April Update

Covering the Iran War

Iran has long been one of the most censored and repressive societies in the world. Today the country is living through both an intensive bombing campaign and an Internet blackout. To find out how Iranian journalists are helping inform the world about what’s happening inside their country, I reached out to Jason Rezaian.

Jason was The Washington Post correspondent in Tehran when he was arrested in July 2014. He spent 544 days in prison. Since his release he has become a fierce advocate for the rights of journalists in Iran and around the world. Jason is the director of Press Freedom Initiatives at the Washington Post and, along with Liam Scott, produces a newsletter, Press Freedom Desk. He also recently wrote about the situation in Iran for The New Yorker.

The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What role have Iranian journalists, working under very difficult conditions, played in helping the world understand what’s happening inside their country?

Journalists in Iran are working in one of the tightest controlled media landscapes in the world. That being said, there’s always been a tradition of journalism that’s as independent as it can possibly be. Iranian reporters have contributed tremendously to the work that Western journalists have been doing in Iran over the years.

When I was arrested in 2014, I don’t think anybody predicted how precipitously the number of foreign independent journalists would fall off. In the vacuum local journalists have been reporting via social media. There are flourishing conversations on Instagram and Twitter and Telegram. We owe a lot of our understanding of what’s happening in the country to those individuals who are reporting at incredible risk to themselves and without much reward.

What’s changed since the war began?

There’s a small number of journalists who are able to get online and get video and images out. Many of them are people who have worked or are working for state media. Oftentimes, we take this sort of black and white approach with people who are working for state media in authoritarian states. You just assume that they are a supporter of the state because they work for one of these organizations. But I had a whole bunch of people who were sources of mine who were working for state media outlets and felt terrible about the propaganda that they were helping to create and very clandestinely were getting information they had access to out to the world through people like me.

So those people are still there, some of them, still sending information out. Others are making telephone calls. The regime has made it possible for people to buy exorbitantly priced cell phone packages to call foreign countries and they’re getting information out that way.

And then you have a couple of very well-known citizen journalist outlets that operate mostly on Twitter and Telegram. They receive open source video of protests or right now explosions, buildings that have been bombed, and they do OSINT verifications. Some of them are working with Bellingcat and other organizations that are verifying video and putting it out there. When you see the great visual forensic reports that The New York Times does or The Post or CNN, a lot of that is based on citizen journalists who are receiving this information and doing the initial vetting. There are also a certain number of people who have Starlink terminals that have been smuggled into the country and sold on black markets.

What do you think as a journalism community, and even just average people who are following developments in Iran, can we do to support independent journalists?

To support them directly is very difficult. But I think that there is a kind of intellectual support that they’ve lacked for a very long time. We should be recentering, or attempting to recenter, the narrative around actual Iranian voices on the ground to the extent that we can. The ability for us to have a picture of what’s happening inside Iranian society right now is difficult, but it’s not impossible. There’s only so much that talking heads can tell you about a war happening in a place that they’ve never actually been to. I don’t wanna say that it’s worthless, but its worth is very little.

I hope that this war ends and I hope the Iranian people are able to forge a freer path forward. But I fear that we’re actually at the beginning of a much bigger kind of conflict that involves more and more countries. Those voices inside Iran right now desperately need to be heard for us to understand what might happen next.

New Press Freedom Briefing

There’s something else we can do for Iranian journalists and other journalists around the world facing repression. For decades, US fellowship programs have been a lifeline for journalists under threat around the world. Today, when more journalists are facing unprecedented levels of violence and repression and being forced into exile at record rates, how should US fellowships programs respond?

In a new Press Freedom Briefing out today, Robert Mahoney grapples with the question. Rob spoke to researchers, directors of US fellowship programs, press freedom advocates, and journalists themselves in compiling a comprehensive analysis replete with detailed recommendations. You can read it here.

The Press Freedom Briefing is adapted from an internal report that Rob prepared for the advisory board of the Knight Press Freedom Fellowship Program, established by the JPI in 2024. Since then, the program has supported five fellows, at the Newmark School, the University of Michigan, Stanford, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

New Event: Covering Gaza, Inside and Out

The current Knight Press Freedom Fellow hosted by the Newmark School is Mohammed Mhawish, an award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza City. Mohammed covered the aftermath of the October 7 attack and since leaving Gaza with his family in 2024, has continued to write on Gaza for The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and other publications.

On April 23, Mohammed will be in conversation with Newmark School professor Peter Beinart about what he witnessed on the ground, what the view looks like from the outside, and what the fragile ceasefire, Trump's "Board of Peace," and the widening U.S.-Israel war with Iran mean for Gaza — and for the journalists still covering it. Space is limited and you must reserve your spot in advance.