Media Check-USA

Media Check-USA
August 09, 2007

By Kevin Fatemi

As more and more American troops in Iraq are being disintegrated, vaporized and blown to bits by Iranian-made munitions, the pathetic hand-wringing in the USA about "Iranian interference" in Iraq has led only to useless and counter-productive ambassadorial charades of "regional security conferences" between the US and the cynical Iraq-based mouthpieces of the criminal regime that has terrorized the entire nation of Iran since 1979. In the meantime, the near-complicity of the US media in perpetuating the status quo in Iran has led to the nearly absolute ignorance of the American public concerning true state of worsening subjugation and oppression that the Iranian citizens have been suffering under since the most recent "election" in Iran. . And here is the rest of it.Since the former alleged interrogator, torturer, executioner and hit-man for Khomeini has been installed as "president" in Iran, the elevation in power and stature of the most murderous henchmen in the regime to positions of judges, intelligence chiefs and ministers has only widened the oppression and terror that the freedom-loving people of Iran have had to suffer under. However, this fact and the overall falsehood of any semblance of truly democratic elections in Iran has been withheld from the American public by a media that seems more concerned with avoiding any reporting on the domestic situation in Iran that might endanger their access to visas for their reporters to enter Iran for "exclusive" first-hand reporting.

CNN, ABC and even Fox News have been notably irresponsible in their coverage of the domestic governmental terror in Iran that has prevented any form of political dissent from being covered in the USA press. In the meantime, brave and conscientious Iranian journalists and political opponents are being arrested, tortured and secretly executed for attempting to let the truth be known about the Islamic Fourth Reich and its Islamic Revolutionary Gestapo. While CNN has been relentless in its efforts to blacken the Bush administration's attempts to bring truly democratic elections to Iraq, it has been virtually mute on the lack of any political discourse or freedom that preceded the most recent "presidential elections" in Iran.

It's preening and coddling of Ahmadinejad as a valued pet thorn in the side of President Bush has led to virtually no coverage of the widespread arrests, executions and disappearances of hundreds of thousands of political opponents to the criminal regime in Tehran. The only coverage of domestic unrest in Iran has been the airing of the "confessions" of the unfortunate Iranian-American citizens provided by the Islamic Republic or the supposedly "candid" bazaar interviews conducted under the watchful eyes of government agents wherein Iranian citizens claim that all is well in Iran except for the oppressive "effects of US-led sanctions" against their government. While Christian Annanpour has been to virtually every war-torn suburb in the Middle-East to rail against the effects of President Bush's foreign policy, she has not been to Evin prison in Teheran where braver news reporters as well as teenage girls and boys are being tortured and executed for doing simple teenage things that are banal and perfectly legal anywhere else in the free world such as attending or even listening to rock concerts or wearing Western clothes or even merely taking a photograph near the prison.

The continued executions of teenage girls in Iran for "immoral behavior" such as the case of 16 year old Atefah Salaahah in Neka, who was secretly executed for being raped, after being condemned to death by an "appeals" judge who was consequently promoted to be a "minister of justice" in the Ahmadinejad government, was only revealed to the American public in a documentary on the Discovery Times channel after being ignored by CNN in any coverage of the Middle East. In summary, CNN's refusal to reveal the degree of domestic terror being perpetrated by Ahmadinejad and his henchmen has added to the degree of oppression that the Iranian people are being subjected to. ABC has a network news-radio channel broadcasting out of New York called WABC. For nearly ten years, the top-rated news-talk-radio show on week-nights all along the East coast was the John Batchelor show, from 10pm until 1am. This show was structured and organized with interviews from some of the most widely acclaimed and knowledgeable international affairs experts on political, military and social developmements in the US and abroad.

The individuals being interviewed on-air ranged from Khaled Mashaal, one of the leaders of the military wing of Hamas, out of Damascus, to Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel, to Ali Reza Jafarzadeh representing the Mujahedin Khalq based in a sanctuary in Iraq, and even to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah. While both Hamas and the Mujahedin Khalq have at some point or another had American blood on their hands, they were still on-air with John Batchelor on WABC. In fact, Jafarzadeh was responsible for the revelation of the degree of advancement of the Iranian nuclear program which seemed to have been ignored by the West until only recently.

However, the main crux of the John Batchelor show was to educate the American public about the surreptitious yet ubiquitous hand of the Iranian regime in fostering terror and war everywhere in the Middle East and abroad to threaten the US and Western civilization in general. Mr. Batchelor, who himself is of partial Iranian descent, and claimed to have once sat in the lap of Mossadegh, was very adamant and unabashed about pointing out the support that the Iranian regime had lent to the foes of peaceful coexistence in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. One of Mr. Batchelor's nightly contributing analysts, John Loftus, would provide information on the Iranian terror network in Iraq that we would not see on other networks or even in the printed news for months to come if ever. Suddenly, one night Mr. Batchelor informed his wide audience that his show had been cancelled by ABC. The American public had lost its only true access to information about the terror campaign being waged against the West by the regime in Iran.

For the week before his last show, ABC and Mr. Batchelor’s call-in line was bombarded with pleas to remain on the air. Inexplicably, this sole access to real-world information on the Iranian terror network disappeared from the airwaves. They say "money talks." In this case, one can only draw the connections between the financial power of the Iranian regime and the corporate greed of WABC. Finally, while Fox News has often being labeled as right-wing in its take on the news, it has nevertheless, failed miserably to reveal to the American public, the degree of oppression being faced by the Iranian citizenry. In particular, its morning talk radio show has failed miserably to reveal the degree of non-representation of the Iranian people’s political wills that the Ahmadinejad regime actually embodies. In other words, Fox News Radio has failed to explain to its listening public that this regime in Tehran is the result of a lack of any free press, political opposition or freedom of expression and is the result of mass arrests, torturing and executions of any and all domestic political opposition prior to the "election."

The American people are now ignorant of the true love that the Iranian people have for the US, peace, freedom and democracy because US media, including Fox News, allowed the Ahmadinejad hijacking of power in Tehran to go unnoticed and unreported. The final straw in establishing my disdain for Fox News Radio came one morning recently when I heard one of their commentators referring to Iran as the "one true democracy in the Middle East." I wanted to pickup my cell-phone and call in to set the record straight. However, unlike the John Batchelor Show, this program had been pre-recorded the day before. The American people are living in an insulated time-warp devoid of any realistic idea of the degree of terror being inflicted on the Iranian people by the thugs, torturers, executioners and terrorists who conveniently call themselves the Islamic Republic of Iran.