uhoh— report from HuffPo a little while ago: the govt is striking back by using heavily edited clips from Fox News to smear the protesters and the US:

3:09 AM ET — Iran state TV using Fox News footage. Earlier this evening, emailer Valentina sent along this Farsi-language video of a June 15 news report by Iranian national TV. She described it as such:

This video is about yesterday events when people gathered in front of one of candidates’ (Mousavi but no name was mentioned in the report) HQ. In brief: The narrator says that a group of opportunistic people supporting a candidate (without bringing up the name) are responsible for breaking and destroying the public/ private property. They are blaming the foreign media for supporting the riots and covering the story. They cited Fox News who has predicted the violence and wants to divide Iranian people. They are interviewing a group of people who are mad because their property has got destroyed.

In search of more detail of how the government is spinning Monday’s events, I asked another reader (who has graciously been helping me translate Farsi) to give a more detailed description. He obliged:

What a propaganda masterpiece. So the gist of it is that there were some minor rallies that started peacefully but some people took advantage of the situation and began vandalizing. Meanwhile, the foreign press tried to make it sound worst and create disunity among the population. It cuts to a Fox News interview that US should take advantage of this situation and make contact with the people in the street. They then interview shop owners — “victims” — saying the government should stop such act of vandalism. ‘It’s unfair to us (shop owners) to come to work and see our properties and business is damaged.’

A fascinating look inside the state’s message machine, and as he noted, “you see how well they monitor all news sources to put together that video montage.”

Here’s a link to the Farsi video
kalam.tv

So Iran’s state TV is claiming that the foreign press is stirring up trouble and wants to divide the Iranian people. I guess this is part of their ‘spin’ to justify the crackdown on journalists.