Why I Went to Iran
“Shame on you for partnering with the murderous government,” read one comment on Twitter. “How much did the mullahs pay you?” another user wrote. And a third: “You have sold your soul.”
These people had written to me because I was in Iran, on a week-long reporting trip. They believed I must have struck some sort of bargain: favorable coverage in exchange for access. They assumed that in an authoritarian state, we would see only what the government wished us to see. The comments, while ungracious, prompt a reasonable question: What is the value of flying 6,000 miles to a country where months of anti-government protests have been largely stilled, a country where—on the surface—things appear calm?
NPR, where I anchor, has been committed to covering Iran for decades now, from the outside when we must and on the ground when we can. My team and I applied for visas back in September. We pushed. For months, we got nowhere. And then, one morning at the very end of January, an email arrived from Tehran. Subject line: “Your visa has been approved.” Six days later, two NPR colleagues and I were on a plane.
