The New York Times and the Iranian election

[Hannah Bell]

The response of the US media to the Iranian election says more about the state of democracy and the so-called “free press” in America than it does about the state of democratic rights in Iran.

...No sooner had Iranian authorities announced late Friday, US time, that Ahmadinejad had defeated Mousavi by a 30 percent margin than the Times and virtually the entire media proclaimed the election a fraud. The (NY) Times did not simply report the allegations by Mousavi that the election had been stolen, it embraced them wholeheartedly and uncritically.


It did so without undertaking any independent investigation. It brought forward no serious facts to substantiate the claim. Rather, it relied on allegations made by Mousavi and his supporters.

...On what mass base could Mousavi depend for a successful bid to unseat Ahmadinejad? The candidate of the Iranian liberal establishment, he campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamist clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.

The media has not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world. Mousavi’s most prominent backer, moreover, was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading figure in the state apparatus and one of the country’s wealthiest men. Rafsanjani, notorious for his corruption, is despised by Iranian workers and the poor.

Mousavi’s actual electoral base did not extend beyond better-off-sections of the urban middle class, university students and businessmen.

There is another issue. What standing do the New York Times and the US media as a whole have to lecture Iran about democratic elections?

The Times accepted the theft of the 2000 US presidential election without a whimper. That was a presidential coup, and it was carried out in broad daylight, with Bush and the Republicans suppressing votes and the Supreme Court halting a recount in Florida that would have given the election to Al Gore, who had won the popular vote nationally. One need only recall the extraordinary events of election night 2000, when the networks suddenly reversed their call for Gore in Florida and declared the pivotal state for Bush...

The filthy role of the Times in seeking to discredit the Iranian election epitomizes the corruption of the American media and its integration into the state. The mass media serve ever more openly as instruments for the manipulation of public opinion in the interest of state concerns.

In this article, as in the articles published on the Iranian election, there is a large element of provocation. Such “news” items are written on assignment from US intelligence agencies. This corruption of the media is itself a critical expression of, and factor in, the advanced decay of American democracy...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j15.shtml