26 Bahman and Beyond

Editorial: Please excuse my tired, uncoordinated stream of consciousness below. Tomorrow we’ll have a full and detailed analysis of the current situation on the ground in Iran, but I felt I needed to keep my readers up to date:

It’s late on February 15, 2011. I slept last night, the first time I’ve slept more than 4 hours at a stretch since Egypt’s president stepped down on Friday. I’m just getting home from a long day of traveling and work. I have been struggling to find out what is going on in Iran. I asked a friend who has family in Tehran whether the protesters were still there from the night before, and she informed me that security forces pushed them out very late at night. I’m reading reports that opposition websites are down, and there were more protests today. Iran News Now has an excellent account of “What Comes Next,” and Enduring America also has excellent coverage of today’s events, and the repercussions of yesterday’s.

I don’t have time to write, because I have to be up in five hours, so I will get back to writing tomorrow afternoon. This shouldn’t be frustrating to me, because there should be plenty of other sources of news. There are not. The main stream media is doing a poor job of covering this story (on the whole, with exceptions), and this is compounded by the regime’s relentless attack on journalists and human rights activists, both foreign and domestic. It shouldn’t be my job to report on Iran. I’m not Iranian. I don’t work for a news outlet. I’m a white guy from Massachusetts. But somehow, the image below shows that my blog, and Iran News Now (another citizen journalist) are in the top Google search results for news on yesterday’s protests (see image below).

We shouldn’t have to get our news from blogs. We shouldn’t have to rely on Twitter to tell a news story. But what I’m writing now isn’t self pity (please) or bragging about our coverage of Iran. This blog post is an apology to the protesters, freedom fighters, and martyrs of Iran, who want nothing more than a voice, because at the end of the day the whole world should be telling their story. They deserve better coverage, they deserve television cameras from foreign media outlets. They deserve Anderson Cooper, and all the others. They deserve all those things as much as they deserve freedom, and all of those things are being denied to them by dictators who do not value their lives.

So I apologize for not being able to write more today, and I thank all of the blogs (Tehran Bureau, Homy Lafayette, all of the reliable Twitter accounts that are too many to list, Iran News Now, Enduring America, and others, I wish I could thank you all) that are doing a fantastic job, with few resources and many obstacles, to tell a story that the whole world should be telling. And I thank all of the readers of my blog who offer me encouragement just by clicking on my link. I am honored and humbled by the men and women of Iran, and I cry for their freedom which has thus far been denied.

But tomorrow, on a few hours of sleep, I will gladly get up, go to work, run home, and blog like hell. Because the Iranian people’s time has come, the dictators’ time is up, and I get the honor and privilege of covering it all when it happens.

Azadi (freedom),

James Miller