All Blog Posts from World Watch

Iran's state-controlled media are waging an all-out propaganda assault to cast post-election unrest in the Islamic Republic as a futile attempt by "the West" to interfere.

It has been a classic one-two punch from Iran's hard-line rulers: first they hit on the streets with batons, tear gas and arrests of opposition leaders. Now, in the newspapers and television broadcasts, they're striking with their own version of the truth.

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Iran's hard-line regime, starting to show stress under the mounting pressure of massive opposition rallies, has told foreign media that if they're seen on the streets of Tehran today with a camera, they will be arrested.

Since the contested election results were announced just hours after polls closed on Friday, images of thousands of thousands-strong protests — some turning violent — have streamed out of Iran's capital city.

Tuesday, the regime's Ministry of Islamic Guidance, which strictly controls where all foreign media go and who they speak to in Iran, told CBS News and, we believe, all other Western media, that the rally scheduled by opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's supporters for Tuesday afternoon was illegal, and so, therefore, was covering it.

But the ban is much broader than that, extending to any coverage in Tehran whatsoever.

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Fallen Airman Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers has the grim honor of being the first to be filmed coming home – now that the Obama administration has lifted an 18-year ban on news coverage of the returning war dead at Dover Air Force Base.

Staff Sgt. Myers’ family gave their permission for the media to record the silent, solemn ceremony. A six-man carry team lifts the fallen man or woman’s transfer case of remains from the plane to a waiting vehicle. The remains go through a formal autopsy and identification process, and are then sent onward, with an officer escorting them on the journey, for final honors and the funeral.

Staff Sgt. Myers was from Hopewell, Va. The 30 year old had been decorated for outstanding service as a military technician, and he’d been awarded a Bronze Star last year, for a previous tour in Iraq.

Now his return to the United States will be marked, noted and remembered in a way few casualties are of late, in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, that have extended far beyond the U.S. public’s average attention span - or the U.S. media’s, for that matter. We all share the blame in that. Dover Air Force press officers have been besieged with phone calls from the press, for the “first one.”

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What if you have a global summit but there's no media to cover it? Like the tree falling in the forest, does it make a sound if no one's there to hear it?

Some, perhaps hundreds, of the journalists at the G20 were perilously close to not getting into the ExCel Center — the site of the meeting — because of a printing house problem.

Okay, I can confirm the meeting is going on. But it seems a pretty apt metaphor for the times.

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