Through The Veil

There is a paper from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) that may be of interest to some of our visitors here.

Through The Veil: The Role of Broadcasting in U.S. Public Diplomacy toward Iranians. (28-page pdf)

This study scrutinizes the problems that the United States faces in its public diplomacy with Iran by looking at various aspects of communication. What motivates the study is that an improvement in public diplomacy and broadcasting for Iranians would help the United States play a more important role in influencing trends and events not only in Iran but also throughout the region.

The paper first examines two initiatives that took place during the last decade: Radio Farda and VOA’s Persian Television. Second, it examines European public diplomacy initiatives toward Iran—more specifically, three radio stations: the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Persian service in London, Persian Radio France Internationale (RFI) in Paris, and Persian Deutsche Welle (DW) in Bonn. Analyzing different European broadcasting efforts toward Iran provides a better picture of the foreign information sources available to the Iranian audience. With a clearer understanding of the Iranian media market, the peculiarities and weaknesses of American broadcasting to the Islamic Republic can more easily be appraised. Finally, this study briefly explores the Iranian radio and television channels run by Iranian-origin private citizens who reside in the United States, mainly in Los Angeles.