Ahmadinjad lies because we let him

By Tal-Anna Szlenski

I can’t help but despair when reading through this article on “Ahmadinejad, master of spin“. In shedding light on Ahmedinejad’s media approach, it showcases how seasoned journalists fail to address his inane manifestations and lies as being just that.

From Jon Leyne’s BBC piece it is derived that journalists expect to corner the Iranian president and with the right prompt trigger some sort of confession accounting for wrongdoings.

In the article we read that

in an interview on Sunday with Christiane Amanpour on the ABC News programme This Week, he dismissed as “propaganda” the stoning sentence defence lawyers say was imposed on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.

When asked his own opinion on the issue of stoning in general, he simply avoided the question.

Then, he flatly denied the claim that the number of executions in Iran had dramatically increased since he took office, something attested both by human rights organisations and by international news agencies who keep a running tally of executions announced in the Iranian media.

At Columbia University in New York, he stated boldly that there was complete freedom in Iranian universities. Several students who went out to protest against him on his return to Tehran were promptly arrested.

So why is it that our journalists are so concerned with exposing his ‘spin techniques’ rather than calling a spade for a spade and in this case, a lie for a lie? Why is it that it seems that journalists are willfully seeking to be proved wrong by Ahmadinejad? And why is it that this man is weighed against values, principles and morals which he has no intentions of adhering to?

And we’re back!

By Tal-Anna Szlenski

We’re back, and with changes as to how we’re going to run this blog in the future. 

As some might have noticed, the last post on this blog was submitted almost a month ago. This lack of posts was not because we didn’t have anything to say. I mean, it was UK election time! Of course we had something to say. And a lot of it.

Yet it posed a problem. You see, within this fine group of people contributing to the blog, many found themselves in a bit of a dilemma. Most, if not all, of us are – quite unsurprisingly –  established, or seeking to be, in the realms of politics, journalism and communication. We had to admit that blog posts of a controversial nature under personal names could compromise any professional reputation, with the click of a Google search.

Hence, our solution to this problem, and the way the blog will be run in the future looks like this:

The list of contributors to the blog shall remain with our names. Yet we have all chosen a internet moniker which we will use consistently with our posts. With this system we hope to retain accountability, as well as a mild degree of anonymity.  

This resolution of ours  is perhaps not perfect nor fool-proof, but it serves our purpose in this conoundrum so typical for the so-called internet age.

With this new meassure many more posts should be emerging, and we look forward to explore how our solution takes form in practice. Of course we are interested in hearing any other suggestions, or thoughts on what you guys reckon about this? Please do share.

As such, consider this the last ‘named’ post on the blog.

Happy friday!