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La based satellite tv crucial iran protests { June 20 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/6887640p-7837301c.htmlhttp://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/6887640p-7837301c.html
L.A.-based satellite TV is crucial link for protesters in Iran
By SANDRA MARQUEZ, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 11:25 a.m. PDT Friday, June 20, 2003
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Reza Fazeli was a household name when he fled Iran in 1979, abandoning a career as an actor and film director.
He's back in front of the camera today, but in a much different role - news anchor for one of four Los Angeles Iranian television studios that beams satellite broadcasts every day into Iranian living rooms.
When rumors surfaced of an explosion at Tehran University during recent student protests in the capital, Fazeli asked his listeners for information. Within minutes, the phone lines were lit up and faxes were pouring in from Iran, where it was 2 a.m.
"When I get faxes back, I know they are hearing me," said Fazeli, 68.
The student uprisings have given a focus for the U.S.-based satellite broadcasters, which the Iranian government has condemned for stoking unrest.
To many protesters, the satellite broadcasts are a lifeline to the outside world from a country in which the media are tightly controlled.
Despite an official ban on satellite dishes, some estimates claim about 35 percent of the Iranian population has access to one. Others claim the figure is much lower and only the rich can afford them. Still, the information spreads on tapes and in phone calls.
"With satellite TV channels, we can see what is happening and we can tell other friends," said one caller to Fazeli's show from Iran who identified himself as Reza, a 28-year-old student of English literature.
Reza, who asked that his last name not be published for fear of retaliation, said the satellite broadcasts gave him courage and made him feel part of a larger movement.
"They are the most important things," he said. "Here, we have no real news."
But some also see dangers in the broadcasts. Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, an Iranian journalist who was jailed a few years ago, said the California-based stations fill a void but often merely advance the "rumor mill."
"In the absence of active national media, foreign-based media become more powerful," he said. "But because these TV stations have no representatives on the ground here, they are incapable of understanding and gauging the real situation in the country."
The student unrest in Tehran has deep support from the estimated one million Iranian exiles who live in the United States. Los Angeles, dubbed Tehrangeles by some exiles, is home to the world's largest Iranian emigre community.
Fazeli's Azadi Television - one of four satellite television stations and two radio stations that transmit directly from here into Iran each day - is a gleaming new station that opened six months ago with an initial $600,000 investment. The U.S. government says the stations are independent; it gets its message out to Iran through its own Farsi-language station, Radio Farda.
The recent wave of student protests against Iran's hard-line, anti-American clerics, the largest in months, have led to sometimes violent clashes between students and pro-government militia.
The demonstrations show discontent with President Mohammad Khatami's failure to deliver promised political and social reforms, said Reza Pahlavi, heir to Iran's dethroned monarchy. His father, the late shah of Iran, was overthrown in 1979 during the country's Islamic revolution.
Pahlavi, 42, is now heard regularly on the U.S.-based broadcasts. He praised the technology that is allowing millions of Iranians to see what is happening in their country and know that the rest of the world is watching.
"Thank God for technology. Thank God for satellite television. Thank God for the Internet. Thank God for cell phones," Pahlavi told The Associated Press from his base in Falls Church, Va.
A vocal proponent of self-determination for the Iranian people, he is emerging as an unlikely symbol of democracy.
"The average man on the street understands today that a prerequisite to democracy is secularization, that is a separation of religion from government," Pahlavi said.
In Tehran, though, many demonstrators say they aren't in the streets to support the heir to the Peacock Throne.
"Our slogan is 'no to the leader (Ayatollah Khamenei), no to the shah.' Our movement is a peoples' movement, not an American movement," said one protester.
Yet sentiment cuts the other way, as well.
"Their news is good and honest. They are accurate; not the lies we get from the media here," an elderly man in Tabriz said of the U.S.-based broadcasts. He asked not to be named.
Half a world away, on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where Iranian exiles mingle at bakeries, bookstores and music stores that cater to the tastes and sounds of their homeland, the country's recent unrest has been a topic of animated discussion.
"If they ask me, 'Are you willing to take one week of vacation and join them (the student protesters), probably I would say no," said Nima Amini, 32, a commuter airline pilot who left Iran when he was 19.
He said the student movement "is very pure" but questioned the motives of wealthy exiles who he believes will only try to reclaim their social standing if reform succeeds in Iran.
But he also acknowledged that the U.S. broadcasts have been crucial to sustaining the calls for change in his homeland.
"It also gives them some hope, that people on the other side of the ocean have heard them and they care," Amini said. "At the end of the night, they can go home and see themselves on the satellite. This is the positive side."
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