Word: shahs
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...press accurately prepare the American people for what has happened in Iran? The critiquing has already begun. "Reporting Iran the Shah's Way" is the title of a free-swinging attack on the U.S. press in the Columbia Journalism Review by William A. Dorman, a radical-left California journalism professor, and "Ehsan Omeed," described as an Iranian-born professor at an American university. It asks why crowds in the street were called Freedom Fighters in Budapest but mobs in Tehran. Sandy Socolow, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, calls the article "a kind of diatribe"; Stan Swinton, vice...
...been told all about riots, corruption, torture and discontent. The press, however, can be faulted, particularly in the earlier stages, for describing the opposition, in the simplicity of news bulletins and snippet coverage on TV, as "an unlikely coalition of left-wing extremists and conservative Muslims" who opposed the Shah's modernizing reforms. That was too pat, too close to the Shah's talk of "Islamic Marxists" arrayed against him, whom he dismissed. The capsule summaries also ignored the distress of the new Westernized middle class...
...press had to play catch-up in Iran. The Shah himself has long been on the grand tour of editors, anchormen, roving correspondents. But after the New York Times closed down its bureau in February 1977, there wasn't one American reporter based in Tehran. The result has been what correspondents call "parachuting" into a place, arriving like firemen after a fire is visibly raging...
...Times, speaks Farsi. The U.S. embassy was hopeless as a source because of its self-isolation. Vivid coverage of the deteriorating situation by men like Jonathan C. Randal of the Washington Post and Nicholas Gage of the New York Times was usually hedged on the question of whether the Shah would survive. Gage in June reported on the opposition but added that "most analysts" thought the Shah "too powerful," because he has the backing of not only the armed forces and the United States, but also of "large numbers of peasants and workers...
This was typical of a cautious reportorial consensus until everything began to give way; it was less "pro-Shah" than an attempt to assess presumed elements of strength in a fluid situation. Journalism was never guilty of the reckless effusiveness of Jimmy Carter's 1978 New Year's toast to the Shah's "island of stability." But it also resisted, says the Wall Street Journal's Bartley, those Iranian exiles who wanted the press to "report that the only trouble in Iran is the Shah, and if we only toppled him everything would be peachy...