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The Satellite Subversives
SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "The New York Times (free registration reguired, blah blah blah) has a fascinating article about a former Iranian rock star who has launched a pirate TV station broadcasting back into Iran from, of all places, L.A. From reading the article, I can't help but compare Narional Iranian Television to U-62 from the movie "UHF" because of its ultra-low-budget operations and programming, but, like the fictional station, it's wildly popular. OK, I know this is a little off the beaten track for Slashdot articles, but it's nice to see that there's a broadcaster out there more interested in providing a meaningful service than figuring out ways to squeeze more and more money out of viewers."
http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/24NITV.html
Here is the registration-free link.
karma whoring is fun for the entire family!
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Since UHF has been mentioned in the writeup, it can't hurt to say that plans to release the movie on DVD are set to go this summer, with a large number of extra features that Al is helping to arrange.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"Pirate" implies a lack of license to broadcast on a particular medium. This station is not "pirate" in any traditional sense of the word; they are abiding by the communications laws of the countries that contain their uplinks, and are paying whatever fees are necessary to the owners of the bird. The only place they can be considered 'pirate' may be within Iran's borders, presuming the Iranian equivalent of the FCC has attempted to legislate away such signals. (It sounds like they've simply chosen to ban the receiving equipment, instead- and perhaps organized a small holy war against the station.)
Remember, to be 'pirate,' you have to have regulations in the first place, and it sounds like the Iranian regime (which we in the US helped put in place) just isn't scientific enough to be regulating particular spectra. Misrepresenting the station as violating US broadcasting law doesn't do them any favors.
This is the text of the article, in case NYT gets /.-tted.
The Satellite Subversives
By MICHAEL LEWIS
A few months ago, on Nov. 5, 2001, to be exact, The Wall Street Journal ran an odd report from Tehran. Thousands of young Iranians had taken to the streets to wave American flags and chant pro-American slogans. They had responded to the appeal of Reza Pahlavi, son of the former shah, who lives in Maryland and addressed the Iranian people via a call-in television talk show broadcast from North Hollywood, Calif. In Iran there were enough satellite television dishes and enough people watching what came through them that a man on a telephone call to Los Angeles could hijack a demonstration on the streets of Tehran.
A few weeks later, I drove down from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to watch Reza Pahlavi appear live on National Iranian Television -- or NITV, as it usually calls itself. I thought maybe there was a story in the surprising new political influence of the son of the former dictator. And there was. It just wasn't the best story. In this little hellhole of a TV station off a back street on the wrong end of Hollywood, something astonishing had happened.
NITV opened for business in March 2000. It was the brain wave of an Iranian-American man named Zia Atabay. Most people when they first meet Zia Atabay see a hard-bitten and cynical operator, the sort of guy who doesn't know what the short end of a deal looks like. But Atabay has an ability to shift without warning from cynicism to sentiment and from cold calculation to airy romance. In the old days, before the Iranian revolution, he was a rock star. He sold so many records in Iran that he thought nothing of flying to Paris with 50 grand in cash in his pocket and returning a week later to his mansion in Tehran empty-handed. Ayatollah Khomeini believed all music was sinful, and Atabay wound up fleeing on foot for his life with $4,000 stuffed inside his underpants. Since 1980, he has lived in Sweden, Spain and England, but until he reached California, he never really felt at home.
In Tarzana, a suburb of Los Angeles, Atabay became a United States citizen. His wife, also Iranian-American, made a small fortune in plastic surgery clinics. In the late 1990's, he had a modest critical success with his own Farsi-language local cable talk show -- and that flipped the switches in his mind that shut down his cold reason and turned on the steam. There are roughly four million Farsi speakers in the United States and Western Europe. Atabay thought they were underserved with Farsi-language entertainment. He would take his wife's plastic surgery profits and dump them into Farsi movies, music, cooking shows and perhaps a bit of tastefully exposed Persian female flesh. ''It was a dream,'' he says. ''I saw CNN, NBC, CBS. I saw that once a year they talk about Iran. If I have a Farsi-language network, I tell myself, I will show the world.'' He investigated the alternatives and discovered that the cheapest way to reach the United States and Western Europe -- cheaper even than shortwave radio -- was satellite television.
To establish his product, Atabay decided he needed to give it away, at least to begin with. He also needed an anchor tenant, an Iranian personality big enough to attract the mass audience he craved. Buried in the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in Los Angeles there was a neglected trove of aging Persian entertainers unwelcome in their home country. The Dan Rather of Iran now lived in Encino. The Frank Sinatra of Iran lived in Sherman Oaks. Atabay found the real star power he was looking for in a journalist named Ali Reza Meybodi, who also lived in Sherman Oaks. The Persians who live in Los Angeles describe Meybodi as the Larry King of Iran, but he's more dignified than that, a throwback to an earlier age of TV talk shows. He's more like the David Frost of Iran. Or was, until he, too, was forced to flee Iran for his life. Meybodi, who still speaks little English, then earned his living on Farsi-language radio programs in the United States. Atabay agreed to pay Meybodi three times what he made on his radio call-in shows -- and six months' salary in advance -- to be the host of a three-hour TV talk show with call-ins, and Meybodi came aboard.
It was during Meybodi's show in September 2000 that this story really begins. As always, calls were coming in from across the United States and Western Europe. And then a call came that didn't sound like the others; it clicked weirdly, like an Iranian phone line. The caller said he was in Isfahan, a city in central Iran, and that he was picking up NITV's satellite signal. Meybodi didn't believe him.
''Who am I?'' Meybodi asked.
''I don't know,'' said the caller. ''But I see you on my TV.''
Meybodi still didn't believe him; nobody did. He asked for the caller's phone number and said he would call him back. Still on the air, Meybodi phoned Isfahan, and sure enough the caller picked up. But Meybodi still didn't believe his story.
Meybodi held up an apple on TV.
''What am I holding?'' he asked the caller. Atabay and a few others drifted into the studio.
''An apple,'' the caller said. Now everyone who worked at NITV was in the studio. They were all Iranians; most of them were middle-aged men; most of them had not been home in more than 20 years; most of them assumed that they would never go home. They were not just physically but also imaginatively cut off from their pasts.
Meybodi picked up a pen. ''What am I holding now?'' he asked.
''A pen,'' the caller said.
''When he said it was a pen,'' Atabay says, ''that's when we began to weep.'' Men with faces that looked as if they had been carved from stone broke down and cried, oblivious of the fact that they were on live television.
All of a sudden -- just like that -- there was a new connection between Iranians in exile and the home country. The effect was electric, but unsettling, as if someone had plugged a 120-volt appliance into a 240-volt socket. Atabay says it took six hours before the whole of Iran knew there was something new on TV and another six before they all tried to send him faxes. ''These people wrote to say that everybody start like crazy to buy satellite dishes,'' Atabay recalls. ''They sell their carpets. They sell cars. We had one story from someone who sold a kidney.'' Atabay was right about Farsi-language programming, for the wrong reasons. There were indeed many people in the world who felt starved for Farsi entertainment. But just about all of them still lived in Iran. And yet when he beamed his free signal into the sky he never imagined it would reach them.
Neither, apparently, did the Iranian government. A black market in satellite dishes thrived ever since the government banned them back in 1995. For some reason no one could explain, the regime turned a blind eye to it, until, in late September 2000, it discovered NITV.
<Sig>The good thing about having a good memory is ... euh
They speak Farsi in Iran and Aimaq, Tajiki, Ashkun, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Brahui, Darwazi, Farsi, Gawar-Bati, Gujari, Hazaragi, Jakati, Kamviri, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Malakhel, Mogholi, Pashto, Pashayi, Sanglechi-Ishkashimi, Tanshewi, Tatar, Tirahi, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Waigali, Wakhi, Warduji, and Wotapuri-Katarqalai in Afghanistan.
I wonder why Afghan culture is so fragmented...
It's never as easy as that. Here's three potential problems, and there are more:
(1) We already have a broadcast means to present American opinions and points of view -- it's called the Voice of America, it's got editorial independence, and it's been broadcast in Farsi for several years.
(2) While I don't know the editorial leanings of this station in particular, whoever chose to support it (state department?) would have a tough time maintaining their support once some politician started complaining that their views didn't exactly match American foreign policy -- and I bet they say some things about Israel that would sure piss off a Congressman. Before you cry "censorship", remember that the U.S. doesn't have to support unpopular views, it just can't forbid them.
(3) The U.S. has enough problems with "Street Cred" as it is. Iran has already banned the station, but they'll lose more viewers, I think, if it turns out that this is just bought and paid for by the U.S.
Of course, if the new "Office of Strategic Influence" decided to underhandedly throw a little money their way, especially if they didn't try to assert editorial control, I'd certainly support it.
But don't automatically assume they don't 'cause we'd rather blow shit up.
Just a little footnote to what nomadic said, since it bears on the impression most people have about Iran: Farsi is an Indo-European language, meaning it's in the same language family as English, French, Russian, and most of the languages spoken in Western Europe. The notable exceptions are Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian; Basque is a language 'isolate', meaning there are no known related languages, the last 3 belong to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. This all means that Iranians speak a language much more closely-related to English than Finnish, etc.
Arabic, is relevant for Islam in the same way Latin is for the Catholic Church, which is why many (most?) people in dominantly Muslim countries can speak Arabic... as a second language, in the case of Iran, Afghanistan, and others.
Disclaimer: I studied Linguistics, but I know *very* little about the countries and cultures in question.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence