Authoritarian regimes’ version of reality finds its way into newsrooms all too easily
Not all Iranians support the recently killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even if media coverage can make it appear that way. That is why journalism must look not only at the facts, but also behind the structures of power, writes Antti Yrjönen.
Looking at the stream of images coming out of Iran, one could be forgiven for thinking that the entire country was mourning the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In press photographs, tearful supporters carry portraits of the spiritual leader killed by Israel through the streets, with the country’s official flags flying in the background.
The photographs are real. But they do not give a truthful picture of Iran. Taken together, they amount to less than the sum of their parts.
In the most recent survey (2024) by the Netherlands-based GAMAAN, which studies Iranian public opinion, a clear majority of Iranians said they wanted an end to the Islamic theocracy. In two years, support for the Supreme Leader had collapsed from 18 per cent to 11 per cent. In other words, most Iranians belong to the opposition. Outside Iran, one is more likely to encounter the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flag favoured by the opposition than the country’s official flag.
Why, then, does the media present such a different picture?
Authoritarian systems determine what people may safely gather around, and what may be photographed, transmitted and verified.
This works particularly well in circumstances where those in power do not need so much to invent reality as to curate it. The funeral procession is real. The grief is real. The captions may be entirely accurate.
But a truthful photograph is not the same thing as a truthful picture of a society. The distortion often arises not from outright lies but from proportions: from what is seen repeatedly, what reaches audiences first and what can easily be verified – and, conversely, from what is too dangerous, fragmentary or uncertain ever to make it into the news stream.
In Iran, the mechanism is unusually easy to see. Foreign journalists need a press visa approved by the authorities, must use pre-approved local guides and are required to submit detailed travel itineraries to officials. They also risk arrest or the confiscation of their material if they report on illegal gatherings – in practice, opposition demonstrations. A pro-government demonstration, meanwhile, can be photographed by anyone without difficulty.
When the Iranian authorities shut down the internet in January 2026 – a situation that continues to this day – journalists covering Iran found their ability to stay in contact with local sources and verify events restricted still further.
The result is a divided media landscape: publications that reproduce Iran’s official line continue operating much as before, while reformist and exile media find their work increasingly difficult and slow. The missing image of events still exists, but does it have any chance of reaching an audience?
Authoritarian governments understand the dynamics of an accelerating news cycle: to control the narrative, they do not need to suppress the counter-narrative completely. They need only slow it down. At the same time, the demand for speed is pushing many newsrooms to rely ever more heavily on artificial intelligence in order to increase the pace of publication. The trap is set.
The dangers of speed are already there for everyone to see. On Sunday 29 March, Ilta-Sanomat and Helsingin Sanomat reported incorrectly that Russian drones had been shot down in Finland. Aamulehti also published an erroneous report about the drones.
The mistake originated with Sanoma’s AI tool, which had misinterpreted an official press release – or, more precisely, made things up. It seems clear that the story fabricated by the AI was allowed to go to publication without anyone bothering to read the Defence Ministry’s original statement.
AI hallucinations, however, are only a symptom of a deeper problem. Without oversight, artificial intelligence reinforces narratives that are already dominant, including state propaganda.
This is not a matter of AI having some built-in political bias. It is about official narratives finding their way into newsrooms with virtually no friction. In a newsroom that has been automated too far, reality becomes whichever story arrives first and requires the least journalistic work.
Iran is an extreme example, but the problem can be seen elsewhere too. According to the University of Gothenburg’s international Varieties of Democracy research project, freedom of expression is currently the aspect of democracy under the greatest pressure worldwide.
Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, noted in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index that, for the first time, the conditions for practising journalism were assessed as ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ in more than half of the world’s countries.
Censorship and propaganda are often imagined simply as theatrical displays of state power. Modern methods of silencing are frequently subtler. They rely on a constant, exhausting effort to make independent newsgathering and verification slower and more expensive than simply repeating the state’s official version of events. This can be achieved, for example, by intimidating sources and increasing bureaucracy.
In the United States, Donald Trump’s return to power has led to an erosion of press freedom. The president calls journalists names and threatens news organisations with lawsuits. The administration’s torrent of AI-generated rubbish and memes smothers the information environment in noise. At the same time, it reinforces a phenomenon researchers call the liar’s dividend: when fabricated images, recordings and texts are everywhere, those in power gain a ready-made excuse to dismiss genuine journalism as nothing more than fake news.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has taken control of around 80 per cent of the media landscape. The government is backed by legislation tailored to suppress organisations funded from abroad.
These systems are, of course, not morally or politically equivalent. But comparability is not the point. What matters is that autocratic pressure is increasingly directed at the fundamental structures of journalism: access to information, fact-checking and journalism’s credibility.
The question is not always whether an individual piece of media content is factually true. More important is to ask what structures of power made that particular documentation possible in the first place – and what alternative realities were simultaneously pushed out of sight.
Who was left outside the frame? Journalism does not fail only when it publishes outright lies. It fails just as surely when it mistakes the image that is easiest to obtain, or the information that travels with the least resistance, for the whole truth.
This piece was originally published in Maailman Kuvalehti on 2 April 2026 under the title ‘Kuka rajattiin kuvan ulkopuolelle Iranissa? Autoritaaristen hallintojen versio todellisuudesta löytää liian herkästi tiensä toimituksiin’. Read the original →
