Iran Tv's English Channel Challenges Bbc

It was intended to be a radical departure in global news coverage, and few could argue that in this, at least, it succeeded. Iran's new state-run English-language 24-hour news channel, which launched yesterday, was aimed at viewers in the US and Europe, its director said. But despite the clipped English tones of its anchorman, Henry Morton - "Salaam, and welcome" - the channel, called Press TV, still needed to learn a thing or two about western attention spans.

Much of yesterday's airtime was occupied by long extracts from a soporifically gentle interview with the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and a slow-moving documentary about Russian culture. That - rather than the channel's overtly propagandistic tone - seemed likely to prove the biggest obstacle to its success. As Fox News discovered long ago, you do not need to worry too much about the truth, just as long as you keep your news reports 60 seconds long, and use a lot of loud music.

Press TV's website took a more forthrightly partisan approach, emulating the design of the BBC News site to an almost spooky degree, but with material to make the BBC blanch. A news story about the attempted attacks on central London and Glasgow airport, headlined More threadbare propaganda from the west, was a perfectly serviceable account of recent events in Britain - until the final paragraphs, where the reporter suggested the events were staged by the UK government, in order to tarnish the image of Muslims enraged by the knighting of Salman Rushdie.

The website also included a "quick vote" poll - "Do you think the withdrawal of the occupation forces is the best solution to the restoration of peace in Iraq?" - but, as if to invite mockery, refused to allow users to see the results. Inside Iran, meanwhile, the channel itself did not seem to be available at all.

At the launch of Press TV, at the headquarters of state broadcaster IRIB, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said its goal was to counter "propaganda" peddled by western channels. "Knowing the truth is the right of all human beings but the media today is the number one means used by the authorities to keep control," he said. "We scarcely know a media that does its duty correctly. Our media should be standard bearer of peace and stability. It should be void of any contamination which affects the rest of the world."

Mohammad Sarafraz, head of the new channel, said most of Press TV's 30 journalists were non-Iranians, and included many Britons as well as Americans. The channel will have correspondents in London, New York, Washington, Beirut, Damascus, Moscow and several other European capitals, as well as three correspondents covering the Israel-Palestine conflict from Gaza, Ramallah and Jerusalem. Mr Sarafraz said training had been provided by an employee of the BBC.

Despite Iran's dubious record on press freedom, he insisted the channel would not be a mouthpiece for the government.

Backstory

Press TV and its website is not alone in offering a different take on the world's news. Other members of America's "awkward squad" have long been trying to get their message out. As the Iranian rolling news channel was launching, Kim Jong Il's Korea News Service led its site with news that a delegation of the International Atomic Energy Agency had left Pyongyang on Saturday. There was no further information. Meanwhile, Prensa Latina in Cuba led its site with "Fidel Castro: The Empire has created a veritable killing machine", the empire being the US.