Mohammad Mahdi
PressTV
In the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. When I say god, I want to say our god Allah is different from theirs. And what I mean by that? You know, they say “in god they trust.” And I think they painted this sentence on their god. More and more, I feel like that their god is losing its power and thanks to this this legal organization process which is started, so maybe they need to change their trust in their god.
When it comes to PressTV as stated in our model, PressTV has tried its best to be the voice of the voiceless. By voiceless, I mean those with little or no voice on the western media controlled by the dictates of the Global North.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to advertise PressTV, but you know this voice of the voiceless is about solidarity. We've come a long journey Frankly, the journey was not that easy. I'm not sure how much you know about that journey. They removed us from satellites. They terminated our YouTube channel. They removed some of our Facebook, Twitter accounts. They did what they call “shadow ban,” so even those accounts which are not suspended, disabled, removed, even those when they post that the content does not reach the followers that they should.
They tried everything. They forgot, say, confiscated our dot com domain. I'm not sure if that ever happened to any other media before that. When recently they even tried to block our RSS feed. So just I'm giving you an idea of how far they're gonna go and how tolerant they are towards the alternative view. They even targeted PressTV with sanctions.
Looking at all that, you would be like what happened to all the false about media freedom and freedom of expression, freedom of speech. And how are they gonna go to silence you? But all that want to stop us from being the voice of the voiceless, because we believe in what we do. We will not give up. So that's for our process at PressTV.
But what we need to do together? For one, when something like that happens to any of us, I think we all need to make hell of a noise out of it, because today it's us, tomorrow it might be you.
PressTV since its launched, as I mentioned, face a lot of obstacles coming from the Global North. And with RT I think they experience whole of it packed in one year. What be experienced like more than fifteen years at PressTV. So they're gonna come after you. It's not gonna stop there. So we need to report that, we need to make noise out of that. As I mentioned because they're gonna come after you as well and global solidarity, right? Something else we need to do together is creating some multinational online platforms to get rid of western hegemony in this field. I say multinational, because we might have like, I don't know Ukrainian, Chinese, Russian, but I think multinational platforms have better chances of internationalization. So we could reach an international audience through that online platforms that are not controlled by the Global North.
Another thing we need to do better is I think mainstreaming. We don't need the Global North’s AP or Reuters telling us what's newsworthy and what's not. If the Israeli regime jails Palestinians without trial but by what they call the administrative detention without any trial or even telling them what's they done, what's the crime. If that happens, that’s newsworthy. But how much do you see that covered in western media in in the Global North media.
If the West actually preaches the board about environmental policies as Vijay mentioned, and if they go to COP(联合国气候变化大会) summit and preach the word about environmental policies. And we see for example Canadian mining companies polluting Africa. That's newsworthy. We need to cover that.
So we need to do a lot more covering the things of that sort. For example, you see them for example talking about Iran's malign activity in West Asia. And I intentionally avoid the term the Middle East, which comes from the Eurocentric viewpoints of the world. When you see them talk about Iran's malign activity, they talk about recently what they call Russia's malign activity in Africa or their scaremongering about Chinese investment in Africa with the whole discussion about “dam trap” and stuff.
These are things that they want to report to the world as newsworthy. But if for example, the Africa’s command of the US military is present in like fifty three countries of the fifty four in Africa that's militarization of the whole continent but how much do you see them talking about that so to them it's not news-worthy, so that's where we need to do more or for example if they don't know if they kill thousands in Somalia thousands of civilians in the name of what they call “war on terror.”
We need to do more reporting on that. We need to do more analysis on that. The world needs to know about these things. If they for example the corporate bomb, the whole infrastructure in Iraq after they invaded. And the country is still struggling with cover shortages and stuff people need to know why this thing's happening. So this is mainstreaming which I wanted to mention.
There are lots of stories that are less talked about for example and if people for example in Iran, in Venezuela, in Zimbabwe suffering because of this Western sanctions we need to do a lot more reporting on that. We at PressTV are working on ways to do mainstreaming better and Iran also has its young international news agency called Iranpress, which is expanding reporting from different countries where they doing actually some good stuff as well and I'm sure there are a lot more we can do together and we can do it together. Thank you.