Iran's Most Wanted Journalists

Iran has become “the world’s biggest prison for journalists,” the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders reports. After opening the country to the foreign press during the presidential elections on June 12, the regime dramatically reversed course afterward, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets to protest the election’s outcome.

All foreign media were expelled, while the country’s own reporters were systematically rounded up and detained. Many have been taken to undisclosed locations, where they have had no communication with their families and no access to lawyers. Some have not been heard from in weeks, and some, like Amir-Hossein Mahdavi, editor in chief of Andisheh-ye Now, have suddenly popped up on state-run television to “confess” that the media’s allegations of election fraud were nothing more than a foreign plot to launch a velvet revolution in Iran.

Some arrested journalists have suddenly popped up on state-run television to “confess” that the media’s allegations of election fraud were nothing more than a foreign plot to launch a velvet revolution.

Although the exact number of journalists who have been arrested in Iran is difficult to calculate, Reporters Without Borders estimates that as many as 50 reporters, editors, and bloggers are languishing in prison cells. Many more have gone into hiding. On one day alone, June 22, all 25 employees of Kalemeh Sabz, Mir Hossein Mousavi’s newspaper, were arrested in a security sweep. (According to Amnesty International, 22 of the 25 employees have since been released; the whereabouts of the other three remain unknown.)

Even members of the religious establishment have been targeted. On June 16, a midlevel cleric and vice president under President Mohammad Khatami, Mohammad Ali Abtahi—known to Iranians as the “Blogging Mullah”—was arrested at his home in Tehran. The popular blogger, whose site, webneveshteha.com, is a favorite destination of Iran’s reformers, was not seen again until Saturday, when state-run television showed him standing before a judge, along with dozens of other protesters, testifying that he was mistaken to suggest in his blog that the election results were fraudulent.

The recent crackdown on Iran’s media has not come as a surprise. A few days before the elections, the Revolutionary Guard sent a communiqué to the country’s news organizations warning them to be wary of publishing “threats and rumors” that could compel the population “to riot.” It was a blatant threat that most Iranian journalists ignored. Now they are paying the price.

Iran has long been a one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, but that has not stopped Iran’s intrepid reporters—men and women like Abbas Abdi of the now defunct Salam newspaper; investigative journalist Akbar Ganji, currently in exile in the U.S.; and Shahla Sherkat, who founded the leading Iranian women’s magazine Zanan—from challenging the regime’s control of the media and revealing its crimes and secrets to the world.

Recognizing this underreported and deeply troubling aspect of the Iranian regime’s crackdown on the protest movement, we at The Daily Beast are publishing the names, affiliations, and photographs of just a few of the journalists who have been arrested, detained, or are otherwise missing. We demand that the Iranian regime respect the rule of law and immediately release all of the journalists it imprisoned in the wake of the demonstrations that followed the presidential elections.

View as Single Page 12 Back to Top August 3, 2009 | 11:06pm Facebook | Twitter | | | Emails | print International, Politics, Iran, Media, Shahla Sherkat, Salam Newspaper, Abbas Abdi Salam, Abbas Abdi, Iran Jailed Journalists, Jailed Journalists, Iran Journalists, Blogging Mullah, Kalemeh Sabz, Andisheh-ye Now, Amir-hossein Mahdavi, Reporters Without Borders, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Tehran Protests, Iran Election, Revolutionary Guard, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mohammad Khatami, Akbar Ganji (–)

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Eric Pape has reported on Europe and the Mediterranean region for Newsweek Magazine since 2003. He is co-author of the graphic novel, Shake Girl, which was inspired by one of his articles. He has written for the Los Angeles Times magazine, Spin, Vibe, Le Courrier International, Salon, Los Angeles and others. He is based in Paris.

Lloyd Grove is Editor at Large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.

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Iran's Most Wanted Journalists

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