Playing Catch-Up in Iran

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Did the press accurately prepare the American people for what has happened in Iran? The critiquing has already begun. "Reporting Iran the Shah's Way" is the title of a free-swinging attack on the U.S. press in the Columbia Journalism Review by William A. Dorman, a radical-left California journalism professor, and "Ehsan Omeed," described as an Iranian-born professor at an American university. It asks why crowds in the street were called Freedom Fighters in Budapest but mobs in Tehran. Sandy Socolow, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, calls the article "a kind of diatribe"; Stan Swinton, vice president of the Associated Press, thinks it a "cheap shot" for the professor to hide behind a fake byline (he turns out to be Mansour Farhang, who teaches government at California State in Sacramento). Harder to dismiss is the judgment of Professor James A. Bill of the University of Texas, author of The Politics of Iran: he writes in Foreign Affairs that Iran coverage over the years has been "consistently sparse, superficial and distorted," particularly in "misrepresenting the nature and depth of the opposition to the Shah."

Such questioning deserves more rebuttal than the usual cracks about 20/20 hindsight. Journalists aren't expected to anticipate train wrecks or assassinations. But a simple test of their performance is: Are readers or listeners taken by surprise by events that were foreseeable? The Iran coverage meets this test favorably, in that any well-informed reader for the past year has been told all about riots, corruption, torture and discontent. The press, however, can be faulted, particularly in the earlier stages, for describing the opposition, in the simplicity of news bulletins and snippet coverage on TV, as "an unlikely coalition of left-wing extremists and conservative Muslims" who opposed the Shah's modernizing reforms. That was too pat, too close to the Shah's talk of "Islamic Marxists" arrayed against him, whom he dismissed. The capsule summaries also ignored the distress of the new Westernized middle class.

It wasn't until last summer and fall, when the U.S. press at last gave deeper attention to Iran, that some important nuances came clearer. TIME'S September cover story "Iran in Turmoil," for example, reports "the mullahs, for all their abhorrence of the decadent excesses of modernism, have traditionally been political progressives." (The Columbia Review article overlooks such considered judgments, and itself may have too cockily declared that the Shi'ites "are not interested in running the country.")

The press had to play catch-up in Iran. The Shah himself has long been on the grand tour of editors, anchormen, roving correspondents. But after the New York Times closed down its bureau in February 1977, there wasn't one American reporter based in Tehran. The result has been what correspondents call "parachuting" into a place, arriving like firemen after a fire is visibly raging.

Parachute journalism happens because too many editors assume Americans aren't much interested in world news and have cut back coverage. In retrospect, notes Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal, the press now knows that Iran "was more important than the space or staffing given it." Last week 120 correspondents--30 of them American--clustered in Tehran's Hotel Inter-Continental.

For parachuting newsmen, language barriers and Iranians' fear of the police made it hard to develop sources. Even now, only one Western reporter in Tehran, Andrew Whitley of the BBC and the Financial Times, speaks Farsi. The U.S. embassy was hopeless as a source because of its self-isolation. Vivid coverage of the deteriorating situation by men like Jonathan C. Randal of the Washington Post and Nicholas Gage of the New York Times was usually hedged on the question of whether the Shah would survive. Gage in June reported on the opposition but added that "most analysts" thought the Shah "too powerful," because he has the backing of not only the armed forces and the United States, but also of "large numbers of peasants and workers."

This was typical of a cautious reportorial consensus until everything began to give way; it was less "pro-Shah" than an attempt to assess presumed elements of strength in a fluid situation. Journalism was never guilty of the reckless effusiveness of Jimmy Carter's 1978 New Year's toast to the Shah's "island of stability." But it also resisted, says the Wall Street Journal's Bartley, those Iranian exiles who wanted the press to "report that the only trouble in Iran is the Shah, and if we only toppled him everything would be peachy."

Harder to judge is how much journalists were unconsciously guided by a sense of the national interest. Concedes Dick Fischer, NBC'S executive vice president for news: "Early on we reported rather softly on the Shah; we thought he was our man." A telling indictment in the Columbia Review is that in an eleven-month study the authors could find no use of the word dictator to describe the Shah. Though the press did speak of torture and a repressive secret police, it usually labeled the regime as autocratic or authoritarian.

Perhaps such significant shading is one reason why Le Monde's Middle East veteran, Eric Rouleau, reflects that U.S. journalism got trapped in cliches about "the progressive Shah" beset by "fanatic religionists." But when it comes to nationalism, how about the French? They allowed Ayatullah Khomeini a sanctuary they rarely grant other political exiles to campaign for the Shah's overthrow. Rouleau speculates that the French, miffed by being shut out of Iran's arms deals, "took a calculated bet that it wasn't a bad idea to be host to a man who would be influential in the next regime." Nationalism might have sharpened the French reportorial emphasis on discontent in Iran. But Rouleau is surely right in saying that in covering places like Saudi Arabia, the U.S. press must do a better job of understanding the power and outlook of Muslim nationalists.

In Iran, the American press, which is often accused of sensationalizing the news, played it cautiously. It fully reported the tinder but did not add to the fire. Oddly enough, this should put it in good position, free of the onus of sponsorship, to report whatever happens next.

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