Irony Alert: Iran Launches Human Rights News Agency

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Message to the Mac McClellands and Nick Kristofs of the world. You will soon have some new competition. As will The Onion:

A senior Iranian lawmaker says the country will soon launch an English-language news agency to report on human rights conditions in the West.

Member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Parliament (Majlis), Mohammad Karim Abedi, told Fars News Agency on Monday that the new news agency would seek to assert human rights in the US and Britain.

Called The Human Rights News Agency, Abedi said that the new agency would report on instances of rights violation in Europe and the US. He said such abuses have gone unnoticed over the years by the world media.

Thanks to its focus on the West, the news agency can conveniently ignore the situation back home. Say, for instance, the Ahmadinejad regime’s stifling censorship of the press, its penchant for juvenile executions, and its bloody crackdowns on political dissidents and religious minorities.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate