Soft news in soft war: Maximum pressure,Voice of America,and outrage media in Iran

Abstract

The US Maximum Pressure campaign, a conglomeration of diplomatic, economic, and military sticks, was ostensibly designed to force Iran into renegotiating the 2015 nuclear deal; critics say the real aim is regime change. The auxiliary media efforts in support of the policy are part of an ongoing soft war. One dimension of these efforts is the export of a popular American media format, the outrage genre or cable news magazine, to Iran via Voice of America. Last Page (safhe-ye akhar) is an attempt, like much international propaganda, to reinforce rather than change opinions. This paper examines how the program attempts to reinforce anti-regime sentiment not by informing its audience but by providing a space of mediated belonging in which the host ‘gets you,’ feels the news with you, and feels for you. The paper concludes with a discussion about the potential uses and limitations of outrage media in international propaganda.

Keywords

soft war soft news public diplomacy propaganda outrage media Voice of America maximum pressure campaign Iran

At the outset of 2020, the US and Iran dangerously teetered on the precipice of outright war. At the climax of confrontation: a siege of the US Embassy in Baghdad in late 2019 by allies of an Iran-backed militia that had been targeted by US air strikes; the assassination by drone of Iran's top security and intelligence commander, Major General Qasem Soleimani on 3 January; despite threats from then-US President Donald Trump to strike cultural sites if Iran retaliated, Iran lobbed 22 missiles at two US military bases in Iraq on 7 January, but not without giving advanced warning (Fassihi, 2021). Hostilities then deescalated after the White House claimed there were no causalities—despite evidence to the contrary (Ali and Stewart, 2020).

In mid-2020, Fox News's Tucker Carlson made history when his cable news magazine became the highest-rated cable news program ever, averaging an audience of over 4.3 million (Joyella, 2020). Programs like Carlson's, which combine hard news with ‘soft’ emotive deliveries, have long been winning the prime time ratings race for cable news viewers; Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity (both while at Fox News) also once held top spot.

These phenomena come together in the US Maximum Pressure campaign. Ostensibly aimed at forcing Iran into a ‘better deal’ concerning its nuclear program and ending its support for militant groups in the Middle East, critics claim its intent is to goad Iran to the brink of war. In addition to its economic, diplomatic, and military sticks, the policy includes auxiliary media efforts in the service of an ongoing ‘soft war’ (Bajoghli, 2019a), one of which is the production of a cable news magazine and its broadcast into Iran by Voice of America.

To examine the role of soft news in soft war, that is, to critically assess the strategic function—purported and possible—of this genre, how it is produced and performed to achieve that function, and the repercussions and limitations of its deployment, this paper proceeds in three parts. First, we situate Maximum Pressure within a longer history of media use in US-Iran encounters and position Voice of America (VOA) in the literature on international communication and propaganda. Second, we outline the general contours of the cable news magazine and VOA's Persian language export, Last Page (safhe-ye akhar). The ‘outrage’ genre chides journalistic norms of detachment and balance in favour of partisan, emotive performances that are designed to fulfill social needs of belonging (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; Peters, 2010; 2011). Third, we conduct a qualitative analysis of ten episodes of Last Page that aired during heightened tensions between the US and Iran (3 January – 13 March 2020; Appendix A). To gauge how Last Page crafts a mediated experience of belonging, we examine discursive and visual content as well as the affective performance of the host, focusing on: what is said about the Iranian regime and how it is said (how the program is structured for viewers to feel the host ‘gets me’); how the host, Mehdi Falahati, speaks to the regime (how he feels the news with his viewers); and how he addresses his audience using in-crowd language and rhetorical questions (how he feels for his viewers). We conclude with a discussion of the limitations and consequences of importing the genre into a vastly different political context as an auxiliary effort toward broader policy goals.

The voice of soft war: Media in US-Iran relations

The tensions of early 2020 were a culmination of increasingly hostile posturing that began anew when, in May 2018, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the ‘Iran Deal’ aimed at preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. At the time of the decision Iran was in full compliance and only 29% of Americans supported the action (Kahn, 2018). After the withdrawal, the US applied a policy dubbed Maximum Pressure. Designed by John Bolton, who tweeted ‘Regime change is in the air’ in early 2020 (cited in Crowley, 2020), it uses a variety of diplomatic, military, economic, and media tools to, ostensibly, force Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA. Critics maintain its primary aim is to ‘foment dissent in the pursuit of regime change’ (Bajoghli, 2019b). It is no secret that the US seeks to ‘[w]ork closely with international allies and regional partners to isolate Iranian regime, support Iranians seeking change, neutralize Iranian threats, and roll back Iranian Influence’ (Loomis, Powers and Rahimi, 2018: 191). Whatever the ultimate goal, the US has (re)imposed sanctions targeting the bulwarks of the Iranian economy and has attempted to further isolate Iran from the international community (Smolenski and Pietromarchi, 2019; Stewart, 2019; US Department of Treasury, 2018). Since, food prices have risen by about 60%; forecasts for 2019 project Iran's economy to shrink by 9.5% and inflation to hit 35.7%; the value of the Rial against the US dollar halved in 2019 and again in 2020 (Iran’s Rial drops, 2020; Six charts, 2019).

Maximum Pressure's media efforts include a social media initiative and increased satellite broadcasting into Iran by Voice of America. These efforts can be viewed as part of an ongoing ‘soft war’ (Bajoghli, 2019a). While soft war has become a broad concept in academic scholarship—‘all non-kinetic measures whether persuasive or coercive’ (Gross and Meisels, 2017: 1)—we focus exclusively on media efforts. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei first uttered the term ‘soft war’ in an August 2009 speech encouraging Iranians to maintain a ‘positive outlook’ against an onslaught of subversive messaging and imagery beamed in from the West (Rahimi, 2015a: 374); it is the latest iteration of a discourse of ‘cultural assault’ that took shape in the late 1980s and 1990s (Sabet and Safshekan, 2013). That Khamenei's call came only months following a presidential election marred by widespread fraud, one that galvanized the Green Movement, highlights how the term is a discursive device used to redirect grievances by rallying a people against a common enemy (Rahimi, 2015a: 361) and to provide cover for the suppression of dissent (Price, 2012)—all the more evident after security forces killed 304 Iranians during protests in November 2019 (Amnesty International, 2020). Nevertheless, soft war foregrounds the use of media in past encounters between Iran and the US. In 1953, a joint US-UK orchestrated coup, ‘Operation Ajax,’ ousted the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and consolidated the power of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran for 26 years (Gasiorowski, 1987; Risen, 2000). Leading up to the coup the CIA passed ‘out anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the street and plant[ed] unflattering articles in the local [Tehran] press’ (Risen, 2000; see also Abrahamian, 2001). The CIA also planted stories in major US outlets to raise concerns about the rise of communist influence within Iran, which then ‘received wide play on overt channels, such as the Voice of America’ (Roberts, 2012: 764). Conversely, the use of cassette tapes to circumvent official media channels was integral to the success of the 1979 Revolution (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994).

The repeated use of media in conflict situations does not mean that media are necessarily the cause of any outcome. To build up to a consideration of what Maximum Pressure's media efforts may or may not do begins with an account of the media environment into which they are deployed. Iran's media is by no means ‘free.’ The Islamic Republic holds seventh place among the most-censored countries according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (n.d.) and exiled journalists critical of the regime have been sought out, captured, and executed (Peltier and Fassihi, 2020). Newspapers are aligned with parties and politicians (Bruno, 2009) and the country's constitution gives the Supreme Leader ultimate control over television (Khiabany, 2008). The state also has a complex and evolving infrastructure for monitoring and censoring digital media (Akbari and Gabdulhakov, 2019). Yet, while a good part of the regime's media strategy is indeed repressive—it shut down the internet for a week during protests in November 2019 (Iran curbs internet, 2019)—it is not limited to reactionism (Bajoghli, 2019a; Price, 2012; Rahimi, 2015a). Not only are some media difficult to contain, but much of the regime's anxiety over ‘culture assault’ is tied to Iran's demographics (Bajoghli, 2019a; Sabet and Safshekan, 2013); over half its population is under 25. As such, since 2009 the regime has ‘moved away from creating content solely for state television’ of which young Iranians are suspect (Bajoghli, 2019a: 114).

Within this landscape dissent and allegiance—and all stances in between—play out in complex and dynamic ways through a variety of cultural forms (Semati, 2020). Iranians utilize various strategies to sidestep state control, from internet backdoors to underground culture; counter narratives and oppositional discourses circulate on- and offline via images, songs, jokes, and poems (Semati, 2012: 122). Whether pockets of dissent persist partially due to regime tolerance is an open question given that the regime has been willing to violently curb dissent it views as threatening. Nevertheless, this is an ‘information-rich environment’ (Semati, 2012) in which the communicative practices of Iranians are part of an ‘art of presence,’ a flexible, shifting, and creative agency that challenges, subverts, and plays off imposed constraints (Bayat, 2013).

As the description above highlights, it is important not to oversimplify the media landscape in Iran as one into which only outsiders beam dissent. Nevertheless, foreign and diaspora media are active players. While satellites are technically illegal, they have proliferated as have the networks available to Iranians (Alikhah, 2008). These networks also have a significant internet and social media presence. Indeed, the soft war in which Iran sees itself embroiled is irreducible to a US-Iran dyad. Other governments (e.g. the UK, Saudi Arabia, Israel) and organizations fund a slew of initiatives, some diaspora-led, that broadcast programming into Iran. These vary widely in terms of politics, genre, quality, and connection to Iranians (e.g. BBC Persian, Manoto, Iran International, and those based in Los Angeles and Toronto) (Bajoghli, 2019a: 41 − 44).

Two of Maximum Pressure's media efforts have received attention. The first is the short-lived Iran Disinformation Project launched in 2018. Funded by the US State Department, the social media campaign's goal was to provide counter narratives to regime disinformation (Iran Disinformation Project n.d.). Funding was suspended, however, when it was made public that the project was actively smearing and trolling activists, scholars, and journalists who challenged, or were ‘deemed insufficiently supportive’ of, Maximum Pressure (Mortazavi and Daraghani, 2019).

The second effort, and the focus of this paper, is VOA 365 which includes VOA Persian News Network (VOA-PNN) and Radio Farda. Voice of America was formed just months after the US entered WWII. Today, it produces radio, satellite television, and digital programming in more than 40 languages. Since 2017, it has been overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The US has aired Persian-language radio programming intermittently since 1949 (Kisatsky, 1999). After various starts and stops, VOA-PNN resumed regular broadcasting after the 1979 revolution. TV programs were introduced in 1996 (Biener, 2003). Deemed a ‘high priority’ after 9/11 (Izadi, 2009), the Bush administration increased funding for VOA-PNN with Radio Farda debuting in 2002 to target younger Iranian audiences (Akbarzadeh, 2011; Biener, 2003). Recently, USAGM relaunched its Persian programming as VOA 365, a 24/7 news network featuring rebroadcasts from US networks and real time original programming (USAGM, 2019b). VOA Persian maintains a comprehensive digital presence. Its video content averages 870,000 weekly views across its three YouTube channels; its Facebook and Instagram pages average 2.2 million and 1.9 million weekly views, respectively (Loomis et al., 2018). In total, the US spends $31 million annually on VOA Persian and Radio Farda (Katzman, 2020). The USAGM boasts 11 million television viewers for VOA 365 and claims that 24% of Iranians consume USAGM media across platforms on a weekly basis (USAGM, 2019a); other polls return similar numbers (see: Mohseni, Gallagher and Ramsay, 2018; Wojcieszak, Smith and Enayat, 2013). Approximately 16% of adult Iranians consume VOA-PNN's TV and online news content weekly (Loomis et al., 2018) and USAGM reported a 57% viewership/user increase across platforms between 2015 and 2017 (USAGM, 2019b).¹

Voice of America has long been a subject of controversy, one best understood when contextualized within scholarship on international communication, particularly the cultural/media imperialism thesis developed during the Cold War by Herbert Schiller and others (Boyd-Barrett, 2015). The thesis highlights how ‘the West’ champions the free flow of information in order to keep global markets open for media conglomerates and maintain US hegemony. Conversely, the Non-Aligned Movement has called for international media policy that protects cultural autonomy and allows national media industries to develop in the Global South (Nordenstreng, 2011). The media imperialism thesis has been revisited and challenged numerous times on various grounds (see Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees, 2020); for one, it is not only western states who take advantage of the free flow doctrine (see Rawnsley, 2015; Xie and Boyd-Barrett, 2015).

Under the cover of the free flow doctrine US officials tout VOA as an institution of public diplomacy (Loomis et al., 2018), a form of soft power that uses culture to ‘entice and attract’ foreign publics in an open marketplace of ideas (Nye, 2008: 95). But in line with scholarship that highlights how private-enterprise media can act in the interests of imperialism (Boyd-Barrett, 2015) and that US communications writ large have long been militarized (Schiller, 2008), many scholars position VOA as a ‘global platform for the delivery of propaganda’ (Stoneman, 2009, p. 317; see also Nye, 2008; Rawnsley, 1996); ‘white propaganda’ specifically, which identifies sources but has a selective relationship to ‘truth’ (Jowett and O’Donnell, 2015). As ‘the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols’ (Lasswell, 1927: 627), propaganda is used to forward or attack ‘an interest, cause, project, institution, or person in the eyes and minds of a public’ (Lee, 1945: 127 − 128). It aims to affect collective action, achieving ‘an appreciable alteration of the state of the “social system”’ (Parsons, 1942; 551). The Iranian regime also characterizes VOA as propaganda (Bajoghli, 2019a) and, as such, sees it as part of an effort to manufacture rifts, to ‘force the system to disintegrate from within’ (Deputy Head of the Basij Militia for Cultural and Social Affairs, quoted in Price, 2012, p. 2400). Conversely, US policy Hawks have long worried that VOA's chartered journalistic objectivity (VOA through the years, 2017) hinders the outlet's ability to effectively champion US interests and reduces America's voice to a ‘whisper,’ or worse still, a channel for America's adversaries (see Sienkiewicz, 2016). Today, these same criticisms are levied at VOA-PNN: it produces ineffectual programming which fails to attract young, educated, anti-regime Iranians (Katzman, 2020); it has been infiltrated by reformists and regime agents rendering it the ‘voice of the mullahs’ (Hook, 2020). The Trump administration had repeatedly endorsed these claims and worked to realign content with policy goals (e.g. Amid a pandemic, 2020). Indeed, recent headlines at VOA 365 explicitly promote Maximum Pressure (Shafer, 2020).

What the Iranian regime and US policy Hawks share is a belief (whether genuine or rhetorical) in the power of media. But what can propaganda, particularly, international propaganda achieve? Discourses about winning hearts and minds persist as do assertions that media efforts can act as tools of containment (preventing one's adversary from expanding their influence), penetration (developing relationships with new audiences) or even regime change (Henrikson, 2006); the Cold War, it is said, was won not ‘by use of arms,’ but through ‘invasion … by radio’ (Nelson, 1997, quoted in Price, 2003: 54). But, due to the complexity of any given context, conflict, or scenario, historical examples cannot furnish proof of concept (Pahlavi, 2007: 274). Recent studies on international propaganda confirm that source credibility and audience identity mediate and moderate, respectively, message reception (Min and Luqiu, 2021) and that target international audiences may have unforeseen responses to propaganda (Stanton, 2021). Moreover, there is agreement that communicative efforts are auxiliary to other means (Rawnsley, 1996) and constitute long-term strategies, some of which could take generations to yield results (Pahlavi, 2007). Therefore, are propagandists simply ‘shooting in the dark’? (Martin, 1971). Examining radio broadcasting during the Cold War, Rawnsley (1996: 2) makes a more modest assertion: that ‘international propaganda can only reinforce, rather than change, existing opinions.’ But this does not make propaganda ineffectual or unimportant. Indeed, propaganda's power perhaps lies in the fact that it is reassuring (Auerbach and Castronovo, 2013). The question then becomes how propaganda might reinforce existing rifts rather than create new ones, the repercussions of doing so, and, in the context at hand, what tools the US uses in an attempt to do so within Iran? VOA 365 has developed programming of a genre associated with America's own recent issues with polarization and deepening divides: the cable news magazine.

Outrage and cable news magazines

In an ‘affectively polarized’ United States—in which members of each party see the other as untrustworthy and hostile (Iyengar et al., 2019)—cable news programs yield high ratings, particularly those produced by Fox News (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; Peters, 2010). The format has been described as: news analysis programs (Norton, 2011), infotainment (Delli-Carpini and Williams, 2001), soft news (Coe et al., 2008), cable news magazines (Peters, 2010, 2011), and the ‘outrage’ genre (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). This paper draws largely on the latter two concepts, though not all cable news magazines are of the outrage genre. Cable news magazines are developed to attract niche markets by mixing entertainment with highly partisan news. They are not soft news in the sense that they cover celebrity gossip. Instead, they blend ‘hard’ news content with ‘soft’ deliveries (Coe et al., 2008), whether the irony and humour of The Daily Show or the performance of care and sincerity found in The O’Reilly Factor, Tucker Carlson Tonight, or The Rachel Maddow Show (Peck, 2018; Peters, 2011). VOA 365 has dabbled in both. The former, Parazit, an infotainment program known as the ‘Iranian Daily Show,’ has been subjected to scholarly analysis (Rahimi, 2015b; Semati, 2012). The latter, however, has received scant attention in international communication. This paper focuses on VOA's outrage product, Last Page, to help fill this gap.

Last Page, debuting in 2012, is an hour-long program hosted by Mehdi Falahati that airs every Friday. Last Page has survived the VOA 365 rebranding, is touted as one of its most popular programs (USAGM, 2019b), and is positioned as integral to Maximum Pressure's mission (Modell, 2017). The USAGM boasts that Last Page ‘is one of the most-viewed satellite TV programs in Iran and abroad. The show has over eight million subscribers on YouTube alone’ (USAGM, 2019b). (Verification efforts did not corroborate this number. Its two YouTube pages, at the time of writing, indicate just over 130,000 subscribers and 100 million views combined). Each episode consists of two segments. The first involves a deep dive into a political issue. Drawing on reporting from other outlets, the anchor provides the audience with commentary and analysis. The second segment, ‘The Last Curtain,’ features a one-minute clip cut from a speech made by an Iranian cleric. Falahati offers no commentary, but gestures in a way so as to suggest the point is to mock and laugh at the content, similar to O’Reilly's ‘Most ridiculous item of the day’ or The Daily Show's ‘moment of Zen.’

This phenomenon ought to be on interest to scholars of international communication and propaganda for several reasons. First, US media-ops have long exported American-style journalism (Sienkiewicz, 2016). While Voice of America's initial broadcast (in German) is perhaps the epitome of the ‘American cool’ journalistic style—‘We bring you voices from America…. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth’ (quoted in VOA through the years, 2017)—both international broadcasting and propaganda, like cable news, have increasingly shifted toward entertainment (Price, 2013). In blending entertainment and news, the cable news magazine's ‘point of departure’ is belief rather than balance (Peters, 2010: 841). The genre departs from neutrality and detachment, offering instead ‘pre-digested news’ (Peters, 2010: 834) in the form of ‘opinionated conversations, debates, and arguments about the news’ (Norton, 2011: 321). Last Page is no different and proclaims that it ‘does more than just cover the news. It focuses on newsmakers impartially, putting their past and present on display for viewers’ (Last Page, n.d.).

Second, propaganda utilizes whole or partial truths or outright falsehoods in emotionally charged packaging (Lee, 1945) to generate both fear and a sense of belonging (Auerbach and Castronovo, 2013: 10). The outrage genre shares these characteristics: a selective relationship to truth, emotional packaging, fulfilling social needs. Stories that cannot be made to fit ideological positions may be exclude from discussion (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014: 11). While this is certainly problematic, focusing exclusively on ‘truth’ misses the primary import of cable news magazines (Peters, 2010). Such programming, first and foremost, meets the experiential, social needs of its audience rather than their information-seeking needs (Sobieraj et al., 2013). These needs are satisfied by how the program performs belief, that is, how the host visually and discursively forefronts emotion and crafts involvement (Peters, 2011: 303 − 305). Indeed, the cable news magazine places the personality at the center of the experience (Norton, 2011). It is with them, as someone who ‘gets you’ (Sobieraj et al., 2013: 415) and who feels the news with you (Peters, 2010: 846), that the audience makes a connection—‘there would be no Rachel Maddow Show without Rachel Maddow’ (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014: 7). Such performances involve a ‘deep acting’ of sneers, shrugs, sighs, expressions of fear and anxiety (Peters, 2010), ‘melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and hyperbolic forecasts of impending doom,’ and the hallmarks of outrage, ‘malfeasant inaccuracy and intent to diminish’ (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014: 7). Information and accuracy remain important, but primarily to the extent that they aid the emotional, connective performance of the host

Third, US officials hope to attract international audiences who are uninterested in traditional news (Price, 2013: 82). Cable news magazines were developed for this very purpose. Moreover, the seemingly symbiotic rise of the genre and affective polarization has led to questions regarding their relationship. The origin of outrage media does not lie in an already polarized electorate—the reality of an ideologically polarized America is still debated (Iyengar et al., 2019). Rather, they emerged out of a complex assemblage of deregulation, technological change (the advent of cable and digital broadcasting), and political advocacy (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; see also Prior, 2013). While popular narratives lay blame for polarization on partisan cable news (as well as social media; see Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2017; Klein, 2020), the extent of media's role is far from settled. On the question of whether opinion-driven, partisan media polarize the nation—through diminishing trust or providing avenues through which echo chambers develop—the research provides no smoking gun (Arceneaux et al., 2012; Coe et al., 2008; Levendusky, 2013; Prior, 2013). Nevertheless, there are findings that indicate consuming such programming may increase the partisanship of those with already strong views (Levendusky, 2013) and these individuals may have more influence on the political system writ large (Prior, 2013). Moreover, outrage media can stir anxieties that inhibit an individual's willingness to ‘talk politics’ outside a trusted inner circle (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). Thus, while penetrating new audiences with Last Page is unlikely to be fruitful—particularly youth since the genre tends to attract older viewers (Martin and Yurukoglu, 2017)—its potential effect could be in line with what international propaganda is acknowledged to be able to do: reinforce opinions. This comes with its own repercussions. An analysis of Last Page provides an opportunity to consider these issues.

Last page: Outrage against the regime

We analyze ten episodes of Last Page aired between 3 January and 13 March 2020 (Appendix A). While representative of the program as a whole, we chose this period because times of upheaval or heightened tensions accentuate features of propaganda (Zaharna, 2008), a difference of degree rather than kind. The question is not whether Last Page, as an auxiliary effort of a broader policy operating in a crowded field of international and diaspora broadcasters into Iran, has demonstrably reinforced anti-regime attitudes. Instead, we build on existing literature that highlights the centrality of emotion in the genre's effort to create a social experience (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; Norton, 2011; Peck, 2018; Peters, 2010, 2011; Sobieraj et al., 2013)—seen in equal parts mockery, melodrama, physical and verbal performativity, reduction of complexity, vilification, and hyperbole—and focus on the program's discursive and visual content as well as Falahati's affective performance. From the established literature emerge three points of analysis we adapt for our study: what is said about the Iranian regime and how it is said (how the program is structured for viewers to feel the host ‘gets me’), how the host speaks to the regime (how he feels the news with his viewers), and how he addresses his audience using in-crowd language and rhetorical questions (how he feels for his viewers).

While studies of propaganda have employed a variety of methods—experimental (Min and Luqiu, 2021), historical (Stanton, 2021), political economy (Rawnsley, 1996)—we follow a long tradition that utilizes historicized and contextualized qualitative methods (see Baines, O’Shaughnessy and Snow, 2020) to analyze how Last Page creates a social experience structured around anti-regime sentiments in an effort to maintain those attitudes. Because the aforementioned parts—mockery, melodrama, and so on—are fluid concepts performed differently depending on context, interpretive methods and qualitative content analysis are particularly useful in that they offer ‘a means of systematically analyzing the meaning occurring within data sets and [are] better able to account for subtleties of meaning as well as variations in interpretation of textual elements’ (McIntosh and Cuclanz, 2017, p. 253; see also Fields, 1988). We do so without losing sight of the contextual factors (Macnamara, 2005), namely, the historical encounters and policy debates as well as the tumultuous time during which our data aired: a confrontation that included the assassination of Soleimani, missile strikes against US bases in Iraq, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752) by Iranian missiles—all against the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the violent suppression of protests, and parliamentary elections in Iran.

Omitting maximum pressure: Ttalking about the regime

When belief takes precedence over balance facts are omitted. Last Page chronically avoids any discussion of the negative effects of US sanctions under Maximum Pressure. Two examples are illustrative. First, Last Page positions Iran as having botched its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming the world's second leading exporter of the virus (LP 28/02/20; 06/03/20). The issue is certainly complex: the Iranian regime rejected help from the US and Doctors Without Borders citing both conspiracy theories that claim the virus is a creation of the US military and that the limited offer was a PR stunt to mask the damages done by US sanctions (Knutson, 2020; Malekian, 2020). However, on this matter Falahati only cites a State Department spokesperson who repeats its official position, ‘food and medicine have never been under US sanctions’ (LP 06/03/20). The program thus omits, as Human Rights Watch (2019) reports, that Maximum Pressure ‘poses a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines.’ In short, despite exemptions for humanitarian imports, redoubled US sanctions ‘are hampering Iranian efforts to import medicine and other medical supplies to confront one of the largest Coronavirus outbreaks in the world’ (Cunningham, 2020).

Falahati applies the same strategy when discussing Iran's economic hardship, laying blame squarely on the corruption and mismanagement within the regime's ranks. (This is a well-acknowledged fact with 55% of Iranians holding members of the government responsible for the country's economic woes; Gallagher et al., 2019). Falahati repeatedly characterizes the regime as a ‘mafia system’ (LP 03/01/20; 31/01/20; 14/02/20) referring to how the Revolutionary Guard has a hold on Iran's economy—‘The Supreme Leader's power depends on these mafias and in fact these mafias are holding his power for him’ (LP 03/01/20). While not wholly inaccurate, omitted again is any mention of how sanctions ultimately help to maintain and exacerbate a mafia-type system (see Peksen and Drury, 2010).

These omissions are not, on their own, remarkable. All news is inherently selective. And that selectivity is perhaps always ideological. But in outrage media omission and selectivity are significant in how they reduce complexity in the service of emotive performance. That is, omissions do not occur because of some irrational, emotionally unhinged worldview. Instead, the omissions undergird the emotionality of feeling the news. What Falahati says about the regime—an unbalanced, unnuanced account of its failures (but again, not wholly inaccurate)—provides the basis for how he talks about the regime. Indeed, Falahati’ mockery and name-calling are hallmarks of the outrage genre (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). In discussing Iran's retaliation for Soleimani's assassination, Falahati suggests Iran warned the US ahead of its airstrikes so as to avoid fatalities (LP 10/01/20). While this turned out to be true—the US knew via a warning sent to Iraq's Prime Minister (Fassihi, 2021)—at the time of airing it was not confirmed. Regardless, Falahati positions a geopolitically reasonable move to avoid all-out war as a sign of weakness for which he mocks the regime, ‘The hard revenge occurred: Da da da dum!’ (LP 10/01/20). The mocking tone extends to the pejorative and ironic terms he uses when referring to the regime's members: ‘stupid,’ ‘smart,’ ‘genius’ (LP 17/01/20; 31/01/20; 07/02/20). For the regime as a whole, he appropriates their own terminology, ‘sacred system,’ using it sarcastically (LP 03/01/20; 07/02/20; 14/02/20).

This type of discourse is crucial for crafting an experience of belonging built on a shared animus directed toward the regime, one in which the personality ‘gets you’ (Sobieraj et al., 2013). Falahati is not converting regime supporters but providing another space for anti-regime sentiments to be maintained or reinforced. He communicates that he ‘gets’ the viewer not only through mocking the regime but using other means as well; propaganda must in some sense also be reassuring. First, using a ‘paranoid style’ common in cable news magazines (Peters, 2010), Falahati uses anonymous evidence to confirm suspicions the viewer may or may not have concerning the regime while simultaneously positioning himself as having the access and understanding to do so. In accusing Iran of shooting down PS752 intentionally Falahati refers to an email from ‘a friend’ and then has a guest speculate about supposed evidence of a conspiracy (LP 17/01/20). Second, he rearticulates, and gives life to, other anti-regime sentiments. In a segment on poverty in Iran against the backdrop of the regime's violent November 2019 crackdown Falahati asserts that, in cutting public services, the Islamic Republic ‘is digging its own grave quickly’ (LP 03/01/20). He then elaborates on what he means by comparing Iran's predicament to that of Iraq two decades earlier. He reminds his viewers that Saddam Hussein's officials claimed to have everything under control ‘while the US military was just a few streets away.’

Feeling with: Speaking to the regime

‘Getting you’ is only one part of crafting an experience of belonging. A staple of cable news magazines is that the anchor acts as a ‘tribune of the people,’ aggressively interrogating authorities (Peters, 2011: 302). This is vividly on display in Fox News’ brand of populism (Peck, 2018). There is an important caveat in the case of Last Page. Falahati does not speak to the regime in the same way that Tucker Carlson spoke to former President Donald Trump through his program, a connection evident in the latter's subsequent Twitter activity. Falahati does not have that access or clout. His performance is more akin to that of Bill O’Reilly who would berate, accuse, and insult ‘liberals,’ individuals likely not watching. Falahati's performance, like O’Reilly's (Peters, 2010) is one of speaking as if he was speaking directly to the regime and government officials, expressing out loud what his viewers, fans, and imagined community want to express. In short, Falahati feels the news with his audience (Peters, 2010).

Falahati performs this role by reserving his use of informal Persian, slang, and casual idioms for the regime—some of which would not be used in polite conversation (a form of incivility pace Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). In one instance he reads a 7 January tweet by Iran's Foreign Minister in which the latter invokes Article 51 of the UN Charter (concerning sovereign self-defense) to frame Iran's position in a moment of heightened tension with the US. Falahati proceeds to sarcastically sum up the regime's stance as ‘All Iran wants is to end the US presence in region.’ He then looks directly into the camera and says, ‘sit back and wait for it to come’ (Beshin ta biad), a caustic way of saying ‘in your dreams’ (LP 10/01/20). Falahati also often expresses anger directly at the regime. After showing a clip of the Supreme Leader claiming protesters burned down the nation's wheat stock (in November 2019) he asks: ‘Which places were burned down by people, Mr. Supreme Leader?’(LP 03/01/20). He angrily questions the Director of the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization over the downing of PS752 (LP 17/01/20). To Iran's Deputy Health Minister, in regard to the country's handling of the pandemic, Falahati shouts, ‘Why are you lying?’ (LP 28/02/20). Falahati portrays himself as defiant and sharp, someone who openly speaks about the reality of the Islamic Republic with bravery. In feeling the news with his audience, he performs their anger. But he is also concerned for the people of Iran.

Feeling for: Addressing the people

The social experience crafted in outrage media is not only about catharsis and shared animus. Falahati uses several performative strategies to further develop a sense of belonging. First, like other outrage media he communicates care and sincerity. In his 3 January monologue on poverty—pregnant with pauses, sighs, and a pen thrown down in frustration—Falahati assures his audience in a low-pitched and compassionate tone that ‘enduring such a situation, definitely could not be permanent’ (LP 03/01/20). Indeed, the sharp, acrimonious, mocking regime-facing side of Falahati's emotional style is complemented by this markedly different posture and timbre when addressing the public for whom he claims to speak. In the 28 February iteration of ‘The Final Curtain,’ Falahati breaks from his usual manner of communicating contempt for the regime—a raised eyebrow, shaking head, or smile—and accompanies his laughter with a popular poem, ‘my bitter laugh is more sorrowful than a weep…’²

But who exactly is his concern for? Like other cable news magazines, Falahati simultaneously addresses and constructs his public through in-crowd language (Peters, 2010). He addresses them individually and collectively as vigilant and informed: ‘The November protests are like fire under ashes, we all know it’ (LP 03/01/20); ‘I don't want to remind you regularly of the mullahs’ demagoguery, you know it very well’ (LP 14/02/20). He contrasts his audience to the regime's ‘naïve supporters’ who are ‘trapped by the regime's deception.’ (LP 24/01/20). Against this group Falahati invites identification by posing rhetorical questions: ‘Where in the world could such a thing happen? A country's Deputy Health Minister being so careless about a virus that he is infected with?’; ‘Which government in history has treated its people like this?’ (LP 28/02/20). Delivered in a determined, high-pitched voice followed by a few seconds of pause, the rhetorical questions are indirect, yet insistent speech acts with a phatic function: to confirm the bonds of those who already know the answer.

All of these dimensions—a host that ‘gets you,’ feels the news with you, and feels for you—are certainly dispersed throughout the dataset. But, at times they come together in one segment that highlights their potential repercussions. One week before parliamentary elections, Last Page dedicated a full episode to the Parliament's corruption and ineffectiveness (LP 14/02/20). Falahati mocks parliament from the outset. The opening sequence and logo are altered to include the headline, ‘Majles-e Agha Pasand,’ or ‘A Parliament made up of those favored by the Supreme Leader.’ Falahati explains further that in a system built on the ‘guardianship of the Islamic jurist’ (Velâyat-e Faqih) the parliament is nothing but kashk or ‘whey.’ In informal Persian, to refer to something as kashk is to mark it as vain or futile. After turning to express anger, ‘Damn this parliament’ (Khak bar sar; literally ‘dirt on one's head’), Falahati poses a rhetorical question, ‘Why is the outcome of each and every election a disappointment for the voters?’ His anti-regime viewers know the answer. But it is complicated. There are anti-regime Iranians who vote and others who do not. Left unaddressed is the fact that the choices Iranians make at the polls are complex and often involve compromise. About 70% of Iranian eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2017 presidential election and 57% among them voted for the moderate candidate, Hassan Rouhani (Iran election, 2017). Progressive Iranians chose Rouhani in order to prevent his hardliner opponent from being elected; they believed prevention to be ‘better than a cure’ (Malekzadeh, 2017). Evident here is how the program's work reinforcing sentiments attempts to also shift behaviour. Ignoring these complexities Falahati again asks rhetorically, ‘How can 80 million people, a society, a nation still be fooled?’ He then flips the script; the mocking tone almost exclusively reserved for the regime and its supporters is directed at those anti-regime Iranians in his audience who might vote: ‘Vote [Falahati smiles]…these are the [corrupt] parliament representatives…. don't oversleep, go and vote!’

The Day after subversion: The limits of outrage in international propaganda

As an ‘auxiliary instrument of policy’—imperialistic or otherwise—any media effort must be considered in relation to the diplomatic, economic, and military decisions which it is intended to support (Wilbur Schramm, quoted in Rawnsley, 1996: 5). If propaganda and the cable news magazine have both been shown to reinforce rather than change opinions then perhaps, programming such as Last Page could aid in a containment effort (Henrikson, 2006). By providing a site of repetitive identification for those already critical or opposed to the Iranian regime, it could make any effort by the regime to consolidate a manufactured consent more difficult. It is not possible to definitively assert how and if Last Page contributes to the containment of the regime, particularly as only one effort among a multitude of others beamed into Iran—future studies might carry out a comparative analysis of the international and diasporic broadcasts into Iran. There are signs, however, of severe limitations which push back against any simplistic reading of international media use for political aims.

The overall Maximum Pressure policy has been deemed a failure (Pita, 2020). There is no new deal and the Iranian regime continues to fund militant groups (US State Department, 2020). Moreover, Iranian public opinion is shifting in ways not amenable to US interests: three quarters of Iranians now opposing ending ‘all enrichment under any circumstances’; negative sentiment toward the US is at its highest level 13 years; and Iranians increasingly blame sanctions for their economic woes (Gallagher et al., 2019). No media effort, no matter how well produced, can mask the negative effects of sanctions and derogatory rhetoric. But there is also potentially more at stake, made visible by comparing Last Page to another aforementioned VOA export to Iran: Parazit.

Source credibility is essential for audience receptivity (Min and Luqiu, 2021). VOA attempts to provide ideological support to a young population that already distrusts state propaganda. Trading one state for another is perhaps not an attractive option. But Parazit, the satirical ‘Iranian Daily Show’ was quite popular in Iran and scholars have been cautiously positive regarding its contribution to a “democratic imaginary” (Semati, 2012: 129) while remaining wary of its use in the service of US interests (Rahimi, 2015b). Last Page differs on both points and the difference lies in the style of the programs. Last Page is not satire. Its caustic style and us-other politics, while unable to unilaterally foment a crisis of legitimacy, can more easily play into regime narratives of soft war and may, as in other cases, endanger grassroots activism (see Price, 2012). Second, unlike satire which maintains a certain flexibility in its dependence on “diversions, juxtapositions, paradoxes, and incongruities” (Rahimi, 2015b: 269), Last Page‘s earnestness is more direct and demanding. In effect, it does not reflect, facilitate, or complement the local, creative, and flexible agency of subversion within Iran that Bayat (2013) calls an ‘art of presence.’

This dynamic is illustrated well by the use of a popular hashtag on Persian Twitter: #thedayaftersubversion. Initially started by pro-regime change advocates, it was soon appropriated. Regime supporters used it to warn of a Syrian-like civil war should the regime be overthrown. Others, without directly targeting the regime, poked fun at the effort by asking what they should wear the day after or by sarcastically expressing their hopes and dreams. What is evident is that the dyadic, either-or, us-other framework that is the ground of outrage media, a genre developed in a two-party system and imported into a complex authoritarian context, cannot capture the complexity of Iranian politics. Regime change may indeed be in the air, but the reality of how it is discussed, envisioned, and contested is more complex than the Manichean lens of US policy can appreciate.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Piotr M Szpunar

Notes

Appendix A

Episodes List for Last Page*
Air Date	Episode Theme
03/01/20	Khamenei's direct role in suppressing the people (November 2019 Protests)
10/01/20	Creating a hero out of Qasem Soleimani
17/01/20	Evidence of Ukrainian airliner (PS752) shot down on 8 January 2020
24/01/20	Islamic Republic's criminal record; covering one crime with another
31/01/20	The new billionaires: Leaders of Islamic medicine in Iran
07/02/20	From the Ukrainian airliner to Coronavirus in Iran
14/02/20	Parliament: A place for the Supreme Leader's servants, not the house of the people
28/02/20	Iran, the second exporter of Coronavirus to the world
06/03/20	Ministry of Intelligence and the Supreme Leader's roles in Mellat Bank and Padidah corruption
13/03/20	Liar Supreme Leader and the on rush of Coronavirus in Iran

*available at https://ir.voanews.com/z/1868 ; All translations by the author.

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