How Should the Western Press Cover Iran? 

Foreign Affairs

How Should the Western Press Cover Iran? 

The detention of an Italian journalist in Tehran raises questions of how to report from the Islamic Republic.

The detention of the renowned Italian journalist Cecilia Sala while reporting from Tehran has reignited a longstanding debate on the dismal state of press freedom in Iran. The Il Foglio journalist was granted an eight-day journalist visa to file stories from the crisis-hit country, and the authorities arrested her before she could show up at the Imam Khomeini International Airport to board a flight back to Rome. 

According to the Italian foreign ministry, she was arrested on December 19, but it was only on December 30 that her ordeal in solitary confinement was publicized as the Italian authorities hoped they could find a diplomatic way out by keeping the case confidential. She cannot read because her eyeglasses were taken away, and in her frosty cell at the notorious Evin Prison she doesn’t have a mattress, only two blankets, including one to cushion herself from the concrete floor. 

Speculations abound about the Islamic Republic’s possible motives. One that is frequently invoked is that Sala’s arrest is another attempt at hostage diplomacy on behalf of a government that was founded in 1979 on not one, but two revolutions—the second one, in the words of its chieftains, being the 444-day hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. 

On December 16, the Department of Justice announced that an Iranian national had been extradited to the United States by the Italian authorities, at Washington’s request, to face trial for his role in violating American sanctions law. He is believed to have been part of a scheme to send sensitive drone parts to be used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Cecilia Sala’s arrest bears all the hallmarks of Tehran acting in reprisal against Rome and setting the stage for a deal.

The broader incentives behind such a risky gambit when Iran’s foreign relations are exceptionally fraught and its economic woes deplorable are difficult to decipher. One possibility is that Iran wishes to use Sala as a bargaining chip at the upcoming January 13 negotiations with the European trio of Britain, Germany, and France, where the Islamic Republic expects to rekindle diplomacy over its nuclear program. 

The other hypothetical scenario is that the Supreme Leader once again believes that bullying an international reporter would be perceived by the world as an indication of his prowess. After enduring an unprecedented military setback against Israel and multiple regional reversals with the collapse of its proxies and the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the detention of a European journalist may well appeal to ayatollah as an act of muscle-flexing.

This is simply conjectural, but it isn’t inconceivable. The track record of the Islamic Republic’s attempts at “harsh revenge” shows every episode of loss against foreign rivals is often made up for by exacting a toll on the strangulated Iranians at home, including by punishing them with stricter lifestyle and cultural prohibitions or taking aim at other scapegoats such as journalists, students, and artists.

But in what has happened to Sala, who friends say has always followed Iran’s stories with interest and wished to report on the country’s complicated sociopolitical developments with integrity, precision and literacy, there is a broader question about journalism and how the “Iran beat” of the international desks is going to be affected moving forward.

Sala’s decision to travel to a country on the cusp of a military conflagration was courageous; it was not, however, counterintuitive to be persuaded to report from Tehran when a pro-reform administration, at least nominally committed to constructive engagement with the world, replaced a president whose radicalism was so uninhibited even some regime insiders were convinced the tide of social discontent would eventually bring down the theocracy. 

As in other authoritarian states such as Russia and China, the number of foreign reporters on the ground has not been zeroed, although it has been notably curtailed. There are correspondents who travel to Iran for short-term assignments, and there are others who are completing their more extended stints out of sporadically functioning Tehran bureaus. Even if Iran were an active conflict zone, journalists should have been there reporting on what they see, hear, and understand.

There have been members of Iran’s exiled opposition who have found fault with Sala for traveling to Iran at a time of precarity, their point being that every European or American citizen setting foot in the Islamic Republic territory “legitimizes” the autocracy. Some of them have even gone out of their way openly to entertain conspiracy theories that Sala conspired with Tehran to sugarcoat the “mad mullahs” and that her arrest is a false flag operation.

But journalists aren’t supposed to match their mission with the impulses of groups or individuals engaged in power competitions. Sala did what every good journalist would do. She wouldn’t have been able to discover much about a deeply misunderstood and paradoxical country in eight days, but her decision showed her work ethic. At least she embraced an in-person experience rather than tweeting from her office in Rome. 

Foreign correspondents have scrambled to maintain a presence in Belarus, one of the most repressive countries when it comes to press laws (and it’s no more “legitimate” than Iran as a government). In 2020, at least 20 international reporters lost their accreditation and were deported by Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime. In Egypt, ranked 170^th out of 180 surveyed nations in the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index 2024, the government said it has been hosting nearly 1,200 resident foreign correspondents as of 2022, including Egyptian reporters representing international media.

Cuba, sanctioned by the U.S. and designated by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, remains a magnet for journalists—in 2007, there were 169 foreign correspondents based in the country. Despite a lack of reliable data on the current size of the press corps, there has never been a shortage of demand for Cuba stories. Similarly, reporters securing admission on rare occasions to the world’s most insulated nation, North Korea, have often been applauded for their bravery, including when BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes made it there in 2016 and was eventually expelled. 

While the Iranian government dodges questions about the actual reasons behind the escalatory arrest of a 29-year-old Italian reporter, there are substantive questions that anyone who cares about press freedom needs to reckon with. This includes the European governments whose citizens will continue visiting Iran, as well as the United States, which is now bracing for a novel turn of its foreign policy under President-elect Donald Trump. 

With the sweeping publicity around the Sala case, it is probable that international journalists may be deterred from traveling to Iran for some time. It is also likely that the EU nations, the United States, and other countries with an interest in first-hand Iran reporting will discourage journalists from accepting prospective Tehran-based assignments pending some sort of agreement on the universal sticking points that have induced the current dilemma.

But if the Islamic Republic decides not to turn a journalist’s authorized reporting trip into a crisis and avoid plunging itself into a diplomatic spat with a friendly European country that has scarcely displayed the typical Western aversion to the theocracy, what is going to happen to the future of Iran coverage? Is there any change on the horizon in favor of more robust reporting, or will piled-up cynicism undermine independent journalism at a time when it’s needed the most?

Clearly, the Islamic Republic ideologues and technocrats alike aren’t so ill-informed as to fail to see that, with every journalist they detain for bargaining purposes, they worsen the unfalteringly bad press Iran receives around the clock. The establishment has shown subtle and sometimes explicit indications that it does care about how it’s portrayed and perceived internationally. In Tehran, the continued presence of at least some foreign journalists has its own advocates.

Iran’s preferences, however, don’t determine what sort of journalism should be produced—the friendly PR the Islamic Republic officials fancy cannot be churned out by professionals. What matters is whether countries hosting the world’s largest media corporations and publications are certain that they still need reporting about Iran in the future, and whether this sort of coverage can be best provided by correspondents who are either accredited or can travel.

If the European capitals believe that there is a distinction between Iran and a state like North Korea, whose omission from the media narratives has already been taken for granted as unobjectionable, and that not talking about Iran as a major source of change in the region and beyond is a non-starter, then the next step is to break down how access to Iran should be maintained.

The same applies to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, as well as other countries where public attention to Iranian affairs remains inevitable, but a lack of regular access means media organizations must constantly justify to their audiences why their Iran commentary is so abstract, laden with generalities and devoid of facts. 

Of course, it is always possible to ask the Ankara and Abu Dhabi bureau chiefs to report about Iran based on what they find in the Turkish and Emirati media. It is also possible to ask the non-Persian-speaking international correspondents in London, Brussels, and Washington, DC to make the most of their writing sophistication, extensive contacts, and OSINT extraction skills and raise some public awareness of Iran.

But naturally, the media prefer to have reporters on the field, and they want to ensure they can provide sufficient legal protection and security guarantees to the journalists that they are being mindful of the importance of these missions. This cannot be facilitated in the absence of diplomatic and political safeguards that introduce accountability and preserve the chances of compelling communication. 

When the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested in July 2014 and convicted of espionage in a closed-door trial riddled with inconsistencies, it was high-stakes diplomacy between then-Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, enabled by their personal engagement throughout the 2015 nuclear deal negotiations that secured Rezaian’s release. 

To be sure, Iran was looking for material concessions, and deliberately traumatizing a journalist for 544 days in captivity is called hostage-taking. But it doesn’t mean an unfavorable situation should have been abandoned. An ad hoc mandate from the two governments at odds made it possible for their envoys to secure a journalist’s release before his plight evolved into an indefinite humanitarian tragedy.

Today, that active diplomatic hotline between Tehran and Washington doesn’t exist, and still there are American journalists who wish to report from Iran or have visited the country after the violent crackdown on the 2022 uprising—CBS News’s Lesley Stahl and NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly are examples. And this is the subtlety of the status quo: At what point will countries with an interest in reporting on Iran decide about the extent of the leverage they wish to exercise to remedy if problems occur like Sala’s arrest?

Last October, Germany closed three Iranian consulates in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich in response to the Islamic Republic’s execution of the Iranian-German national Jamshid Sharmahd. A war of words between the two foreign ministers has spiraled ever since. Aside from the technical details of the controversial case, it is now up to the German government to ascertain whether the consulate shutdowns are going to serve broader democratic causes, including shoring up critical scrutiny of Iran by the media and keeping avenues of accountability open, or were simply a spur-of-the-moment reaction. 

Cases like Sala’s arrest are primarily of a consular nature, in which governments sit down to find concrete solutions. They understand that they cannot improve Iran’s excruciating press freedom record overnight, and they also realize that the odds of an Operation Eagle Claw succeeding in bringing hostages home are trivial. So they hunker down to do what falls within the realm of possibility.

In this case, the Italian foreign ministry and its Tehran-based diplomats are working strenuously to secure the journalist’s freedom, even when they can see that their negotiating partner is one of the most cantankerous governments. But this is easily the most responsible course of action—and I am not opposed to X (formerly Twitter) storms and “free the journalist” hashtag avalanches as long as they don’t caricature sensitive cases requiring attention to details and serious treatment. 

Protectionist policies are easiest to justify when they often come on the heels of security breaches, violations of national interest and other forms of degradation and devaluation. But they also have the effect of erasing the question rather than seeking to answer it. This is what the German government’s decision achieved. The Islamic Republic has also explained away its turn to revolutionary isolationism by instructing its people that a national closed-door policy would make the country immune to foreign influence, precluding injustices like the 1953 coup against the patriotic Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the British MI6.

If nothing else, the Iranian autarky is paying off—in the reverse order, though: The author of All the Shah’s Men Stephen Kinzer boldly argued Iran might well be “the most pro-American country in the whole world.” The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof was almost convinced after a 2012 trip that “at the people-to-people level” Iran was probably the most pro-U.S. country in the Middle East. Ask Iranians, and, with or without nuances, they’ll share the same conclusion.

The American cultural footprint in people’s lives is more prominent than ever because it’s voluntarily accepted. Not only has the external “infiltration” not gone anywhere, but foreign intelligence organizations are also virtually doing whatever they need to do within Iran’s borders to glean information, identify targets and serve their own interests. 

In the same piece that Kristof wrote about the Iranian people’s fascination with Americans, he also wrote, “because we aren’t on the ground, I think we journalists collectively haven’t given this story the importance that it deserves,” referring to the burgeoning revolt against the Islamic Republic after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement took wing. 

Journalists travel to Iran often at high personal risk and come back with rare documentaries, critical interviews and first-hand stories. Removing media oversight from an ambitious authoritarian power is a recipe for disaster. To protect those journalists instituting the oversight, diplomatic leverage is required. To ensure the leverage exists, countries need to make a decision.

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