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This Revolution Will Be Televised

The U.S. government has proposed spending millions to broadcast pro-democracy propaganda into Iran.

By Joe Piasecki

In a small suite in a strip mall just off Victory Boulevard in Canoga Park, right above a dentist's office, Shahram Homayoun smokes Marlboro Lights as he plans the daily television news broadcast. The scene in his renegade community TV station is not unlike a thousand others across the United States, except that most of his reporters - and a big chunk of his audience - are halfway around the world in Iran. As the head of Channel One TV, the 50-year-old former Iranian journalist and political prisoner now runs one of the largest guerrilla TV stations sending the message of resistance back home. In this case, a pro-democracy, often pro-Western resistance.

At least two other large stations, NITV and Melli TV, are located less than a mile away - a unique but not surprising situation considering as many as 500,000 Iranian expatriates are thought to be living in Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley is the heart of Iran's most radical TV and, many would say, a beachhead in the battle against Iran's Islamist theocratic regime.

"The Iranian people have to decide what they want for their country, and we are for freedom and democracy. We host all kinds of different political groups and we let them speak freely," says Homayoun of Channel One, which he has operated along with a sister radio station for the past four years.

Freedom, as they say, comes with a price. Homayoun says he has received numerous death threats for his work and, for fear of reprisal, his station-affiliate translator begged not to be identified.

He also, apparently, is getting exactly zero help from the direct benefactor of his work, the United States of America.

Following the invasion of Iraq, the United States government stepped up its propaganda war in Iran, struggling to win the hearts and minds of a very cosmopolitan people who are living under what is often described as one of the world's most oppressive and dangerous regimes. Radio Farda, a State Department-sponsored mix of hard news stories and contraband Western pop from acts like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, went on air in late 2003 via satellite and webcast to assure Iranian youth, the largest demographic group in that country, that democracy is good and that Americans aren't such bad people.

Now in diplomatic crisis-mode over the Iranian government's resumption of its nuclear power program, the Bush administration is asking Congress for $75 million to start beaming its own 24-hour Farsi cable TV news channel into Iran. But there's been no move to support the Valley stations, which have been using satellites to sneak past Islamic Republic censors for years on ridiculously small budgets. Not to mention navigating a world of technological skulduggery, the condemnation of Iran's ruling regime, and open threats from the supporters of that regime. These renegade stations often operate like they came right off a James Bond movie script.

And, like a movie, they persist despite the odds. Down the street, Zia Atabay, who worked as a pop singer and record executive back in Iran, holds NITV (National Iranian Television News) together on a shoestring. Like Homayoun, the impeccably dressed Atabay broadcasts Farsi news all over the Northern Hemisphere via satellite and the Internet. Although it broadcasts more music and entertainment than Homayoun's Channel One, NITV also advocates free speech, free press, gender equality, an end to human rights abuses, and separation of church and state.

Both stations say they have secret contacts in Iran - some numbered, 007-style - who report via cell phone, bringing local news to Iranians unfiltered by government censorship.

"In Iran you cannot see the true news because it all belongs to the government and Iranians don't trust it. We tell them the truth of what's happened. That's why they keep connection with us," says Atabay, who hosts a news program from his spartan offices. The truth is deadly serious stuff: Recent discussion topics include the disappearance of a young female reporter, a transit strike that was brutally suppressed with beatings and imprisonment, and the country's controversial nuclear program.

Comparatively large and busy, Homayoun's Channel One offices are decorated with art depicting Persia's proud history, the most important of which are images of the Iranian flag as it looked before the Revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and set up a theocratic republic.

For Homayoun, who hosts both a morning and evening live political talk show fielding calls from inside Iran, his flag is a symbol of resistance.

"Every day we get calls [from Iran] asking for this," he says, holding up a drawing of the flag by an eight-year-old viewer. "This shows our power."