BEN- GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF MIDDLE EAST SCIENCES Portrayals of Neda Agha-Soltan's Death: State-Funded English-Language News Networks and the Post-2009 Iranian Election Unrest THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS NEAL UNGERLEIDER UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. HAGGAI RAM UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. TAL SAMUEL-AZRAN SEPTEMBER 2010 1 BEN- GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF MIDDLE EASTERN SCIENCES Portrayals of Neda Agha-Soltan's Death: State-Funded English-Language News Networks and the Post-2009 Iranian Election Unrest THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS NEAL UNGERLEIDER UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. HAGGAI RAM UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. TAL SAMUEL-AZRAN Signature of student: ________________ Date: _________ Signature of supervisor: ________________ Date: _________ Signature of supervisor: ________________ Date: _________ Signature of chairperson of the committee for graduate studies: ________________ Date: _________ 2 Abstract: This thesis examines international media coverage of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old Iranian woman who died of a gunshot wound in Tehran during the 2009 post-election demonstrations. Agha-Soltan's death was captured by at least two camerapersons. The resulting footage appeared on television news worldwide, with Agha-Soltan's death becoming one of the most readily identifiable images of the demonstrations in Iran. International media in Iran relied strongly on user-generated content created by bystanders in Tehran. For international news organizations who found their employees expelled from Iran, use of bystander-generated footage became a convenient method of reporting on a major world event. The easy availability of camera- equipped mobile phones among Tehran's middle- and upper- classes meant a surplus of video footage of oftentimes violent demonstrations and rallies. Specific news coverage taken is from three organizations: The BBC, Al Jazeera English and RT (Russia Today), an English-language international news channel funded by the Russian government. This thesis focuses on internet news coverage by all three networks of both Agha-Soltan in particular and of Iran in general. This includes text, video and audio material offered on their websites, as well as television footage that was also broadcast on YouTube. The time frame for coverage analyzed in the thesis extends from June 20, 2009 (the date of Agha-Soltan's death) to December 31, 2009. This time period is further divided into three separate sub- periods: June 20, 2009 – June 22, 2009 (early coverage of Agha-Soltan's death), June 23 – September 22, 2009 (extended coverage, after-events and analysis during the sixth months following Agha-Soltan's death) and September 23 – December 31, 2009 (miscellaneous 2009 news and year-end retrospectives). This thesis begins with a description of Agha-Soltan's death on June 20, 2009 as reconstructed from the two videos (“Video A” and “Video B”) that were made of her final moments. Although multiple camerapersons are visible in the videos, these are the only two videos to have shown up on the internet as of date. The description of Agha-Soltan's death is supplemented by background information reconstructed from three other user-generated videos that appear to show her in Tehran the same day. In both the death videos and the three Tehran videos, Agha-Soltan appears accompanied by her music teacher Hamid Panahi. The introduction continues with an explanation of the unique confluence of factors that led to the profusion of video from June 2009 Tehran: easy availability of camera-equipped mobile phones, the use of social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the relationship between Iranians and the Iranian diaspora. This thesis attempts to create a timeline of the dissemination of the two Agha-Soltan videos; an explanation is given of the complicating factor of deletion of early Agha-Soltan videos (and, in fact, of much violent footage from June 2009 Iran) by YouTube, which maintained an ambivalently worded anti-violence policy at the time of Agha-Soltan's death. A chapter on Existing Literature examines prior research conducted on the BBC, Al Jazeera English 3 (along with their Arabic-language mother channel) and RT/Russia Today, along with academic studies of possible antecedents to Agha-Soltan. This chapter makes extensive use of the research of Philip Seib, director of the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy. Seib has written extensively on Al Jazeera and the reframings encountered by mass media on the internet. Brief mention is given to the history of media criticism of foreign reporting in the Middle East, with special attention given to the works of Edward Said and the changes to Middle East reporting pre- and post- internet. Possible antecedents to the coverage of Agha-Soltan's death – and the two videos themselves – appear in numerous studies such as Hall Gardner's examination of the influence of portable transistor radios on coverage of the 1989 Tienanmen Square events, Adrienne Russell's survey of new media effects on coverage of the 2006 Parisian banlieu riots and Mark Deuze's parsing of the role of mobile camera-equipped phones in turning “observers” into news “producers,” along with the many studies of the role of social media and user-generated content in coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Contemporaneous studies into the effects of gender, beauty, femininity and feminism into media coverage of Agha-Soltan's death are also mentioned. Although BBC, Al Jazeera and RT coverage of Agha-Soltan was rarely as unsubtle as the British newspaper which called her the “Angel of Iran,” writings by authors such as Peggy Drexler and Golbarg Bashi are cited in order to examine the complicated question of how Agha-Soltan's gender effected coverage of her death. I also summarize the rich history of academic research on the BBC. Numerous studies of the media organization's news-gathering, multimedia and public diplomacy presences have been published in recent years. The BBC's relationship with the region, through the various BBC Persian and BBC Arabic services as well as Anglophone broadcasts, was researcherd by Seib and Mohammed Ayish. Magisterial surveys of the BBC's internal operations by Philip Schlesinger and others are parsed as well. Internal BBC studies on the use of social media within the network are cited. Finally, an overview is made of allegations of bias in BBC coverage and their possible applications to the network's Agha-Soltan depictions. Also summarized is previous academic writing on Al-Jazeera English and RT. Due to the young age of both networks, there is rather less literature on the pair. Nonetheless, books by Hugh Miles, Marc Lynch, Mohammed El-Nawawy, Seib and others have discussed Al Jazeera's Arabic-language operations. However, specialized research into Al-Jazeera's English-language coverage by John Owen, Tony Burman and El-Nawawy is discussed, as is the smaller corpus of literature on RT put out by authors at the University of South California's Center on Public Diplomacy and elsewhere. My examination of BBC coverage of Agha-Soltan's death in the larger context of the Tehran demonstrations finds an ongoing narrative where the network's attempt to perpetuate a “1979-in-2009” framing rapidly gives way to childish infatuation with the possibilities of using user-generated video content to cover a major world news event. Following the Iranian government's order that the BBC's Jon Leyne lead the country, 4 the BBC came to frequently rely on user-generated video obtained via the internet to cover the events in Tehran. In the 72 hours following Agha-Soltan's death, most news coverage of the shooting on the BBC was packaged with a translated interview with her fiancee, Caspian Makan, that was originally aired on BBC Persian. In these early days, Agha-Soltan is painted as a symbol of the Iranian government's brutal treatment of young, idealistic protesters. Over the remainder of 2009, the network aired extensive after-coverage of Agha-Soltan's death. These stories were related to both breaking news stories such as her arba'een ceremony and to ongoing retrospective features. Multiple packagings and framings of an interview with Arash Hejazi, the doctor who treated Agha- Soltan after her shooting, were made. I analyze the multiple formats of this interview, of a documentary film on Agha-Soltan that was broadcast on the internet and interviews with other figures, including Rostami Motlagh, the mother of Neda Agha-Soltan. During this time period, a consistent pattern is uncovered where the BBC actively perpetuates a “martyr” framing around Agha-Soltan's death that turns her into an unwilling symbol of Iranian democracy. Both the Hejazi and Motlagh interviews emphasize the cost Agha-Soltan's death took out on those around it: for Hejazi, exile from Iran and purported hounding by state authorities and for Motlagh, the inability to properly mourn her daughter's death. Similar coverage was broadcast on Al Jazeera. However, the network stayed largely true to their self- proclaimed mission of “the voice of the global south.” While Agha-Soltan's depiction on Al Jazeera was as sympathetic as the BBC's, Agha-Soltan is put into a pan-Muslim context several times. During a discussion on Al Jazeera's Riz Khan talk show, callers and emailers use a story on Agha-Soltan's death as a reason to accuse the larger Muslim world of forsaking Iran and “the readiness by Western media and politicians to accept any criticism spread by Twitter against the Iranian government.” Another talk show on the network, media criticism program The Listening Post, ran a segment accusing the Western media of “double standards” in their adoring coverage of Agha-Soltan compared to the sparse coverage of an Egyptian woman named Marwa el-Sherbini who was killed in a racist attack inside a German courtroom.