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In the days since the United States and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Reza Pahlavi—the son of the country’s last shah—has been omnipresent. He’s made multiple appearances on Fox News; he’s been interviewed on 60 Minutes; he’s written an op-ed for the Washington Post. With the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the message that Pahlavi has been pushing for years—that he is uniquely qualified and positioned to lead an Iran free of the Islamic Republic—is finding new resonance, at least in the US media. But the idea that there are only two possible futures for the country—Pahlavi and freedom or the Islamic Republic and repression—is dangerously reductive, as Sina Toossi recently argued in The Nation: “In Washington, the discourse often reduces Iran to two caricatures: the ruling elite in Tehran and the exiles who promise that pressure and war will bring about regime change. But inside the country, a third current has always existed. It is anti-authoritarian and anti-war at the same time. It rejects both domestic tyranny and foreign intervention. It demands self-determination through nonviolent civic struggle.”
To understand more about the American media discourse on Iran, I spoke with Babak Rahimi, who is a professor of culture, religion, and technology at the University of California San Diego, where he also directs the Middle East studies program. Rahimi left Iran with his family for California when he was twelve, in the wake of the 1979 revolution. “Iranians want change—of course they want change,” he told me. “The question is what kind of change.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AB: What has jumped out to you about the media coverage of the war so far?
BR: First and foremost, it’s the decontextualization of the situation in Iran. There’s hardly any discussion on the history of war in Iran or the complicated history of the Pahlavi regime. The most important context is the 1953 US-led coup that overthrew the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a coup to make sure that Iran was within the US sphere of influence. That became catalytic, absolutely central, to the way the 1979 revolution unfolded. If you’re not offering that information, you’re not letting people understand why the Islamic Republic is so paranoid, so brutal. That whole history is chucked out.
All you get is fragments and clips and very shortsighted views of what’s going on in Iran, and much of it is framed and connected to what happened in December and January, when the Iranian state brutally repressed and killed thousands of people. The illegality of the bombings is not discussed. The discussion quickly comes back to how repressive this Iranian state is. Clearly, you can see the manufacturing of consent.
Some of the key figures, the people who constantly show up in the media, are all in the Iranian-expert industry, and they are presenting a one-sided view, which is saying, “Yes, the war is problematic, but at the end of the day it’s going to be okay.” Hamid Dabashi, from Columbia University: He has a critical stance on the war in Iran. He’s hardly ever on TV. You hardly find people who are independent thinkers.
What do you make of Reza Pahlavi’s recent ubiquity?
I am baffled by the ways in which Pahlavi’s popularity has been amplified without context over the last few years. On cable news from Fox to CNN to ABC, there is much discussion about Pahlavi being “the only alternative.” But there’s little discussion about how he became the so-called alternative. Most of the Iranian dissidents, they’re all in prison, and Mr. Pahlavi has incredible wealth and a network that is allowing him to become the most visible. He is a privileged political figure with a royal pedigree, and he’s giving off the image that he’s really the future of Iran. Not necessarily.
The Pahlavi clique, the group that was driving this narrative, they are all very much in line with Fox News. They want the support of American public opinion, but what they really want is Donald Trump’s ear. They knew that he was the ultimate person to make the decision to go to war. Since the war started, Pahlavi is now everywhere. There’s this really bizarre consensus that he’s now the leader—that wasn’t the case last year! The media is either buying into it or not questioning it. It’s a really scary thing, to be honest. That black-and-white picture should scare us.
Pahlavi’s messaging has been boosted by Iran International, a UK-based media platform that has bled hundreds of millions of dollars since its founding, in 2017, without disclosing its funding.
It’s perhaps the most-watched Persian-language outlet that produces news, commentary, and video content. Its funding most likely comes from Saudi Arabia. They are straightforward in the ways they amplify Pahlavi’s voice. During diaspora protests, for instance, monarchist symbols and chants referencing Pahlavi are aired, and his speeches are rebroadcast. He also usually receives long-form interviews while facing limited critical interrogation on what the future of democracy in Iran would be with him as the “transitional leader.”
Visually, what have you noticed about the way the war is being presented?
You get images of Iran with exploded bombs and dusty clouds that are going everywhere. But when it switches to Dubai or Israel, you see people, humans being killed. This has to do with the fact that there aren’t too many journalists on the ground in Iran, but implicitly or indirectly, it adds to the dehumanizing aspect the media is manufacturing. The human side is not really shown in Iran.
I’m so upset. I’m trying to keep my academic voice. There’s a human side to all of this. You get this really bizarre disconnection. Here I am, as an Iranian American—I’m looking at the media, I’m seeing the horror. We don’t have any connection with family and friends in Iran. I went through a war; I went through a revolution. I can still hear some of the sonic echoes of bombs. This trauma will last decades and generations.
There are many Iranians who are celebrating the war. They are jumping up and down thinking this will be an act of liberation. A lot of news coverage, especially on the local news, is of Iranian Americans who are pro-monarchy going to the streets saying, “Thank you, Donald Trump, for saving us.” There is a large segment of the Iranian population that is not in favor of the war, but you don’t hear that. Of course, they don’t support the Iranian state either. But those voices don’t get heard.
A lot of footage coming out of Iran is being distributed by @VahidOnline, which is run anonymously. Citing their videos, New York magazine called @VahidOnline a “widely respected account” that “has long been a trusted relay point for distributing videos, images, and eyewitness accounts from inside Iran.” You’ve researched @VahidOnline. Can you tell me about the account and its role in media coverage of Iran?
@VahidOnline became very popular among the Iranian diaspora and among Western media who didn’t have direct access to Iran after the 2009 Green Movement. There was an interesting media tunnel. Vahid would post on Telegram, the diaspora would distribute it on their own social media accounts, and then the mainstream media would pick up on it. He was perceived as this heroic figure, the anonymous citizen-journalist giving out all the information.
In December 2009, I was in Tehran witnessing one of the biggest anti-government protests of the Green Movement. I saw police forces brutally attacking protesters. I walk five minutes away, to another neighborhood in Tehran, I see people doing their grocery shopping, listening to music, as if nothing was happening just a few streets away. I was giving interviews to mainstream American news channels, and there was a lot of disparity between how I was looking at things on the ground and how they were reporting it. I was baffled by some of the questions they were asking. It took me a while to figure out what was going on: the media was heavily reliant on this media tunnel and @VahidOnline. Certain areas, especially urban areas, were engaged with the uprisings, but the media tunnel gave the impression that the whole country was rising up.
In a vacuum of other reporting from Iran, @VahidOnline has become uniquely prominent. The account is now posting footage of air strikes, but before the war, what would followers have seen?
He’s very keen on posting protests and conflict-focused media content: things that are highly dramatic, things that underscore an unfolding conflict. He was really doing a good job in giving an impression to his audience of mostly diaspora Iranians that things were about to change in a dramatic way. The footage was real. These were live events that were happening, but you don’t get contextualization, you don’t get verification. And people don’t consider the algorithmic acceleration aspect to it. @VahidOnline was being rewarded for posting content that was highly charged and visually dramatic. The protest clips are real, but once you overemphasize them, you give the impression that things are going in a certain direction. The reality on the ground is very messy. @VahidOnline was giving us this impression that this whole messiness had a direction to it. It simply didn’t.
What is being cut out are vast landscapes of Iranian society. I’ll give you one example: in the southern part of Tehran, the poorer side of the city, the Iranian state has a lot of support to this day. @VahidOnline hardly ever reports from there. It’s somehow invisible.
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