Roozegar was squared in the hardliners’ iron sights. In early 2012, the reformist daily ran an exclusive front-page interview with the former head of one of Iran’s largest reformist groups, the Islamic Participation Front, which had been banned and dissolved. Reza Khatami – brother of reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami – asserted that the Front wouldn’t be participating in the Islamic republic’s ninth parliamentary elections: “Election results are not what they pull out of the ballot box,” he said.

Branded with “disseminating propaganda” and “leaking confidential information,” Roozegar promptly had its license to publish revoked for the third time – officially for a month, but in practical terms, forever.

In an era known simply as “after 2009,” the year when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection provoked nationwide unrest and a harsh crackdown on the media, Roozegar’s fate was typical among those in Iran’s reformist press cadre. Etemad-e Melli, Kaleme-ye Sabz, Shahrvand-e Emrooz – one by one, reformist papers vanished from newsstands. Even the ever-resilient Shargh daily wasn’t spared as Ahmadinejad’s term entered its final stretch; it was suspended after publishing a cartoon authorities mistook as an affront to Iran-Iraq war veterans.

At the height of the crackdown, mentioning prominent reformists in the press, covering the devastating effects of sanctions, or providing honest analysis of then-floundering nuclear negotiations meant a publication’s almost certain closure. The independent press was in a chokehold. One journalist said members of Iran’s plainclothes militia, the Basij, patrolled her paper’s office every day, as friendly in-house “red line” experts were replaced by appointees of the culture and Islamic guidance ministry who cut and respliced their paper before it hit the newsstands.

A woman reads the front page of Shargh 11 October 2003 in Tehran. Photograph: Henghameh Fahimi/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP/Getty Images

And it wasn’t just the papers – the journalists who contributed to them were also under siege. When Mohammad Khatami left office in 2005, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that one journalist in the country was incarcerated. Months into Ahmadinejad’s second term, they documented 52.

“It was horrific,” stressed one reformist journalist. “I can definitively say [Iranian] journalism in 2010, 2011, and 2012 experienced its most difficult period.”

Now, five and a half months after moderate “regime insider” Hassan Rouhani’s unanticipated victory in the presidential election, the climate has eased, even as great uncertainties remain.

In over half a dozen lengthy interviews and conversations, Iranian journalists, mostly reformist, report decidedly more relaxed conditions since Rouhani took office 3 August. One spoke of feeling “more confident” than before; another said he feels “much safer” than he ever did during Ahmadinejad’s tenure.

“Fear, terror, and censorship are gone,” said Masoud, who has worked for various reformist publications. “The police-state atmosphere is gone. Today, you can actually criticize politicians.”

Two and a half months into Rouhani’s tenure, it looked as if the Iranian media would be enjoying a period of steady liberalization. American officials are now regularly covered in the domestic press, and reports on Iran’s sanctions-hit economy and extralegally detained opposition leaders no longer raise eyebrows. A number of journalists, such as Issa Saharkhiz and Bahman Ahmadi Amouei, have been released from jail (the latter on furlough).

A reengineered version of the reformist Tose’eh newspaper was said to be in the pipeline. Neshat, a popular reformist daily edited by fearless newsman Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, hasn’t been on newsstands since it was banned 14 years ago, but was expected to be released 26 October, the same day former Tehran Mayor Gholam Hossein Karbaschi’s once banned Ham-Mihan released its first “pre-issue” under Mohammad Ghouchani’s editorship.

“After 2009,” noted Narges, a lifestyle journalist, Ahmadinejad’s “ministry of culture said they’d close every paper Ghouchani tried to open.” Months after Rouhani’s election, Ghouchani was serving as the editor in chief of Aseman, Mehrnameh, and soon, many thought, Ham-Mihan.

But the 26th came and went, with no further word about Ham-Mihan’s first proper issue or Neshat’s revival. It was said the two had run afoul of the Iranian judiciary, whose chief is appointed directly by the supreme leader. And after Rouhani’s intelligence minister insinuated the release of even more political prisoners on the religious holiday Eid-e Ghadir, the judiciary’s spokesman later denied the reports.

Then, on 28 October came the first newspaper shutdown of the Rouhani era: Bahar, another reformist daily, was closed by order of the media supervision council for an op-ed questioning Imam Ali’s role as a “political leader” – an implicit jab at the rationale for the supreme leadership. Days later, authorities apprehended its editor in chief, Saeed Pourazizi, adding to the handful of journalists arrested since the election, including Behnam Chegini, a journalist and senior member of Rouhani’s campaign team. Pourazizi has since been released on a sizable bail.

“After 2009” reached its climax when authorities placed opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi under house arrest in early 2011. That’s when the oft-cited “securitized” atmosphere began to consolidate and Iranian journalists found themselves in a “catastrophic political deadlock,” said Setareh, a reformist journalist. Any reference to the detained Green Movement leaders or coverage of reformist icon Mohammad Khatami and other prominent opposition figures would sound a paper’s death knell. As for coverage of other reformists, “we would be cautious,” Setareh said. It seemed the establishment wanted to ignore the existence of reformists altogether, eventually provoking parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a moderate conservative, to declare that “denying the existence of reformists is a denial of reality.”

Unable to comprehensively document the travails of reformists, journalists turned to covering “controversial” members of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, from his closest aide and confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashei – despised by the establishment for his nationalistic rhetoric and other “deviant” comments – to his press advisor, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, now in prison. Journalists would receive express orders from authorities to avoid writing about issues deemed sensitive, like Ahmadinejad’s quibbles with the judiciary or the effects of punishing western sanctions. Officials once instructed Setareh’s paper not to write about “the costliness of chicken” during rampant inflation last summer.

But her paper tried to get by, even with the restrictions. Sometimes, they “made news out of nothing.” In other cases they wrote “metaphorically,” the developments of a foreign country serving as an allegory of Iran’s domestic political environment. “In the past few years, we fought for our survival,” Setareh said. “You were willing to ignore a lot of things, but you wanted to keep your newspaper alive for that one moment when it’s needed.”

On the campaign trail, Rouhani vowed to bolster press freedoms and conclusively deliver post-2009 Iran from its “securitized” atmosphere. Though there are plenty of organs dedicated to government oversight, he said before the election, the press is the “best institution for monitoring the performance of the government.” Prior to his September charm offensive at the UN General Assembly in New York, Rouhani again broached the topic: “In today’s world, having access to information and the right of free dialogue and the right to think freely is the right of all people, including the people of Iran.” He has voiced similar sentiments intermittently since.

The changes began even before Rouhani’s election, said Setareh: early this year her paper started publishing interviews with prominent members of the banned Islamic Participation Front. In these interviews, Khatami, Mousavi, and Karoubi’s names came up and the “securitized atmosphere” was criticized – but it passed the censors. It seemed then, she said, they could write about Khatami, as long as others mentioned him in interviews. “This is how we opened up the space ourselves,” she added. When stalwart traditional conservative politician Habibollah Asgaroladi spoke out about Mousavi and Karoubi’s house arrest this spring, claiming they were not part of the post-2009 “sedition,” it cracked open the space even more.

For seasoned journalist Shayan, who has written for numerous independent newspapers, the most pronounced difference brought on by Rouhani can be captured in a single word: Khatami.

Today, Khatami’s likeness and advice dominate the same newsstands at which they were until recently a rarity. Few publications passed up the opportunity to lead with the former president’s smiling visage on the anniversary of his 1998 Dialogue of Civilizations UN speech. “I hadn’t seen him for so long that I’d forgotten about him,” said a bystander browsing papers at the newsstands.

Additional red lines have been inched back. Other prominent reformists are back in the news. The events of 2009 and the house-arrested Green Movement leaders are no longer taboo and regularly addressed on inner pages and on occasion in the headlines. Political prisoners are also fair game – even accounts of their poor treatment behind bars. In late September, Etemad editor Ali Alaei wrote in detail about imprisoned reformist politician Mohsen Safei Farahani, who was arrested in the 2009 election fallout. And in early October the paper ran an interview with Mirmahmoud Mousavi about his detained brother’s condition.

The scope of permissible discussion about Iran-US ties is much broader, with former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani igniting debate over the utility of the “Death to America” chant that dates back to the 1979 revolution. Shargh’s unprecedented interview with an active US government official – the state department’s Persian-language spokesman Alan Eyre – set off a chain reaction of Eyre interviews that extended to outlets such as the business-oriented Tejarat-e Farda newsweekly and the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA). As Masoud pointed out, it all stood out in sharp relief to an interview Shargh published with an EU economic advisor in mid-2012, for which it received an official warning.

Internet filtering, once barely mentioned, is now openly discussable, said Mozzafar, a journalist at a conservative news website. Facebook – officially censored and formerly damned by the right-wing elite as a “Zionist” network – today provides the fodder for headline-grabbing articles, especially when it comes to the new foreign minister’s online escapades. Stories detailing the effects of sanctions accompany reports of Rafsanjani’s unsparing criticism of state broadcast media as nothing but a “box of censorship.” Portraying those who oppose reengagement with the west as “extremists,” instead of anti-revolutionary, represents a shift in permitted discourse, Mozzafar said.

Under new management, ISNA now posts updates on Mousavi, Karoubi, and other prisoners of conscience. Formerly, such stories were relegated to censored opposition news websites. “We can’t write about a lot of stories until official news agencies have written something about them – [or the authorities] will take up legal charges,” Setareh said. But “now, because the news agencies do it, we all do it.”

Reflecting yet another broken taboo, during the last two rounds of the nuclear negotiations in Geneva that produced an interim accord this month, Iranian journalists could be observed casually mingling with their western counterparts in the Twittersphere. Abbas Aslani, general director of the hardline conservative Fars News Agency, frequently retweeted members of BBC Persian, a curious turn of events considering that the intelligence ministry detained over a dozen Iranian journalists and documentarians last year for supposedly collaborating with the network.

It took just one week for Narges’s job prospects to turn around. After 2009, many women journalists with kids had changed jobs, she said, given the heightened risk in their line of work. Narges herself debated “going back to being an engineer.” But a week after Rouhani’s victory, she was flooded with article requests and her years-long attempts at releasing a book finally came to fruition.

An Iranian journalist carries out back issues of Bahar as the paper prepares to shut its operation 8 August 2000 upon court order. Bahar was the last reformist paper standing after a widespread press crackdown by the courts in May of that year. Photograph: Henghameh Fahimi/AFP Photograph: Henghameh Fahimi /AFP

With once-untouchable issues now being brought to the fore, the ensuing headlines have done much to spur sales. The morning after Rouhani’s historic 15-minute telephone conversation with Barack Obama in late September, several newsstands around town had sold out of Etemad and Shargh, necessitating additional shipments. The same was true following each session of the nuclear talks in Geneva.

The shifts in newspapers’ fortunes have buoyed Masoud out of the dreaded job hunt. He was unemployed for an entire year after being laid off, post-2009, from the paper he worked at. After the election this June, he received four job offers. In the past few months, he said, the salaries of independent journalists have seen significant increases of up to “500,000 tomans” (approximately $165).

The transformed media environment is inviting comparisons to the Khatami era – one that Mohammad Ghouchani hailed as “the golden era of Iran’s journalism.” In Khatami’s first year in office, for example, 226 publications received publishing permits, and many fondly recall purchasing multiple reformist dailies a day.

“The Khatami era is really ideal,” Serareh said, describing Khatami’s first four years as “much more open.” At the time, she said journalists would criticize the judiciary, the head of the judiciary, execution rulings, and even the supreme leader. “ ‘Red lines’ didn’t mean anything back then – and maybe that’s what caused the environment to close up.”

Today, analyzing the actions of the supreme leader and the judiciary are still off-limits, but at least now, Setareh said she can write about the intelligence ministry, whose new head speaks to journalists “respectfully” instead of “lobbing insults.”

Others claim the Khatami era was more conducive to revelatory investigative journalism, the leading example of which were reports on the “chain murders” of Iranian intellectuals and reformists that were carried out by the ministry of intelligence in the 1990s.

“During the Khatami era, we had independent journalists who would uncover serious revelations, like Akbar Ganji,” said Shayan. Unlike the coverage of financial scandals during the Ahmadinejad era that pitted one political current against another, revelations of the Khatami era “weren’t about a specific faction – it was about the entire regime.”

“It’s not that it’s gotten better,” said Masoud of the current status of journalism in Iran. “It has returned to what it used to be” before 2005. Recent years had “dislocated” Iranian journalism from its natural course of development, but, in his view, the slow rate of change so far under Rouhani is more rational than the sudden flowering of press freedom experienced in the wake of Khatami’s landslide election in 1997.

The changes in the media environment haven’t been uniform, let alone comprehensive. Though its print edition appears daily, Etemad’s website is still blocked. Bahar’s suspension and the thwarted relaunches of Ham-Mihan and Neshat have dampened expectations. The judiciary recently ruled out the reopening of the Association of Iranian Journalists, while a law under consideration in parliament would impose financial penalties on publications that receive warnings from the culture and Islamic guidance ministry.

Although the new government has promised higher paper subsidies for the reformist press, all those interviewed on the topic said nothing has happened yet. Reporters say the periodicals for which they write haven’t received their fair share since 2009, while government-affiliated dailies like Iran and Kayhan continued to get theirs – a “tool” Ahmadinejad used to control the independent press, Masoud said.

Government advertisements are another means of exercising favoritism: papers affiliated with the government, the revolutionary guard or the supreme leader’s office receive more than independent papers. In an effort to display greater transparency, Rouhani’s administration released a chart documenting the volume of government advertisements given to domestic newspapers in the first six months of the current Iranian calendar, which began in March. The only reformist paper to make the top ten was Etemad. Without paper subsidies and government adverts, reformist papers are sometimes three times more expensive than establishment ones.

As new challenges emerge, journalists still see cause for optimism. “I think those that are doubtful of progress want to imagine Rouhani is Khatami, but they’re not the same,” Narges said. “Some want to change everything quickly, but that won’t produce results. We need to wait – I prefer waiting at least until the next parliamentary elections” in two years.

As for the recent reversals in the trend toward liberalization, Shayan did not blame Rouhani’s administration. He saw as significant that culture minister Ali Jannati’s immediate censure of Bahar was followed by milder remarks that “banning is not the only way to deal with the press.” Jannati’s initial comments, he believes, were intended to pander to fringe groups that support greater media restrictions.

Shayan said he is certain about the source of the pushback against Rouhani’s liberalizing tendencies. “The judiciary,” he responded when asked about the main obstacle to Ham-Mihan’s and Neshat’s republication. Bahar’s shutdown? “The judiciary.” The ongoing executions? “The judiciary.”

Circumspection is a conscious part of Rouhani’s strategy, Shayan claimed. A diplomat with a keen eye for producing tangible results, Iran’s president delicately hones in on “advancing what he wants” under the noses of domestic hardliners, he said, all the while employing mild and tactful rhetoric.

Yet Setareh fears that there “isn’t any will within the judiciary for change.” Rouhani himself has already demonstrated such will – going so far as to withdraw 50 outstanding complaints against journalists and media outlets that criticized Ahmadinejad’s administration, exonerating 16 different publications in the process. Defending the move, Rouhani aide Mohammad Reza Sadegh declared that the new administration “believes in constructive criticism and isn’t afraid of it.”

“The complaints are not coming from the government – the government has withdrawn all its complaints,” Setareh said. “The complaints that are made about the newspapers come from the judiciary.” Though Setareh appreciates the newfound respect with which Rouhani’s intelligence minister addresses journalists, she warned of the Islamic revolutionary guard corps’ parallel security apparatus.

“Okay, so the intelligence ministry is in the hands of the government, but the revolutionary guards’ intelligence unit is still there,” she said. “They will be the ones who imprison you.” Shayan noted that, during the 2009 unrest, the revolutionary guards and the intelligence ministry competed with one another in netting political prisoners, a history alluded to in Hooman Majd’s new book, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay.

The resurgent domestic pressures may reflect a grand tradeoff within the upper echelons of power, according to Shayan, who subscribes to a popular theory that supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei plays Iran’s two main political wings off each other to maintain power. “Khamenei has handed the international arena to Rouhani’s team, so they can go and resolve those problems,” while he has left various domestic matters to the conservatives, said Shayan. Indeed, conservatives still seem to dominate the social arena: coffee shops are still shut down for “repairs,” morality police still roam the streets (in diminished numbers, though, some say), and journalism is still under close, if less oppressive, watch.

One journalist familiar with the situation around Neshat and Ham-Mihan said that while both had encountered difficulties with judicial authorities, judiciary head Sadegh Larijani has actually signed off on Ham-Mihan’s ban. Ghouchani ultimately announced that the paper would cease efforts to republish until “further notice.” The rumor mill, meanwhile, suggests that Neshat may be relaunched any day.

“They create an atmosphere to make you say, ‘Well, this government’s just like the others, so let’s just abandon it,’” Shayan said. “And once you abandon it, it’s not like something better is going to come in its place – you’ll end up with someone like [Saeed] Jalili,” he said, referring to Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator, an ultra-conservative who placed third in the June presidential election. “So we must hold onto this [administration], but critique it.”

Names have been changed.

This story initially ran without a byline



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