I decided to write my blog this week in response to one of my classmate’s post on her blog from last week. She was reporting on and analyzing an issue that arose in Iran in 2009 and that the BBC wrote an article on in 2012. This article was titled “Neda Soltani: ‘The media mix-up that ruined my life’”. This article recounts a horrifying situation in which Neda Soltani was mixed up with an Iranian woman named Neda Agha-Soltan. Agha-Soltan was shot and killed during a demonstration in Tehran, but Soltani, a university teacher, was the one who’s face was suddenly being shown as the face of the woman who was shot. In the article she wrote herself, Soltani tells her nightmarish story which ends with her having to flee Iran (after bribing a security guard with $14,000) and seek political asylum in Germany.
Solanti speaks about how the people she was most upset with in the situation was the Western media. The western media continued to flash her face across TV screens after they were made aware that the woman in the picture was not the same woman who had been shot. By doing this they continued to put Soltani, an innocent woman being made to look like a she faked her own death, in danger.
After reading about this article in my classmate’s blog and then reading the actual article I am overcome with disbelief and sadness. My first thought was how could a mix up like this happen and then escalate to the point where Soltani needed to flee her country. In an article in the New York Times Soltani is quoted in saying, “I never planned to leave my country and my family, but I was forced to”. This is unbelievable to me because I cannot even imagine living in a country that would tell me to lie and change my story in order to clear their governmental image. On the flip side of that though, I also cannot believe, and am ashamed to think, that western countries like the United States who claim to be for protecting and upholding human rights would continue to show her picture and put her life in danger in order to generate a compelling story. In my classmate’s blog she says, “I have never read about Sotani’s experience before but I have always been under the impression that in Iran they treat women poorly, and hold them to a different standard than men”, I also share this same belief and in reading this article my beliefs were, unfortunately, validated. I could not help but wonder that if this same situation occurred and it was a man being falsely accused and not a woman would he have been made an enemy of state and forced to leave his love ones, his friends and his home.
My classmate does a great job of summarizing the original article in a way that still provides the reader with the most important points. She also provides some analysis that I found well researched and, thusly, her analysis prompted many of my thoughts and feelings towards the media mix-up story. I also appreciated the way in which she broke her post up into three different sections titled, “Background”, “So What?” and “Presentation of the Story”. Having these three different sections breaks the post up so that a wall of text does not overcome the reader. It also gives the reader a little preview of what is in each paragraph, therefore making it easier to use for research purposes.
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