Thursday, June 25, 2009

Voice for the Voiceless

I hear that rajanews.com and farsnews.com, two government-funded hardline Iranian news agencies, are not accessible from non-Iranian IP addresses. I tried to verify this by using a few proxy servers I have access to outside Iran and it seems to be correct. But why should a news agency limit its audience on purpose? Not unless, of course, because they have different recipies for the news they "make" for people inside and outside Iran. The lies they easily sell to Iranians with severed accesses to the outside world would not sell so easily to people who have access to all the news sources in the world. They need more delicacy, which leads me to my point: Press TV.

Press TV is an Islamic Republic funded news network for the English speaking audience. If you're reading this outside Iran, I beg you, do not fall for their seemingly independent point of view. I have seen people who, in search of an alternative news source besides the mainstream media, fall for Press TV. This is a mistake, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Consider this: Press TV advertizes itself as "the voice for the voiceless." While the seventy million people of Iran, the people whose country's wealth is being spent on PressTV, has no voice in any of the Islamic Republic media, how they can "give voice to the voiceless?" You want a news source better than the mainstream media? It's fine. But go somewhere else. Anything else would be better than the Islamic Republic's "news making machine."

Update: Iain Dale and Nick Ferrari have decided not to appear on Press TV ever again. Read about their reasons here and here.

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