VOA muzzles stories of Iranian dissent
“When reports began to emerge from Iran of massive demonstrations ten days ago, Sazegara began getting 1,400 emails a day from inside Iran, begging him to appear more regularly to comment on events.
“I was a window into Iran from the outside,” he said. With the crackdown on protest leaders – some 800 of Sazegara’s friends and former colleagues are now in jail – the Voice of America was a key conduit for getting information from inside Iran to the West, and vice versa.
Sazegara went to VOA editor Alex Belida, who initially agreed to put him on air. But after consulting with a Persian-speaking deputy, Belida called him back to say no.
The de facto banning of Sazegara from the VOA airwaves is not the first time Persian-speaking editors at VOA have attempted to suppress information that might be embarrassing to the hard-line government in Tehran….”