The Iranian regime has not barred all news about Syria, apparently realizing that too many Iranians get news from outside the country and so the government cannot black out major news developments.
Instead, the government seems focused on playing down the scale of the disorders in Syria and portraying them, in contrast to those Bahrain, as fomented by Westerners eager to bring instability and discord to the Middle East.
The protests in Syria so far have been much smaller in scale than those in Bahrain, but the Syrian government has been much harsher in its suppression. There are believed to have been more than 50 deaths in Syria versus 11 over a much longer period of protests in Bahrain.
The death toll is believed to be well into the hundreds in Yemen and the thousands in Libya, but Iran is focused almost entirely on Bahrain, where the death toll is the lowest of the countries with major protests.
The Fars and the Mehr news agencies, two of the three most important news agencies in Iran, have both given some coverage publicity to demonstrations in Syria. But Fars and Mehr says the huge demonstrations were in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
The Islamic Republic News Agency, the state news agency, was different. It admitted there were anti-government demonstrations—but it did so with an accompanying video showing two Syrian-American demonstrators it said had been arrested and confessed to being paid agents of the United States.
The limited coverage generally described the protests as “limited,” acknowledging the fact of the anti-government protests, while trying to dismiss them as minor and insignificant.
The pro-government Mashreq website, for example, reported: “Western circles had recently tried through Facebook to create a day of rage in Syria, but the failure of the conspiracy and the lack of welcome by Syrians turned into another disgrace for the US and its allies in the region.”
Radio Farda reported that the scant coverage of events in Syria has not gone unnoticed among citizens.
Alef, a website close to conservative lawmaker Ahmad Tavakkoli, who is an Ahmadi-nejad critic, reported it had received complaints from readers about the lack of coverage.
Alef said readers were right to ask, but then argued: “If the protests in Syria were really by the people and without any foreign instigation, then our domestic media should have covered them as they did the protests in Yemen, Egypt, and in Bahrain.”
The website said Iranian media might not have taken the Syrian protests “seriously” because the sources reporting the protests are “doubtful.” It then went on to indict the Western media.
Alef said Western news agencies don’t have reporters in Daraa and other cities where protests have taken place and must get their news only from those opposed to the Syrian government who are biased. But that is simply not true; reporters from the major Western news agencies have gotten into Deraa and some of the other cities where protests are ongoing.
Alef said, “Western media have demonstrated that they’re not objective at all in their selection of the news, they select the news and amplify it based on their interests; therefore sometimes they practice heavy censorship or they make big mistakes” in their coverage.
Alef then accuses Western news agencies of turning a blind eye to the protests and unrest in Bahrain while devoting excessive coverage to events in Syria.
“Let us remind you that between March 14 and March 20, Reuters and the Associated Press had more than 39 news items from unrest in Syria but these two news agencies had during the same time only nine news items about the unrest in Yemen and Bahrain!!! In these conditions, aren’t we right to be suspicious about the reports of these two news agencies?”
Alef didn’t say where it got those very low numbers. The Iran Times did a computer search on the Lexis-Nexis news file of all major news agencies and hundreds of newspapers in English around the world. From March 13 through March 29, it found 10,147 stories containing the word “Bahrain,” 6,608 with the word “Yemen” and 5,799 with the word “Syria.”