1. INTRODUCTION

On 19 February 2020, the Ministry of Health in Iran announced the death of two patients with COVID-19 symptoms in the city of Qom. Only a few days later, Iran became a country, apart from China, with the highest number of coronavirus infections in the world (Barnes-Dacey et al., 2020). In fact, within a month and by the 20th of March, the official reports indicated a sharp increase in the spread of the disease with more than 19,644 cases of infection and 1,433 fatalities. Subsequently, in less than a year these numbers reached to 1.9 million infections and 63,000 deaths, while at the present time such figures exceed 6.1 million and 130,000, respectively (worldometers.info). Yet, according to some of the independent analysts as well as frontliners and eyewitnesses in the field, the actual numbers are indeed 3-5 times more than what is officially reported, suggesting the government’s statistical cover-up (Fazeli, 2020b; Tajdin & Adamou, 2020). Simply by looking at these alarming figures as well as the lack of transparency in reporting them, what first and foremost becomes obvious is the government’s apparent failure in handling the pandemic.

At a deeper level, however, the government’s inability to curb the spread of the disease and decelerate the mortality rate, not to mention the economic downturn and social disorders, can be traced to the fundamentalist and authoritarian nature of Iran’s political system (Parsa, 2020). This is not surprising, since the Islamic regime is already known as a political entity that has persistently used its religious and ideological fundamentalism to guide its rule over the nation and its international diplomacy throughout the past four decades or so (Ehteshami, 2017; Tajmazinani, 2018). Central to such ideological dominance, while operating within anti-West and Revolutionary doctrine, is the state-run national media (Talebian & Talebian, 2019). Accordingly, during the pandemic, the national media have been actively engaged in disseminating a series of ideology-laden information about the coronavirus, in tandem with the developing political discourses and in support of the ruling clerics.

This is indeed paradoxical, since the national media, from a normative perspective, are considered to work for the nation; they primarily exist to benefit people by providing them with useful and critical contents, especially at times of crises. Therefore, it is reasonable to think of national media as the main government-public communication channel which is traditionally considered to be the most effective means for informing and mobilizing the public against time to reduce the impact of a calamity. Yet within undemocratic nation-states such as Iran, this does not seem to be the case; these institutions of power are merely employed to solidify the state’s legitimacy and justify or disguise its oppressions, giving precedence to elites’ interests over the well-being of the people (Blout, 2023).

In this way, the disseminated messages by the Iranian mainstream media during the pandemic, rather than presenting factual accounts, scientific facts, or unbiased analyses, reflected the state’s ideological principles and political ambitions. Therefore, the gradual accumulation of this ambiguous and manipulative information has inevitably led to overall public confusion and skepticism. In regard to such a disquietingly negative climate in Iran, Alimardani and Elswah (2020) have highlighted issues such as “lack of public trust in officials, religiously charged narratives by unofficial fringe figures and political manipulation of the discourse,” as factors shaping the public attitude towards government. Similarly, other authors have pointed to the hindrances in awareness brought about by purveyors of politics and religiosity which have resulted in public cynicism (Blandenier et al., 2020). Moreover, a number of researchers have variously shown the public distrust in the healthcare system and other government sectors responsible for the fight against the pandemic (Larson, 2020; Vardanjani et al., 2020).

2. PURPOSE AND METHOD

The purpose of this study is to identify and look into some of the discursive trends in the Iranian mainstream media’s dissemination of ambiguous and manipulative information about COVID-19 and the social/political issues around it. Using critical analysis, it chronologically examines a number of main news reports which appeared on some of the government’s most prominent online news agencies in various junctures of the pandemic, reflecting on the Islamic regime’s politics/ideologies behind such accounts. Lastly, the study’s findings are further explicated in light of Media System Dependency (MSD) theory, providing some insights on how Iranians’ reliance on the mainstream as well as alternative media during the pandemic has led to overall public confusion and skepticism.

Unlike most contemporary theories of society that follow the predictive science, the critical theory embraces the moral philosophy, since it is chiefly concerned with “evaluating the freedom, justice, and happiness of societies” (Ingram & Simon-Ingram, 1992, p. xx). Derived from this paradigm is the critical analysis that, according to the framework proposed by Nixon et al. (2017), may consist of seven steps: (1) naming the specific aspect of practice being analysed, (2) identifying the intended purposes of this aspect of practice, (3) uncovering the assumptions that support these intended purposes, (4) identifying who benefits, (5) identifying who is disadvantaged, (6) linking these specific ideas to society-level patterns, and (7) conceiving of alternatives that mitigate actual or potential harms.

As noted by these authors, being theoretically critical does not necessarily mean being negative. Rather, it suggests thinking deeply and carefully about the (un)intended consequences of the actions taken in a society. Nonetheless, the application of these steps in each of the subsections of Section 3, though not in a distinctly outlined manner, proceeds as follows: (1) pinpointing the spread of specific information about COVID-19 by the government, (2) identifying the government’s intention in spreading such information, (3) revealing the possible reasons behind such action, (4) considering the interests sought by any faction of the government, (5) considering the harming consequences of such actions on the people, (6) reflecting on how the government’s interests fit into its ideological position, and in regard to (7) the Conclusion section, discussing an overall courses of action that the government could or should take in preventing or minimizing harm to the Iranian people.

The evidence for this study, however, was gathered from a number of the online news agencies that are run or funded by the government (Table 1). Given that these news agencies function strictly within the Islamic Republic’s media and mass communication guidelines, they are obliged to preserve the interests of the state, and therefore, their news reflects the state-run mainstream media’s. This means that the selection and representation of the news across the state-controlled media outlets, regardless of their size, type, or nature, from subsidiary online news agencies to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), essentially follow the same protocols, as they are set to convey the same message in a more or less similar fashion (Khiabany, 2010). Therefore, deciding on a particular source of news over another, or the number of them, did not seem to have a bearing on critical analysis in terms of reinforcing the foundation of this study’s claims, so long as they function under the state’s control.

3. DISCURSIVE TRENDS IN DIFFUSION OF INFORMATION ABOUT COVID-19

4. MEDIA SYSTEM DEPENDENCY THEORY

MSD theory emerged to reformulate the question addressed by effects theory, by asking: “Under what societal and individual conditions do/don’t media have substantial effects?” (Ball-Rokeach, 2015, p. 369). The theory’s main premise is that the implications of a media system in the context of everydayness have effects at micro, meso, and macro levels, respectively impacting individuals, groups, and social systems, in the face of a threat or at times of uncertainty (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976). Proposed for the first time by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur in 1976, the theory suggests that people are likely to be influenced by media messages when they have little other experience or knowledge that enables them to verify or evaluate them. In other words, the extent to which audiences rely on a specific medium is a key variable in understanding why, when, and how media messages influence these individuals’ beliefs, feelings, or behaviors (Littlejohn et al., 2016). Without a doubt, the observations of Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur have led to identifying some of the factors for the level of such dependency. One of these factors is how important a specific medium is to a person, group, or society for obtaining needed information. In this way, the more important these individuals or groups regard a medium for satisfying their needs, the more likely they are to depend on it, and be influenced by its messages. Another factor is the degree of social instability, which is more applicable for times of crisis such as national disaster, wars, political upheavals, and so on. In this sense, as the social instability increases, the more dependency of people on media for receiving information is predicted.

The ‘media system’ component of MSD theory, however, is best understood “as an information system whose powers vis-à-vis effects rest on the scarcity or exclusivity of their information resources” (Ball-Rokeach, 2015, p. 369). Yet, as Ball-Rokeach pointed out, people might adapt or respond differently to the same social media environment. Furthermore, Jung (2017) explained that MSD is often misunderstood as an all-powerful media concept or the passive audience theory, simply for what the word ‘dependency’ might wrongly imply. Indeed, as he further put, the term refers to the possibility of an individual-media relationship that is “shaped by the degree of importance and helpfulness of resources one party possesses for the other party” (Jung, 2017, page 4). In addition, one’s needs are not always strictly personal but may be shaped by the culture or by various social conditions (Baran & Davis, 2020). In advancing MSD theory, and from a macroscopic societal perspective, Ball-Rokeach (1985) hypothesised that as people’s dependency on media grows more and more, institutions of media have no choice but to reorganise themselves to adapt to the upsurge of these dependencies. Accordingly, this is thought to result in the overall higher impact of media, therefore solidifying the central role of the media in the society.

5. DISCUSSION

This article began with making a case for the evident failure of the Iranian government in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. It was then argued that disseminating a series of ambiguous and manipulative information about the coronavirus by the state-run national media has compounded the gravity of the pandemic and its devastating consequences across the nation. That is to say, the operations of the ideologically driven mainstream news media in Iran during the pandemic, rather than being mobilized for addressing the crisis and helping the Iranian people, were optimised for furthering the state’s exploitative efforts. In line with this idea, a number of news stories, which throughout the pandemic appeared in some of the most prominent news agencies of the government, were critically analysed to exemplify the developing trends in diffusion of information about COVID-19, and to reveal their supporting ideologies. In this way, these analyses illustrated how the national media as a powerful means for government-public communication was deployed, not with the intention to address the needs of the people, but to take advantage of the developing narratives of COVID-19 to consolidate the state’s domineering ideological position.

This is in fact typical among authoritarian countries where the mainstream media, just like other social institutions, constitute an imperative component of the ideological state apparatus, supplementing the functions of repressive forces within the boundaries of the nation-state (Althusser, 2006; Stier, 2015). The state’s strong hold on media in this way is also explained by the contemporary propaganda theory which maintains that “public discourse is shaped and limited by powerful elites to serve their own ends” (Baran & Davis, 2020, p. 94). Moving further along these lines of thought, Semetko (2007) differentiated democratic countries from non-democratic ones and observed that the media-politics relationship in these countries varies depending on (1) how much media outlets are government funded, (2) the degree to which the media’s content and reporting are free of government control, and finally (3) how much the parties, interest groups, and political participants have access to the media. In this way, just by looking at the media-politics relationship in Iran within Semetko’s framework, one could imagine the degree of authoritarianism governing the country’s political system: Institutions of media are owned or largely financed by the government while their contents are subject to maximum control and heavy censorship, not to mention the ruling clerics’ exclusive power to influence the production and transmission of the messages (Mazrooei et al., 2019; Rahimi, 2015).

Having said this, besides identifying and analysing the discursive trends in broadcasting manipulative information within national media, this study also aimed to explicate the emergence and implications of these trends in the light of MSD theory. Looking at the interrelationships between the state, media, and public through this theory’s prism, then, was thought to provide some insights into Iranians’ dependency on media, as a way to understand the current public confusion and skepticism in the country.

Following this view, and to put it in perspective, it can be said that the long-term public dependency on mainstream media in Iran has been challenged by the emergence of new forms of media such as Internet and satellite TV since the early 1990s (Khiabani, 2015). This has evidently given a chance to the people of Iran to free themselves from the dominance of the national media, and to access an abundance of unrestricted media contents (Matin, 2023). Yet during the coronavirus pandemic there seemed to be a shift in this pattern, as the public moved towards national media and mainstream news, exactly because of their contents’ tangibility for the people as well as their relevancy and applicability to the immediate contexts. That is to say, the contents of these state-run media outlets were apparently closer to people’s real-life circumstances and their emergent needs for information, including updates on standard operation procedures and other instructions and guidelines issued by the government. The brief reconciliation between the people of Iran and the national media during the pandemic, however, turned out to be completely in accord with one of the main premises of MSD theory, which holds that there is an increase in people’s dependence on media during social instability.

Unexpectedly though, the availability of new forms of cross-border media (mainly satellite TV and Internet) in Iran, and the growing influx of their unfettered contents, not only seemed to be incapable of counterbalancing the bias of the national media’s messages during the pandemic, but also they appeared to exacerbate the challenges of the public in accessing trustworthy knowledge. There seem to be two main reasons for this: Firstly, the diffused information through new forms of transnational media (also referred to as alternative media) are in general inconsistent with those in the national media (Talebian & Talebian, 2018). The national-alternative dichotomy in media, therefore, seems to affect people in Iran, since these audiences are likely to oscillate between these oppositional news sources in search for reliable information, only to end up with a greater degree of uncertainty and confusion (Taghipour et al., 2023). This is in particular the case for those uncritical audiences with inadequate media literacy who become somehow intellectually paralysed when facing information overload or infoxication (de Bruin et al., 2021). Secondly, even though in general Iranians are highly suspicious of the accuracy and trustworthiness of the national media’s reportage, they still tend to adhere to them simply because these have been the sole channels for people to obtain relevant and applicable information during the pandemic. Likewise, despite the pervasive use of social media in Iran, these digital communication platforms did not seem to be as constructive throughout the pandemic as they were during the Green Movement, a major historical uprising of Iranian dissidents in 2009 which shortly after sparked the Arab Spring in the Middle East (Tofangsazi, 2020). In other words, while social media were undoubtedly the catalyst for social mobilisation that successfully led to some of the recent years’ most significant political changes in the region and around the world, their role in Iran and during the pandemic was arguably problematic.

What is more debatable, however, is that although Net-based communication channels are commonly known as powerful and beneficial means for crisis management, at least, this did not seem to be the case for Iran. In support of this argument, the results of several studies and reports have shown the counterproductivity of social media and other similar data sharing digital networks during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Jafarinejad et al., 2021; Soltaninejad, 2020; Yoosefi et al., 2022). In fact, these accounts have pointed to a wide range of mis-/mal-/disinformation within these digital platforms (Sadati & Bagheri Lankarani, 2021), with the exception of a few that are associated with some well-known and reliable healthcare providers and medical professionals. Therefore, one could argue that although the emergence of satellite TV and the Internet has significantly improved the democratization process in Iran and many other countries around the world, especially during the past two decades or so (Comunello & Anzera, 2012; Tusa, 2013), they have evidently not been so helpful in taking pressure off people in their fight against COVID-19. Consequently, it can be said that while satellite TV and the Internet continues to attract the majority of Iranians who seek quality entertainment and unaltered news, it was the national media that during the pandemic turned out to be the main source of coronavirus related information for many people in Iran (Banakar et al., 2021). The resulting paradox of this is that despite people’s increasing distrust towards the national media throughout the past few decades, during the pandemic they tended to deliberately ignore such doubts and at least follow the mainstream media’s politically arranged news about COVID-19. By the same token, alternative media in Iran did not seem to live up to the normative and emancipatory expectations that are associated with these so-called counter-hegemonic forms of media.

Nevertheless, what all these insights point to is the significance of the interplay of social, political, and cultural contexts as well as spatial/temporal scope in understanding a particular communication phenomenon, especially if MSD theory is to be used as an analytical tool for research. The importance of context is also demonstrated by Loveless (2008), who studied media dependency in democratizing countries, and within the uses and gratifications framework. The focus of his study was on information-seeking behavior within “societies in states of crisis or instability” (Loveless, 2008, p. 162). Loveless (2008, p. 162) was primarily concerned with how citizens in countries undergoing a democratic transition sought information and assumed that there would be a “positive correlation between information-seeking and levels of media use”. His findings suggested that the instability in countries which are in their embryonic stage of the democratization process, and are undergoing a political shift, motivated people to seek more information through the media. Despite trusting the media’s great capacity for providing information “to understand political transition,” he cautioned that any interpretation in this regard should take into consideration the “historically and culturally differentiated media space” (Loveless, 2008, p. 178).

These findings point to the fact that understanding citizens’ media dependency during national (or global) crises requires exclusive attention to “institutional and cultural variations” within each country, and in regard to specific local circumstances (Loveless, 2008, p. 178). This is, in particular, germane to any discussion of media dependency in Iran. On the one hand, the political system and social institutions of the country are driven by the state’s unyielding ideological disposition, hindering the progression of the increasingly globalized and media saturated Iranian society. And on the other hand, the masses’ increasing discontentment and disconnection with the government have given rise to an idiosyncratic form of the nation-state with its own distinctive cultural and political conditions (Golkar, 2020).

6. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

While numerous studies in the past have addressed media dependency in democratic countries, there have only been limited efforts to link such theoretical perspectives to the social problems and complications facing the public within undemocratic contexts, particularly during a time of crisis (Khalifa & Khalifa, 2020). In response to this, the present study examined the national media’s function in Iran, and Iranians’ dependency on delivery of information through the state-controlled institutions of media. Here, the primary goal was to draw attention to the struggles of the Iranian people who were, more than ever, undergoing a great deal of hardship and despair, caused by a range of imprudent, unsympathetic, and outrageous actions/decisions made by the authorities during the pandemic. In so doing, the study’s main focus was on the Islamic regime’s ideological principles, considering them as the underlying basis for giving rise to the possibilities of new ways of exploitation. Under these circumstances, the interdependencies between officials, media, and society increase, and apparently the impacts of those interactions also become more noticeable.

Thus, this study recommends a robust and equitable collaboration and supervision at different levels and across various forms of media as key requirements for ensuring accuracy and avoiding distortion of data. Furthermore, as also noted by other authors (Arab-Zozani & Ghoddoosi-Nejad, 2021), the authorities in Iran should minimize bureaucracy and formalities for scientifically proven aids and methods, instead of relaxing such procedures for unscientific solutions and recommendations. Although it seems to be far-fetched, the government must feel the urgency to put people first and focus on providing reliable and consistent real-time data, instead of politicizing the crisis or seeking to project an unrealistically positive, popular, or powerful image of the Islamic Republic merely for meeting some political objective (Hen-Tov, 2006).

One more lesson to be learnt from the Iranian government’s mishandling of the pandemic is that simply announcing some instruction or advice, and then expecting people to follow them, is doomed to fail. This means that while these regulations should be in place and communicated with the public effectively and early enough, the enforcement of such rules and guidelines as well as citizens’ compliance with them should be monitored and confirmed on a regular basis. Lastly, giving precedence to religious or ideological beliefs over scientific measures, on the one hand, and abandoning responsibilities, making wrong decisions, and disregarding human rights and democratic values on the other hand, are all among the factors that have contributed to the deepening of the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic in Iran. Thus, any improvement regarding public health, especially during national crises, seems to be possible only by taking the necessary steps to immobilize the ideological state apparatus which merely operates to keep the elites in power, albeit at the expense of the lives and well-being of its people.