Since the declaration of incumbent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in the Iranian election of 2009, trusted media outlets from all over the world have saturated their headlines with claims suggesting that the election was rigged.
These same media outlets have done a terrible job of presenting the many counterclaims to the election fraud allegations.
The media's relentless effort to cast doubt on the Iranian election has more to do with Ahmadinejad's poor reputation in the Western media, than it has to do with objective journalism.
The first major accusations of election fraud originated from supporters of defeated reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The former prime minister's base consists heavily of many of Tehran's disgruntled youth, who could not understand how they lost by such a wide margin. Soon thereafter, images and footage of the violent protests in Tehran began appearing in the news and many viewers were convinced by the ferocity of the protests that the elections were in fact rigged. Comparatively, there was almost no news coverage of the many demonstrations in favor of Ahmadinejad, which further indicates that the mainstream media has no intention of "getting the real story".
Soon, reports of extreme violence at the hands of Iran's notorious Basij militia began circulating, including a video of the tragic death of a young woman named Neda, who was supposedly shot by a Basij sniper from a nearby rooftop. No attempt was made by the media to explain why the sniper shot Neda, who was not protesting, and why the sniper did not shoot any of the other people around her.
The mainstream media has paraded Neda as a martyr while refusing to analyze the details concerning her death. The Western media's handling of the Neda affair demonstrates its inclination to run stories that portray Ahmadinejad's government as despotic and oppressive while ignoring relevant questions.
As for the election results themselves, the media has pointed to claims of "irregularities" to suggest rigging, but has made no attempt to present valid counterclaims, instead portraying any evidence that the results were accurate as propaganda from the corrupt Iranian government.
The media outlets purporting this claim failed to mention the impossibility of accurate pre-election polling in Iran and that many of these polls were done by Mousavi's own campaign just as many of the polls that showed Ahmadinejad leading were conducted by the government.
They fail to mention Ahmadinejad was once a popular politician in West Azerbaijan where he became fluent in Azeri, a trait which makes him more agreeable with voters in the East Azerbaijan province than originally portrayed by skeptics.
The media forgets that Ahmadinejad was once the mayor of Tehran. Also, Tehran province is much larger than the city of Tehran and therefore has a much larger pool of voters, many of whom are older and identify with Ahmadinejad's service during the devastating Iran-Iraq war in the 80s. All these facts are relevant to the Iran election story, yet many in the Western media refuse to discuss them.
Such an affirmation would be counterproductive to the Western media's ultimate goal of undermining the validity of Ahmadinejad's presidency.
The media outlets we trust have taken us all for a ride. They showed us one side of the story when they should have shown us both. We deserve to know all sides of a story, and the media has failed at this because many in the media were busy assuming the role of judge and jury. My point is not to say whether or not the elections were rigged; it is to call attention to the enormous bias that the mainstream media demonstrated, so that we realize how easy it is for the media to fool us.
Chris Browning
Sophomore, economics