falls in its 48th year. I add these comments with humility as someone who has had to take these difficult decisions about coverage myself, and I’m making no personal criticism of either the people who took the decisions this time nor people like Lyse who bravely and at some risk to themselves delivered the coverage. These are finely balanced decisions - I’ve leaned the other way in the past, but I wanted to explain in a bit more detail why I’ve now changed my mind. (If people are interested in more on this I spoke to Roger Bolton on his Beebwatch podcast about it this week, which is why it’s top of mind right now.)