Corporate Media Covered Iran Protests With Protest Photos Not In Iran
After the outbreak of protests in Iran three weeks ago, several major corporate media outlets ran stories on the protests using pictures claiming to be from the Iranian protests. Too bad they used the wrong photos.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) investigated photos used in several corporate media outlets and found Iranian protest stories ran with pictures from protests in the United States, France or United Kingdom which were organized by a fringe cult group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK).
The real Iranian protests took place 6,000 miles away from where the photos used in several major corporate media publications were taken.
The pictures are misleading given that they have been used by publications as a means of depicting what happened in Iran.
Most people will not know that the organizers of these rallies are part of a US-and Israeli-aligned fringe group and not allies of the workers and young people who are on the streets in Iran.
The ideology of those protesting in Iran appears to be nuanced and unclear, but what is clear is that MEK has very little to no support in Iran and was disowned by the Green Movement (the last major protest movement in Iran) in 2009.
MEK is also widely disliked for having worked with Israeli intelligence and fighting alongside Iraq during Iran’s decade long war against Saddam Hussein in the 1980’s which killed half a million Iranians.
MEK has also carried out several bomb attacks in Iran and was officially declared a foreign terrorist organization in the U.S. before being cleared in 2012 by Hillary Clinton after years of lobbying by pro-regime change forces within the U.S.
As FAIR says, “no intellectually honest person takes MEK seriously as a viable alternative to the current government in Iran. The idea that it is an actual ‘Iranian opposition’ is a Western media fiction.”
Corporate media may have millions of dollars but apparently that doesn’t cover the cost of accurate photos.
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