L.A.-Based Satellite TV is Crucial Link for Protesters in Iran

LOS ANGELES - Reza Fazeli was a household name when he fled Iran in 1979, abandoning a career as an actor and film director.

He's back in front of the camera today, but in a much different role - news anchor for one of four Los Angeles Iranian television studios that beams satellite broadcasts every day into Iranian living rooms.

When rumors surfaced of an explosion at Tehran University during recent student protests in the capital, Fazeli asked his listeners for information. Within minutes, the phone lines were lit up and faxes were pouring in from Iran, where it was 2 a.m.

The student uprisings have given a focus for the U.S.-based satellite broadcasters, which the Iranian government has condemned for stoking unrest.

To many protesters, the satellite broadcasts are a lifeline to the outside world from a country in which the media are tightly controlled.

Despite an official ban on satellite dishes, some estimates claim about 35 percent of the Iranian population has access to one. Others claim the figure is much lower and only the rich can afford them. Still, the information spreads on tapes and in phone calls.

"With satellite TV channels, we can see what is happening and we can tell other friends," said one caller to Fazeli's show from Iran who identified himself as Reza, a 28-year-old student of English literature.

Reza, who asked that his last name not be published for fear of retaliation, said the satellite broadcasts gave him courage and made him feel part of a larger movement.

But some also see dangers in the broadcasts. Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, an Iranian journalist who was jailed a few years ago, said the California-based stations fill a void but often merely advance the "rumor mill."

"In the absence of active national media, foreign-based media become more powerful," he said. "But because these TV stations have no representatives on the ground here, they are incapable of understanding and gauging the real situation in the country."

The student unrest in Tehran has deep support from the estimated one million Iranian exiles who live in the United States. Los Angeles, dubbed Tehrangeles by some exiles, is home to the world's largest Iranian emigre community.

Fazeli's Azadi Television - one of four satellite television stations and two radio stations that transmit directly from here into Iran each day - is a gleaming new station that opened six months ago with an initial $600,000 investment. The U.S. government says the stations are independent; it gets its message out to Iran through its own Farsi-language station, Radio Farda.

The recent wave of student protests against Iran's hard-line, anti-American clerics, the largest in months, have led to sometimes violent clashes between students and pro-government militia.

The demonstrations show discontent with President Mohammad Khatami's failure to deliver promised political and social reforms, said Reza Pahlavi, heir to Iran's dethroned monarchy. His father, the late shah of Iran, was overthrown in 1979 during the country's Islamic revolution.

Pahlavi, 42, is now heard regularly on the U.S.-based broadcasts. He praised the technology that is allowing millions of Iranians to see what is happening in their country and know that the rest of the world is watching.

"Thank God for technology. Thank God for satellite television. Thank God for the Internet. Thank God for cell phones," Pahlavi told The Associated Press from his base in Falls Church, Va.

A vocal proponent of self-determination for the Iranian people, he is emerging as an unlikely symbol of democracy.

"The average man on the street understands today that a prerequisite to democracy is secularization, that is a separation of religion from government," Pahlavi said.

In Tehran, though, many demonstrators say they aren't in the streets to support the heir to the Peacock Throne.

"Our slogan is 'no to the leader (Ayatollah Khamenei), no to the shah.' Our movement is a peoples' movement, not an American movement," said one protester.

"Their news is good and honest. They are accurate; not the lies we get from the media here," an elderly man in Tabriz said of the U.S.-based broadcasts. He asked not to be named.

When Iranian American Media Shout, Iran Listens
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The role (U.S.-based Iranian media) have played in the recent uprising has been phenomenal," says Hedjazi. "Those people back home have no way to know what's going on. But the minute the stations go on air and say go to this street at this time, the people follow the guidelines."

"Technology fostered all this -- the Web, Internet radio, satellite television," says Mehdi Zokaei, publisher and editor of Javanan International Weekly. "None of this would have been possible five or 10 years ago." Zokaei moved the paper to Los Angeles after the Islamic Revolution made it impossible to publish in Iran. The largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran live in Southern California.

Thanks to the Internet, papers such as Javanan can be read in Iran. Zokaei says the Tehran government is "scared, not just of the Americans, but of the proliferation of Iranian Americans."

Zia Atabay, a former Iranian pop star, and his Los Angeles satellite channel National Iranian Television (NITV) may be Public Enemy No. 1 in Iran. "The Iranian government is spending millions of dollars buying equipment to jam my signal," Atabay says. But he also says Iranians risk jail sentences and worse to call his shows on their cell phones.

But Atabay does not think that Iranian American media are the leaders of any revolution in Iran. "This movement doesn't have leadership, like (Martin Luther) King or Che Guevara. This is a people's movement. Young people don't listen to me. I'm just following what they are doing."

Zokaei, however, thinks that Iranian Americans enjoy a certain street credibility among Iranians that others may not. "People won't listen to Americans, but they listen to Iranian American media because these are people who were there once upon a time."

The other reason Iranian American media finds an audience back home is that they provide an outlet for the frustrations of many ordinary Iranians. "Since 2000, more than 100 newspapers and magazines were closed in Iran by the order of (Supreme Leader) Khamenei, who recently ordered the filtering of Iranian Web sites," says Shahbaz Taheri, editor of the San Jose monthly Pezhvak of Persia.

As their news options within Iran shrink, people are increasingly flocking to outside sources. "In Iran people don't trust their neighbors. But they trust a television station because it's from the outside" says Shahbod Noori who runs the Encino-based weekly Tehran Magazine.

When the students first started protesting the government's proposal to privatize the universities, they turned to Iranian American media like Radio Yaran, Channel One and NITV to get the word out. When 500 members of Iranian special forces broke into students' dormitories, it was the Iranian American media that spread the word. "But we didn't start it. It started over there. We just covered the story," stresses Noori.

Iranian Americans who mostly fled to the United States after the Islamic Revolution have always been opposed to the government in Tehran. Humayon Nejad, publisher of Encino-based Asre Emrooz, describes his paper as "seriously against the mullah regime." Some openly support Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah.

That has made them easy targets for being dubbed stooges of the American government. The United States does directly fund some Iranian American media, such as Radio Farda, based in Washington, D.C., and Prague. It has also hired Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri as a director of a new satellite television channel.

But most of the media are family owned and need their readers and viewers to survive. "Unfortunately, a majority of these media have financial problems that could have a very significant effect on any role in bringing change in Iran," says Taheri.

Reporting on the news from Iran has been a journalistic challenge as well. "Everybody has become a reporter there -- we get stories faxed to us without any address," says Noori. Ordinary people send by e-mail to Javanan photographs of protesting students. "We let the pictures speak for themselves rather than use words," says Zokaei. Radio Iran tries to validate its news from other European and American sources.

No one knows if the protests will lead to real democracy or just evaporate into the Tehran summer. But Iranian American media have realized that, even from Los Angeles, they can move Iran. Yet in the end, editors and producers say, satellite television and Web sites are not fomenting trouble in Iran. "The root of 'disturbance' in Iran is the poverty, censorship, lack of democracy, corruption and forcing people to follow the laws of Islam like the way the Taliban were forcing Afghans," says Taheri.

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