Richard Jeffrey Newman

I’m glad to see report­ing com­ing out of Iran (here and here, both by Nicholas Kristoff) that is based on a journalist’s first-hand encoun­ters with ordi­nary Ira­ni­ans. It’s not just that it’s impor­tant for read­ers in the United States to dis­cover that – gasp! – Iranians are indeed ordi­nary peo­ple, essen­tially no dif­fer­ent than we are; it’s also that this kind of cov­er­age seems to me a fun­da­men­tal sign of respect. I rec­og­nize that the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment itself makes it nearly impos­si­ble for West­ern, and per­haps par­tic­u­larly Amer­i­can, jour­nal­ists to gather the infor­ma­tion that makes these kinds of columns pos­si­ble, and so it is not jour­nal­ists’ fault that they are, gen­er­ally, unable to write them. At the same time, how­ever, the media in the United States is at fault for pre­sent­ing cov­er­age on Iran that not only does not acknowl­edge the gaps in their cov­er­age, and there­fore in their knowl­edge, but that also allows those gaps to stand for some­thing other than the absence they are: an asser­tion by omis­sion that the cov­er­age we are get­ting from our media is also, some­how, cov­er­age of ordi­nary Ira­ni­ans. Kristof’s columns are a nec­es­sary and long-overdue cor­rec­tion.

Tagged Iran