The Foreign Service Journal, October 2010

28 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 eh Mohammadi Ashtiani, whose sentence to death by stoning for committing adultery has been com- muted by authorities since her story gained global attention. (As this story went to press, she was still fac- ing possible execution, however.) Both Farda and PNN have also recently expanded into satirical pro- gramming. In May, Radio Farda launched “Pasfarda” (The Day After Tomorrow), a one-hour live pro- gram; and one month earlier, PNN expanded from 15 min- utes to 30 minutes its popular year-old show “Parazit” (Static), whose hosts have been compared by some ob- servers to U.S. mock newscaster Jon Stewart. Typical fod- der for the show’s satirists included reports during the summer of conservatives issuing new guidelines for Iran- ian hairstyles. Officials from Farda and PNN say both programs have proven popular, according to social media feedback. Vatanka of the Middle East Institute says programs like “Parazit” provide an accessible way for young Iranians, in particular, to take stock of what is happening in their country. “The whole thing is about making individuals on the other side ask the right questions,” Vatanka says. “It’s so different from the usual VOA [approach]. It’s innova- tive in the sense that it tries to raise provocative issues.” A Receptive Audience Iran appears to be an especially fertile terrain for a so- cial media campaign by U.S. broadcasters. Iranian gov- ernment estimates place Internet users at 23 million, while more than 53 million cell phones are in use. Satel- lite TV dishes proliferate in urban areas. And media ex- perts say Iran has one of the world’s most active blogospheres, estimated in the tens of thousands, with bloggers hashing out everything from politics to environ- mental issues to poetry. Fatemeh Aman, a former Radio Farda broadcaster who now works as a U.S.-based analyst of Iranian politics and media, says e-mail remains a regular way of commu- nicating among Iranians, who share information on how to overcome government filters by using proxy servers. YouTube and Facebook video clips are also frequently at- tached and distributed via e-mail, she says. Analysts note a surge in government-runWeb sites and blogs spearheaded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Basij militia to counteract the activism of regime opponents. At the same time, the censorship of Web sites has been so intense that there have been reports of even hardline blogs being blocked. “The regime is spending billions on training peo- ple to monitor the Internet, on [hiring] people to create false blogs that propagate regime attack blogs — agent provocateur blogs, so to speak,” says Abbas Mi- lani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stan- ford University’s Hoover Institution. “The regime has a genuine fear of the Internet poten- tial in Iran,” adds Aman, noting that the political arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Sobh-e Sadegh, was calling for “cyber jihad” months before the events of June 12, 2009, revealed the extent of new media penetration in the country. VOA and RFE/RL, which have long streamed broad- casts and information on Web sites in scores of languages, have ramped up their options for Iranians in the past year, as well. Earlier this year, PNN launched a new application for Apple’s iPhone and the Android/Google phone that provides news updates and allows users to send links to VOA stories through Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. PNN, which runs live programs from 6 p.m. to midnight local time each day, has also launched Facebook pages for nearly all of its programs, Redisch says. Radio Farda last year launched its SMS system, and Facebook and Twitter profiles. Filtering the Feedback U.S.-funded broadcasters to Iran do face challenges in determining the effectiveness of the media they use and the messages they broadcast, of course. Audience surveys show PNN’s satellite TV audience dropped from an estimated 30 percent of regular weekly viewers in 2009 to 20 percent earlier this year, which the station at- tributes in part to intensified Iranian jamming of inter- national satellite TV signals and in part to the reluctance of respondents to admit that they view forbidden media. The percentage of weekly listeners to Radio Farda has been in single digits for several years, at least partly be- cause the regime ratcheted up jamming of its AM trans- F O C U S A kind of cat-and-mouse game has ensued, with many Iranians keeping a step ahead of the censors with the help of anti-filtering software from U.S. sources.