Word: shahs
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...LINE with this dark vision of Iran's potential leadership, the American media wrote of the mass opposition to the Shah in loaded, pejorative terms. Americans read of mobs rampaging, and Newsweek reported that "thousands of hysterical Iranians" wept for their dead. In contrast, the Shah emerged was the force of reason, and the only force that the United States could conceivably support to block the rising tide of anarchy...
Again, it was the news columns that prepared the way for open editorial expressions of support for the Shah. The Associated Press blamed the crisis on the Shah's attempt to bring Iran's "feudalistic society into the modern (aka western) world." The New York Times, on November 6, committed one of the most egregious examples of slanted coverage when it wrote that "the Shah even invited (opposition leader) Mr. Sanjabi to the palace was a dramatic compromise for him. The founder of Mr. Sanjabi's party, Mohammed Mossadegh, almost ousted the Shah from power in 1953." The Times story...
...benevolent compromiser was further described not only as a progressive who brought Iran into the 20th century, but as socially advanced. Newspaper and magazine accounts cited the Shah's record in relaxing censorship, halting torture and replacing political prisoners as evidence of his willingness to cooperate with the opposition, and reported that the abortive land reform efforts of the '60s marked both the Shah's enlightenment and formed the pretext for opposition to his regime...
FROM BELIEVING THAT the opposition derived from either anachronistic religious fanaticism or heathen communism and that the Shah was the last remaining bastion holding both those forces back from the oil fields, the American press and public opinion had only a very short leap to make in advocating all-out support for the Shah. The New York Times concluded that "political change is clearly overdue," but ignored the depth of opposition when it called for support of the Shah because his modernization program best suited the Times's vision of Iran's needs. The Christian Science Monitor went even further...
...confident reports that the Shah would weather the crisis are gone now, and the American media is taking a bit more care when describing Iran's various power holders. But the American press was more than simply mistaken in its predictions; the distortion and misunderstanding of the nature of Iranian opposition forces reflected nationally held values and opinions that paved the way for a repetition of the United States's most familiar foreign policy fiasco. The Iran that the press and the U.S. government sought was one that would be westernized along the Shah's U.S. inspired model...