Proving that the blogosphere is indeed an ocean teeming with an endless assortment of wildlife, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the latest to leap into the water. Yes, Ahmadinejad The Blogger made his debut Friday with a 2,000-plus-word post “recounting childhood memories, the country’s Islamic Revolution and Tehran’s war with Iraq” — and an online poll asking readers if they think that the U.S. and Israel are “pulling the trigger for another world war.”
“State-run television announced the blog’s launch Sunday,” reports the Associated Press. “The blog is an unusual move by the conservative president, whose government has censored Internet sites it deems inappropriate and cracked down on bloggers who have posted anti-government messages since he was elected a year ago.”
Western bloggers responded early today with skepticism.
“This is very interesting. President Ahmadinejad of Iran’s personal blog. Your choice of Arabic, Farsi, English or French,” writes Guerre. “Is he for real or is this just propaganda? You be the judge.” Adds Blonde Sagacity: “Despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s open disdain for the U.S. and a ‘ban on exports of Microsoft products to Iran,’ he’s blogging and the site’s administrator has a Google email account.”
“As part of its ongoing crackdown on internal dissent, the Islamic Republic of Iran today briefly shut down a Web log recently launched by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” jokes ZardozZ News & Satire — though many Web scribes are actually having trouble logging onto Ahmadinejad’s site. Fellowship of FSFE, for one, encountered a “Server Too Busy” message, prompting this observation: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no problem being dependent on U.S. software, which in turn has no problem failing on him.”
“With Iran maintaining its relatively isolationistic stance in the world, the last thing you’d expect to see is their outspoken president reaching out via a social software application; and yet you’d be wrong. But then again if you take a moment to consider the implications of this move, it really shouldn’t be that surprising,” notes Mike Bogle.
“With few exceptions, Ahmadinejad’s fiery speeches go largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Not because of lack of interest, but because they are meticulously filtered and edited down by both the traditional media and politicians alike,” Bogle adds. “Use of a blog by contrast enables him to circumvent these filters and circulate his unedited statements to the entire planet. Guerrilla media is nothing new certainly, but its use by such a predominant figure is.”
But Ahmadinejad is not shunning the mainstream media either: last night, 60 Minutes aired Mike Wallace’s interview with him in Tehran — making the CBS program Sunday night’s top-rated show, not to mention the most-discussed news item on Technorati. (Joel C. Rosenberg says the interview “was pathetic, weasly, limp-wristed and a huge missed opportunity,” while Digital Nomad found Wallace “to be slightly combative. It was almost as though being faced with the enemy, he was going to do his best to slay the dragon once and for all. That strategy might work with someone of lesser stature, but not a significant world leader.”)
Moving on from all things Ahmadinejad, we conclude with Byron Calame’s public editor column for the New York Times yesterday, which clarifies the timeline behind the Times‘ publication of its Pulitzer Prize-winning story disclosing the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program. Calame writes that executive editor Bill Keller now tells him “that the Times delayed publication of drafts of the eavesdropping article before the 2004 election” (emphasis added) and that “Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been ‘dragging on for weeks’ before the Nov. 2 election” — in contrast to the paper’s Dec. 16, 2005 bombshell, which said that the article had been held “for a year.” “It was probably inelegant wording,” Keller says now. (Yeah, we’d say “… for a year …” is a really inelegant way to say “… for way more than a year …”)
“Left-wing pundits and bloggers have insisted that Keller spiked the story to keep George Bush in office. Keller, however, has a different take on his decision,” writes Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters. “He insists that the news would have likely helped Bush rather than hurt him, and the public support for this program after its delayed revelation last December supports that analysis.”
Nevertheless, Captain Ed comes down hard on the Times, concluding, “The Paper of Record managed to utterly destroy the trust it still had left with readers across the political spectrum with this story.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.