Former US Secretary Of State Spurs Media Face-Off in Iran
On April 26, reports on the publication of an Iranian journal had many eyes popped out of the readers’ heads. Mehr News Agency spread words that Asre Andisheh (Age of Reflection)’s eleventh issue had come out, putting to print interviews with the world’s top personalities including former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, political economist Richard Murphy, former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad, futurist Jerome C. Glenn as well as a plethora of Iranian politicians.
Pictures of the trilingual principlist magazine hit online with a sketch of Rice on the Persian cover and a photo of Mahathir Mohammad on the English back cover. “Stressing in an exclusive interview with Asre Andisheh that Iran has based its international decisions and actions on “realism” and has never fallen for the illusions or imaginations of the region or its rivals, Condoleezza Rice, former US national security advisor and Secretary of State, said Iran’s progress is because of the belief in its religious and ideological principals,” Mehr wrote.
Saheb Sadeghi, the owner and managing editor of Diplomat, a magazine on the other end of the political spectrum in Iran, posted on his Facebook account screenshots of his Gmail correspondence with Rice’s bureau chief at Stanford University, Georgia D. Godfrey, in which the latter denied the interview and promised to “get it pulled down”.
This was soon followed by a screenshot of correspondence, surprisingly in French, between Asre Andisheh’s Somayeh Khalili and a “Condi Rice” account at a Magazine Sciences Humaines site registered at a .pro domain. Upon the inquiry sent from a Yahoo email, Condi Rice had confirmed the interview “conducted about a month ago upon the request of a friend”. According to the French screenshot dated May 4, she accepted to do the interview because the issues discussed were of her interest and she wanted to repeat her positions one more time. The paragraph-long response ended with a note on the domestic atmosphere in the US. “The point is any reaction is predictable, given the atmosphere in the US and the presidential race,” a pseudonymous Rice wrote.
According to Mashregh News, Asre Andisheh’s French editor had coordinated the interview through a French colleague who is a close friend of the former Secretary of State. Some supplementary questions submitted to Rice discussed the US presidential race and are now reserved from publication, Mashregh reported.
The faceoff between reformist and principlist media then took a new turn when Tik.ir published a series of faults found in the screenshot, pointing out most interestingly that the Rice’s email address was capitalized on the first letters and that the domain has been offline for a long time. With the hurried forgery exposed, the reformist media reported that the English version of the interview had been removed from Asre Andisheh’s website and the previous page redirected visitors to another interview with Khaled Abou El Fadl, Professor of Law at UCLA. The interview, clearly short of native English writing etiquette is still available here.
As the sides continue accusing each other of forging screenshots, Asre Andisheh editor in chief Payam Fazlinejad says the monthly will litigate against those claiming it has forged the screenshot for the truth to become clear after a fair investigation. Calling the whole episode roorback and brawl, he said the monthly would submit the email’s header to the court.
“We have had extensive investigations from different channels to analyze what is now happening venomously in the media scene,” he said. Stressing that his team will not be trapped in such plots, he added: “On the one hand, we will use the legal capacity of the judicial authorities to provide maximum transparency and on the other hand our team will not cease its uninterrupted efforts started two years ago”.
Calling the allegations of forgery a political reprisal by the intellectual front against the Revolution, he said the “notorious” faction is retaliating against revolutionary figures. “Sometimes, media pressure to disclose documents can trouble the interviewee side and that is how the responses made by the Stanford bureau should be justified. We have no other choice than to give the Email ID header documents to the court,” he told Tasnim.
One of a several confrontations now under way between the two main political camps in Iran, the controversy could be of face-saving value for the two editors in chief. So far, the Condoleezza Rice side has declined to comment or issue a statement for or against the authenticity of the interview.