The muzzling of the liberal press in Iran

Abstract

One of the major and tangible achievements of President Khatami's reform movement was the freedom that the press enjoyed in Iran in recent years. Not since the 1940s had the press been so free and so diverse in its coverage of sociopolitical topics. However, when the conservatives lost the parliamentary elections of February 2000 to the reform candidates, they blamed, to a degree correctly, the press for their crushing defeat. The hard-line conservatives then decided to strike back by punishing the press. In May Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, accused the liberal press of acting as bases of the nation's enemies, ie the USA. His attack on the press served as a green light to the conservative-dominated judiciary to ban the pro-reform newspapers and to jail journalists and editors. This article will examine and analyse the reasons behind the press crackdown, and the inability of the president and the reform-dominated parliament either to prevent the closure of the newspapers or to revive the banned ones.