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Apparently the media of the entire Western world have applied this standard to the dramatic events in Iran, because on Monday massive demonstrations were held in the country's major cities, from Tehran to Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashad, and others. The regime responded with unprecedented violence. There was widespread street fighting. More than 1,000 people were arrested. Several were apparently killed. Even late on Tuesday conflicts were ongoing in Khorassan, and not a single word appeared in a major Western publication, or on the news wires, or on any television broadcast of which I am aware.
So we have a new historical phenomenon: an invisible, unknown, and therefore secret revolution is under way in Iran. And the question for the media is the following: Why do you refuse to report these events? For it is really hard to imagine that this information — which was not hard to obtain and to verify — is unknown to the Washington Post and Times, the New York Post and Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the major networks and the cable-news channels. The only publication that had reported these events as of Tuesday evening was...National Review Online. It rather reminds one of the days of the Cultural Revolution in China, or the immediate postwar period in Cambodia, when millions of people were killed and the West ignored the story. It was not that there were no journalists or others who knew what was going on; they simply refused to tell the story, for a variety of reasons. Some refused because they knew they'd be expelled — or worse — if they wrote the truth. Others refused because they sympathized with the regime and didn't want to give intellectual weapons to the regime's critics. Still others yielded to peer pressure, like the television "reporters" who apologized to Arafat when one lone Italian network broadcast the film of the Palestinian slaughter of two Israelis whose only crime was to have taken a wrong turn. Iran is the mother of all terrorism, and the fall of the mullahs would be a major turning point in the modern history of the Middle East. If the details of the regime's desperate and savage struggle for survival were reported accurately and quickly, the West might yet rediscover its conscience and join with President Bush in declaring the regime an international pariah, thereby accelerating its demise. If ever there were a story that warranted intense coverage, it is this one. If ever "the people's right to know" were at stake, it is here and now. Instead we have silence. Why?
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hen
I first came to Washington I met what I took for a hopelessly cynical
man who asked me to define a secret. I stumbled, and he said that a secret
was when you called a press conference and nobody reported what you said.
