Yet again, now over elections in Iran, the Western media shows its kneejerk allegiance to Western government agendas and a scurrilous disregard for truth, writes Curtis Doebbler At the start of the week in Washington DC, in the US the main political issue was the election in Iran. Specifically, whether or not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had honestly been re-elected in the 10th Iranian presidential elections held 12 June. The incumbent claimed the election had been fair and the people of Iran had spoken. A handful of important allied countries -- including Russia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan -- endorsed this claim by officially congratulating Ahmadinejad on his re-election. The opposition candidates, especially Mir-Hossein Mousavi, claimed that the election had not been honest, and they were supported by a host of Iran's enemies. As might be expected, the United States sat at the head of the table of naysayers, but not resolutely. Vice President Joseph Biden expressed doubts, while President Barack Obama merely regretted the violence that was taking place in the aftermath of the election without pointing the finger. In fact, the US administration's official line is that nothing changed -- meaning that the US intended to pursue depriving Iran of nuclear capability no matter who was in power. In the aftermath of the election few have paused to review the evidence and determine who is telling the truth. Instead, the incumbent has merely left the matter to the state authorities to investigate or confirm. He even left the country on a state visit to Russia, after delaying the trip only a couple of days due to the initial violence. The opposition camp, for their part, fuelled by Western support, and likely money, called for a new election. For the opposition a recount was not enough, the election had to be held again. The opposition, which consists largely of the elite class in Iran, and often of families with contacts abroad, especially in the US, initially threatened to go to the streets. They indeed did, but after being overshadowed by larger celebrations for the winning candidate and allegedly facing threats of violence and arrest, they backed off from the their initial confrontational approach and instead appealed to the Western media. Western governments and Western media were quite willing to respond to the call. Together they have taken the opportunity to play a role in both influencing the Iranian elections before they took place and in trying to de-legitimise them after ending in a result that was not to their liking. CNN, for example, treats the election as a threat to democracy rather then an exercise of democracy. The Christian Science Monitor asks if the election was rigged, but gives no evidence other than suspicion to back the opposition figure making the claim. In the UK both The Times and the BBC focus on the unrest and the alleged curbs being imposed on rallies and the media, not on the election result. Even a cursory reading would seem to indicate that all of these Western media are stoking the flames of violence in Iran, if not consciously inciting it. While it has yet to be seen whether the unrest will subside without more violence in Iran, some observations about facts surrounding the election are already apparent. Suspiciously, however, these readily available facts do not feature prominently -- or often at all -- in Western media coverage of the Iranian election. Here is a brief summary of 10 of these facts that the Western media have ignored. First, it is rare and often impossible to find reference in Western media stories about the Iranian elections to the broad support that Ahmadinejad enjoys among the most vulnerable people in the Iran. While the Western media has been quick to point out that his opponents enjoy strong support in Tehran, they don't even bother to point out that Ahmadinejad was elected mayor of this city in 2003. This must at least be prima facie evidence that he enjoys some significant degree of support in that city. Second, while citing selective pre-election polls showing opposition figures -- especially Mr Mousavi -- leading in some cases, the Western media fails to point out that many of the most reliable polls showed Ahmadinejad with a significant lead and had done so for weeks. In fact, the last poll to be taken by a group that had won awards for its polling for Western media outlets showed Ahmadinejad leading by a factor of two to one over his closest opponent. Indeed, this is almost exactly what the final election count showed. Third, while the Western media spent significantly more time showing their audiences the rallies of opponents, it was the rallies favouring Ahmadinejad that virtually always had many more people in attendance. Even as Ahmedinejad's supporters celebrated the election victory in much larger numbers than the loser demonstrated, the Western media focused almost entirely on the opposition demonstrations. This is not surprising considering that Ahmadinejad enjoys support from almost all the one-fifth of Iranians living in poverty and from most of the rest who are not among the top few per cent of Iranians who live as elites inside or outside their country. Fourth, the Western media has maligned the Iranian election process without pointing out that Iran has a quite complex system of election supervision in place. Before each annual elections day, the Guardian Council establishes a Central Supervisory Committee consisting of two of its own members and five individuals chosen by the council by consensus. The Central Supervisory Committee selects a supervisor for each county. The supervisor assigns representatives to each polling station. These representatives review the process for irregularities, including corruption and fraud. Based on a report finding irregularities, the council may nullify a result and call for a recount or a new vote. Perhaps to show the system works, on Monday 15 June Mr Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, said that a committee had been set up to investigate the violence surrounding the aftermath of the election. The same day Ayatollah Ali Khameni ordered an investigation into alleged fraud. The next day the Guardian Council agreed to a partial recount of the votes. The opposition quickly rejected this and instead demanded that a new election be held. If this demand is accepted it will disadvantage the most vulnerable people in Iran who are less likely to make the effort to vote a second time. Their votes, like those of the mainly black Americans in Miami, Florida in 2000, will simply not count. Fifth, to implement the just mentioned election process the government relies on tens of thousands of people. Among the tasks of these election officials is to count the ballots. Less than 10,000 election officials could count the 40 million votes that were cast on elections day. Even if the bare minimum of just over 4,000 election workers do the counting, it is possible that they could get through all the ballots in one night. Sixth, Iran has a quite meticulous system of vote counting that starts working each year about three months before the voting actually takes place, according to Homeyra Mokhtarzada on the Ace Electoral Knowledge Network (aceproject.org). The Ministry of Interior coordinates grassroots organisations in each of the country's 669 districts. At the same time, executive election committees are formed, including the governor or district administrator, the county or district prosecutor, the head of the voting registration office, and eight members of the public, again according to Mokhtarzada. The executive election committees administer the elections: at each polling station there must be one chief, one deputy and three secretaries, as well as other persons, named by the committees, who may help count the votes. Seventh, fraud is something strongly condemned by Islam and it would be a fatal mistake for any candidate to attempt fraud in a society where such action would likely be more severely punished than in any Western country. Eighth, perhaps it is not surprising that the Western media has ignored many of the facts just mentioned. Western governments and media have already acquired a record for fabricating myths about Iran. One striking recent example concerned the speech of Ahmadinejad to the Durban Review Conference held in Geneva in April. The only head of state to attend, Ahmadinejad gave a strong worded condemnation of racism and taunted absentee Western states, accusing them of supporting racism. But what really seemed to get under the skin of both Western governments and their media was the Iranian president's lashing condemnation of Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people. When Ahmadinejad mentioned Israel the Western governments walked out. Both the Western states and their media claimed that he had called for the destruction of Israel or denied the holocaust. A review of the transcript, however, shows that he had instead recognised the suffering of the Israeli or Jewish people (depending on how one translates his words), but merely emphasised that their suffering should not be allowed to be a reason for imposing a racist regime on the Palestinian people. No mainstream Western media reported this message. Even after the official text of Ahmadinejad's speech was made available, and with the actual speech in Persian available on the internet, both Western politicians and their media outlets continued to promulgate as fact something that was just purely wrong and that they knew was wrong. Ninth, connected to the last mentioned fact, Iranians know that some opposition leaders, including Mousavi, are supported by Western countries with proven records of interfering in the politics of Iran. History has recorded in detail not only how the United States propped up the brutal regime of the Shah, but also how the US and the UK, by covert Operation Ajax, eliminated elected Prime Minister Dr Mohammed Mossadegh. US President Obama recently admitted this fact and seemed uncomfortable with it. Many around him, as well as the US media, seem to have missed this fact or conveniently ignored it. And finally, tenth, Western government and media have been quite explicit in indicating that they do not like the straight and tough talking Ahmadinejad. The truth is, however, as the 2005 elections proved, most Iranians do like him. They appreciate his simple matter of fact style and even more so perhaps his willingness to prioritise the needs of the most vulnerable Iranians. Perhaps most hypocritical of all is the fact that it is the US media that is yelling the loudest about election fraud. In 2000 the media was ambiguously timid as George W Bush became president because the US Supreme Court decided that a quick result was more important than counting the vote of every -- mainly black -- voter. This same media remained silent again in the 2004 presidential elections when President Bush won re-election after taking the key state of Ohio under a cloud of allegations of corruption and voter fraud. Even the Democrats, after threatening to challenge the 2004 vote in that state, told critics to keep quiet and just accept the marred results. Perhaps most pointedly illustrative of the bias that seems to be at play here is an example that touches the heart and soul of almost every US journalist. Try looking up the name of David Barstow to see what I mean. He is a New York Times journalist who won the coveted Pulitzer Prize last month. It was awarded, according to the Pulitzer Committee, for "his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended." Instead of being elevated to exalted status by this award, David Barlow has been almost completely ignored. CNN, for example, ran an almost 100 word story on its website on the Pulitzer Prize winners -- there are several each year in different categories -- that ignored Barlow, refusing to even mention his name. It is perhaps the Western media's bias against truthful reporting on things it doesn't want to be true that is the real story in the aftermath of the Iranian elections.
