Iran criminalises contact with foreign media

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. The consumer in this story is the Iranian researcher who once corresponded freely with a foreign journal, or the ordinary citizen who gave a quoted remark to a foreign broadcaster this month and thought nothing of it. Let us ask whether this arrangement, now advancing through the legislature, serves them - or whether it serves someone else entirely, dressed in the language of security.

I have long observed that when producers cannot compete on the merits of their goods, they petition for protection from competition instead - a tariff, a licensing scheme, a guild rule that excludes the upstart. What is proposed in Iran is the same manoeuvre applied to a different market: the market for information. The state is, in this transaction, a producer of a single narrative. Its competitors are every foreign correspondent, every diaspora broadcaster, every human rights organisation whose reporting reaches an Iranian household and offers an account of events that differs from the one supplied domestically. The lawmakers advancing this measure are not wrong that such competition is uncomfortable for them. They are wrong to suppose that discomfort to the incumbent producer is evidence of harm to the public.

Consider the mechanism with the same patience I would apply to a proposed duty on imported cloth. A duty on cloth raises the price the weaver’s customer must pay and removes from that customer the option of comparing quality and price across sellers; the domestic weaver, relieved of the discipline of comparison, need not improve his loom. Criminalising contact with foreign media performs an identical function in the market for facts. It raises, for the ordinary citizen, the price of comparison - now paid not in coin but in the risk of prosecution - and it removes, for the researcher and the journalist named among those most exposed, the very option of checking one account against another. The state’s information, like the protected weaver’s cloth, need no longer compete on accuracy. It need only remain unopposed.

The producer’s claim, stated in its most respectable form, deserves to be heard before it is answered. Every state asserts an interest in guarding against foreign interference in its internal affairs, and I would be a poor judge of human affairs if I pretended that no foreign broadcaster has ever mixed reporting with agitation. But notice what the sympathy test reveals when we sit, for a moment, in the chair of the person actually named in this month’s proceedings - not the foreign correspondent in London or Washington, who loses little, but the citizen in Tehran or Isfahan who must now weigh an ordinary conversation, an interview, a research exchange, against the possibility that it will be read as a security offence. That is not a citizen enjoying an improved market for truth. That is a citizen whose choices have narrowed to the single seller who cannot be sued for false weight.

Here the asymmetry announces itself plainly, as it always does in these matters. The interest of the state as narrator is concentrated, organised, and represented in the chamber where this law is drafted. The interest of the citizen as consumer of information is diffuse, unrepresented, and voiced - if at all - only by the human rights groups whom the same law will further isolate. No one has asked the family gathered around a foreign broadcast this month whether they wished to be protected from it. They were not consulted, because consumers of information, like consumers of bread, rarely are; they discover the terms of the arrangement only when the price has already risen.

I will not pretend that severing a society from foreign contact is merely an economic inefficiency, though it is that too - a nation starved of comparison produces worse research, worse journalism, worse everything, for the same reason a monopolist produces worse cloth. It is also a moral injury, for sympathy itself depends on the capacity to imagine a world beyond one’s own walls, and a law that criminalises the conversation through which that world becomes imaginable is a law against sympathy as surely as against sedition. The weaver protected from competition eventually forgets how cloth is properly made. A society protected from comparison eventually forgets that other accounts exist at all.