Targeting Tehran

By Mariah Blake, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted December 9, 2004.

It's a misty October morning in suburban Virginia and three middle-aged women are hatching a subversive scheme – one that would land them in prison if they were ever to set foot in their home country, Iran, again.

They gather at George Mason University, a cluster of brick buildings skirted by meandering footpaths and thick oak and maple groves, then file into a soundproof recording studio and start flipping switches. Jila Kazerounian, a forty-seven-year-old computer analyst and the group's leader, hunkers down in one corner next to a mound of crumpled newspapers and gutted recording equipment, and grabs a mike. "Salam," she barks, "testing, testing, salam."

Nothing.

The project's technical director, Ramesh Rad, fumbles with the mixing-board knobs, sending shrieks of feedback through the room. When this doesn't work, she plugs and unplugs cords, and checks the settings on the audio-editing software. Finally, she and the others huddle around the computer monitor blinking and scratching their heads.

Eventually, Parvin, a forty-eight-year-old insurance-claim processor who asked that only her first name be used because she is concerned about the safety of her sister in Iran, suggests a plan B. Half an hour later, the group shuffles into her cramped home office. Parvin switches on her Hewlett Packard desktop and launches her digital-audio software. Leaning close to the mike embedded in her computer, she introduces Kazerounian, who pauses before launching her opening salvo.

"Allow me to first say hello to my fellow countrywomen," she says in Farsi, "the Iranian women who have been living under tyranny for the past twenty-five years."

The crew is recording the first half-hour program for their new radio station called Voice of Women. They intend to stream it over the Internet to a German company, which for $75 will broadcast it via short-wave into Iran on November 6. The station, which is ultimately slated to broadcast live for an hour each week, will feature news, talk, and a call-in segment, during which Iranian women can air their views.

The relative ease with which shoestring operations like Voice of Women can now reach Iran complicates the Islamic regime's struggle to control public opinion. The government has closed more than a hundred papers, many for questioning its policies. And the broadcast media, the most popular source of information among Iranian citizens, remain in the grip of the nation's spiritual and political leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "It's mostly propaganda," says Nati Toobian, who monitors Iranian television for the Middle East Media Research Institute, of official programming. "Even the government admits it's a tool of the regime." But the ruling clerics can't control what airs on the dozens of stations that expatriate groups in the United States and Europe have recently begun beaming into Iran.

Most credit Zia Atabay, a sixtysomething former rock star known as the "Tom Jones of Iran," with starting the trend. In March 2000 he launched National Iranian Television, a commercial station in Los Angeles aimed at his compatriots in the United States and Europe. Six months later, an NITV host, Ali Reza Meybodi, received a call from a man in the Iranian city of Isfahan during his live show. The man said he was receiving NITV's signal. Meybodi didn't believe him, so he jotted down the man's number and dialed him back. Sure enough, the man answered. Still doubtful, Meybodi grabbed a piece of fruit from a wooden tureen sitting on the nearby coffee table.

"What am I holding?" he asked. By this time Atabay and others had filtered into the makeshift studio.

"An apple," replied the caller.

Before long, everyone in the studio was weeping, and calls began pouring in from all over Iran. It turns out NITV reached Iran as the result of a technical snafu; someone at Eutelsat, the French satellite company, had flipped the wrong switch.

When he realized he could reach into Iranian living rooms, Atabay's programming turned political. He wasn't the first to beam dissent into Iran. Since the early 1980s, expats had been staging sporadic assaults on Iranian airwaves, mostly via short-wave, which regular Iranian radios receive. But after NITV's launch, with the cost of satellite airtime dropping and dishes sprouting from rooftops throughout the Middle East, Iranian exiles flocked to long-distance broadcasting.

Mariah Blake is an assistant editor at CJR.

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