Small but Effective Media

Blogs are totally small but effective and non-biased media, because they are non-centric. Here I am going to discuss about two examples of that. Almost all Iranian people don’t like to be considered Arabs. I had seen that lots of other nations think that Iran is one of the Arabic countries. Indeed historically Iranians are from Aryan race that made old Persia.

If I am to rank Iranian public’s interest in Arabs compared to Americans, in the scale of 1 for lowest to 5 for highest, I shall say 5 for Americans, and 1 for Arabs.

Issue-1: Clinton was and still is very popular among Iranians. Even Bush’s team – with lots of similarities with hardliners in Iran – has almost the highest popularities among Iranians compared to other nations. There was a language-based survey done in BBC before US election asking people about in which candidates they favor. Surprisingly it showed that Persian-speaking people are the most favorable nation to Bush (Compared to Arabic, English, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, Hindi, Portuguese and Chinese).

When 9/11 happened, (1) Iranian young people were among the first nations that came to the streets carrying candles in Tehran to show their condolence to Americans. (2) Additionally, one Iranian student who was living as immigrant (student visa) in NYC, just left his classes and joined to help needy people around WTC that later brought for him a special thank from the authority. (3) It had been found from the black box of the airplane which was crashed in Pennsylvania on the day of 9/11 that its pilot had a fight with terrorists on not obeying them to lead airplane to Camp David. The pilot was an Iranian-American which was immigrated to the US.

Issue-2: The most recent conflict between Iranian public and Arabs happened around 2 weeks ago about a historic name, Persian Gulf, a body of water located between Iran and Arab countries in the south of Iran. The starting point of that was among weblogs and the news spread out rapidly. The US National Geography Society (NGS) had considered Arabic Gulf as the second name for Persian Gulf in his 8th edition of World Atlas. And even they named some Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf with some Arabic names.

The wave of anti-Arabism started from Iranian blogs and rapidly spread out in the blogosphere. I should say that there are about 200’000 Persian blogs (Iran’s population is about 65 millions) among which 65’000 are actively and regularly updated. In fact it has made Persian as the 3rd language in the web after English and Portuguese. One blogger had suggested a Google bombing for the name Arabian Gulf. Simply go to Google and search for Arabian Gulf. The first link will be this one , which became the first link by helping Iranian blogs. The page simply says there is no Arabic Gulf and the right name is Persian Gulf and recommends reader to refer to some historic books.

These two issues are just small ones about how the reality is different from what media shows us. When I came to the US, there were a lot of my friends whose view was totally changed from thinking me as a terrorist guy to one of the best persons among their friends.Even I remeber somebody once had asked me seriously if I have ever killed anybody!! No kidding! I later found out the Michael Moore’s TV nation is really a good and simple answer to all this.

The helpful thing about blogs is that they provide a space to prevent the deviated- and biased- media.