Iran election: don't believe everything you read

The Iranian Presidential election, judging by the reaction of the mainstream media across America and Europe, appears to be an open and shut case with the victory of incumbent President Ahmadinejad being widely denounced as a fraud. I have no intention of wading into that debate as only time will tell what really happened in Iran. However, the quality of western reporting on the election has undoubtedly been a major cause for concern.

In America, the New York Times declared the result a massive shock after “unofficial” polls had given Ahmadinejad’s closest rival Mir-Hossein Moussavi a clear lead. In the UK, the Financial Times railed that the “election bears all the hallmarks of a stolen vote” with Germany’s Die Welt adding that: "it seems their real leaders decided that 95 percent control was not enough – they wanted it all".

This has placed western leaders, eager to avoid destroying tentative hopes of detente with Iran, under enormous pressure to condemn the very regime with whom they are seeking to build a relationship. U.S President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, wary of their countries’ past involvement in Iran, have wisely refrained from doing so. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, however, have openly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the result.

To be sure, accurate facts and figures in a world of 24 hour news and instant reaction are often hard to come by even at the best of times. Nevertheless, journalists have to write something and with little time to check their sources, they often resort to hearsay.

The unofficial polls cited by the New York Times and various other publications are a good example of this. Iran has no system for conducting independent polls of its people and the most reliable western poll was carried out three weeks before the election. As a result, the press, eager to be seen as the most authoritative source of public information, took to reporting speculation as news.

The effect of this was to create a narrative, widely accepted by many as fact, that a victory for Moussavi, was a near certainty. So, when the election was called for President Ahmadinejad, the media leapt on opposition claims of widespread fraud as this appeared to fit the story best.

That one reliable poll, however, carried out by American think tank ‘Terror Free Tomorrow’ who published their findings and methodology in full, gave President Ahmadinejad a clear lead of over 2:1. While almost a third of those surveyed had not yet decided who to vote for, an extrapolation of the likely result based on their answers to the remainder of the survey, according to foreign policy blog ‘Just Foreign Policy’, forecast Ahmadinejad winning at least 57% of the popular vote.

The coverage of the protests themselves, however, represents perhaps the most serious manipulation of information by the media. According to former CIA operative and Middle East expert, Robert Baer, the protests have so far been confined to northern Tehran where Mr Moussavi’s most avid supporters reside. Yet they have been depicted by the press as the tipping point of a popular revolution.

Baer claims that “for too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press...” Undoubtedly, the Iranian regime has not helped itself though by restricting the movements of journalists, thereby increasing their dependence on the highly one-sided versions of events presented by Tehran’s ‘twitterers’. Moreover, its heavy handed response towards protesters has made it look more like an angry dictatorship than anything close to a democracy.

At the time of writing, Barack Obama has stepped up his criticisms of the Iranian regime following the tragic death of 26 year old student, Neda Soltani. The media, now more than ever have a responsibility to resist the urge to make a bad situation even worse just for the chance to score a prize scoop. The real danger, however, is that instead their willingness to pass off rumours and guesswork as news may end up reaffirming Iranian suspicions of western meddling and fuelling their determination to develop their own nuclear deterrent in response.