From mission to profession: Journalism in Iran, 1979-2004

Iran's history includes a succession of political convulsions which have led to a "short-term society" which lacks the opportunity to accumulate sufficient material and moral wealth for the wellbeing of its citizens. This is reflected in the story of Iranian journalism over the past quarter century: there were two short periods of rapid growth, immediately after the Revolution in 1979-1980, and in 1997-2000. Each of them was described as a "Spring of Freedom" but was followed by state closure of a large number of newspapers. Behind this bleak picture, however, is a more complex one which contains areas of significant progress. The concepts of citizenship, pluralism, civil society, transparency and accountability, and the rights of women, children and minorities all entered the country's political vocabulary, and the increase in the number of newspapers and of journalists in this period far outstripped population growth.