These days the publication of secret and confidential documents from Western and US sources in the Guardian Newspaper has turned into one of the most controversial issues in the world. Western governments and in particular the United States have been most concerned and irritated by these publications that have been carried out by Julian Assange, the founder of the Wikileaks website and Edward Snowdon, a former employee of the NSA. Meanwhile both the US and British government have resorted to measures aimed at preventing further publication of these materials in the Guardian Newspaper, the latest of which has been the detention by the British authorities of the partner of one of the Guardian newspaper’s writers of these reports. For its part, the Guardian newspaper manifested its protestation by destroying all the material provided to them by Edward Snowdon and not making them available to the British Government. In the midst of all these events, ‘The Islamic Republic’s State Radio and TV (IRIB) entered the scene with the aim of ‘making hay’ from the position advocated by the Guardian Newspaper. It was here that a Raha TV reporter present in West London was a witness while an IRIB reporter were engaged in interviewing a random UK citizens while taping a report concerning ‘violations of free speech by western governments’. However, this interview was followed up by some unforeseen side events: ‘Massih Alinejad’, a free lance exiled Iranian journalist living in London who was an accidental witness to this event entered the fray and injected herself into the interview that was being conducted by IRIB. Massih Alinejad later told Raha TV’s Mohammad Hosseini that she had questioned the right of people renowned for their policies of censure and repression and in particular a policy that has been systematically employed against journalists inside Iran to present themselves as champions of free speech and open society to uniformed private citizens for purposes of deliberate exploitation and propaganda. This incident took place at a time when according to the latest report produced by the ‘Reporters without Borders’, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the second largest ‘prison’ in the world for journalists ad journalism.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 07:53:21 +0000