The Christian Science Monitor is producing a very distorted view on what is happening in Iran. Here I look at two pieces, one manipulated report of a severe incident, one of partisan reporting, to demonstrate that.
Let's start with a story from yesterday: Eyewitness: Iranian militiamen shot 300 rounds during Monday's protest. After two general news paragraphs on Iran it says:
An Iranian journalist who witnessed the shooting told the Monitor that, in fact, the gunmen were plainclothed basiji militia in riot helmets and body armor who fired an estimated 300 bullets from a rooftop – roughly half into the air, and the other half directly into the crowd, over the course of an hour.
"The guy shooting from the roof was very calm, not like he was shooting at people," said the witness. The ideological militiamen, who operate under the auspices of the Revolutionary Guards, fired as if "they were just trying to empty their guns into the ground, very cool, very relaxed."
Now that are very serious accusations and reading only those two graphs the only point one stumbles about is that "plainclothed" is a somewhat curious description of persons with body armor, riot helmets and guns.
The description is followed by thirteen (13) paragraphs around the situation in Iran but without revisiting the above scene. Only then do we get more detail:
"They shot three people in front of my eyes [on Monday], while everything was going quietly and nicely," the witness told the Monitor. Despite the large numbers at the rally, it was a "silent" event in which there were deliberately few provocative chants.
A very peaceful scene, a silent event, and the militia just killed people, "very cool, relaxed" But now:
The witness said another building that served as a basiji base along the route had been surrounded by a human chain and had been presented with flowers. At the basiji base that was attacked, newswire photographs showed a militiaman throwing a stone at protesters over the fence – an act that may have provoked the crowd to attack the building. The building caught on fire and gunmen began shooting from the roof.
"Instead of tear gas, [they] started shooting in the air," said the witness. "That further agitated the people and they kept storming the building. Then they pointed without aiming [holding the assault rifles at hip level] and started to shoot."
Antiriot police wearing body armor and riding motorcycles came to rescue the basiji militiamen, but were knocked from their bikes by the crowd and beaten.
Now this sounds very different to me than the two quote graphs at the beginning of the piece.
Indeed the scene described has been caught on a British Channel 4 video which I urge you to watch and to compare with the CSM account.
A huge mass of people shouting loud, a two story building behind a metal fence, burning with flames coming out of the windows. On the flat roof one man seemingly confused, clearly in uniform, with a helmet and a gun and no body armor or tear gas grenates. Stones are flying towards him. He shots into the air, then rushes to the side (trying to escape?), he comes back and shots into the mass of people. In total some 20 to 30 shots, i.e. one magazine worth of ammunition – not 300 shots, can be heard. One wounded person can be seen getting carried away.
The CSM piece started with militia firing into the crowd without reason. Only at the end of the long piece do we get some of the important context. The building was attacked. From the video we can tell that this attack was serious and that the person an the roof had reason to be panicked.
That does not justify the shooting. I do not want to make excuses here. But the reporting from the CSM and especially the way in which it was written up with accusations upfront and real context at the very end is quite manipulative, i.e. propaganda.
Today the CSM questions the results of the elections in Iran: Was Iran's election rigged? Here's what is known so far.
Results from 39.2 million handwritten ballots came much more swiftly than in previous votes, emerging within hours. Detailed election data typically released has not been made public.
That is a somewhat funny claim. Prof. Walter R. Mebane, Jr. of the University of Michigan (political science and statistics) retrieved official data form Iran at election district level and on June 14th made statistical comparisons with 2005 data. He found (pdf) nothing abnormal, but of course would like even more detailed data at polling station level to confirm that.
Back to the CSM:
Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii, whose decades of studying Iran has included poring over data from Iranian elections, says the result was "pulled out of a hat." Here's why.
…
Ms. Farhi: My personal feeling is that Ahmadinejad could not have gotten anything more than 10 million. And I really do have the data from previous elections, each district, how they voted, each province, to make comparisons with these numbers that the Ministry of Interior have come out.I am convinced that they just pulled it out of their hats. They certainly didn't pull it out of ballot [boxes] or even stuffed ballots, they just made up numbers and are putting it out. It just doesn't make sense.
I do take the numbers of the Interior Ministry very seriously. I pore over them every election. I did it last time in the parliamentary election, to determine the orientations and what they mean. I always do that.
In this election, I am not even going to spend time on this, because of all the [problems].
Okay. The "Here is why" reason consists of the personal conviction of a someone who does not even want to analyze the data that's available because – well, that's why. But Mrs. Farhi does give us one useful information:
Monitor: Weren't there party monitors at the polling stations, to watch the count?
Farhi: There were party monitors, and the boxes were all counted, and there were records made, and the information was relayed to the Interior Ministry on a piecemeal basis.
But at one point, immediately after the polls were closed, a very few people, without the presence of any monitoring mechanism, started giving out these numbers. And that's why I think this was brazen manipulation.
Now that is really information we were looking for. So the elections were monitored in local voting localities and local tallying but Mrs. Farhi doubts, for whatever reason, the tallying at the top of the reporting chain. With local results monitored a new top-tallying should be easy to do. Why isn't the Mousavi side, including obviously Mrs. Farhi, demanding that?
The first official numbers were given out two to three hours after the election closed, not "immediately after the polls closed", and were based on 20% of the election districts counted. The only one who immediately announced he had won a majority in a four horse race was Mousavi.
Those are two quite bad CSM pieces. One sensationally distorting the truth about a incident that, with some justification, could be seen as self-defense. The other one combined of simply telling the untruth with a interview of a partisan hack totally uninterested in the real issue.
Why again should I trusts such "western" media?
