ABSTRACT
Iranian journalists were aware of the tainted image of newspapers that had been established under the former regime and, therefore, their vulnerability in the post-revolutionary environment. Writing in the first issue of its newsletter, Payam-e Ma (Our Message), the Ettela’at staff’s High Council said that under the previous regime, the firm’s ‘various publications, especially its daily newspaper’, had been ‘the mouth-pieces of the dictatorial regime and its colonialist masters, singing the praises of the corrupt, money-grabbing Pahlavi family, and their appointed government officials and mercenaries’. All this, said the newsletter, had taken place ‘against the wishes and interests of the majority of the technical, administrative and editorial staff’. At Ettela’at, as well as at the other newspapers, ‘there had been very little room for freedom of thought, pen and expression, and those in possession of such human gifts had often been ensnared by censorship and repression.’1
