Wolfman in Farsi?
Broadcasting Britney Spears to young Iranians may get their ear. But will it capture their minds?
Millions of Iranians flooded the streets to torch American flags and chant "death to America" last winter after President Bush implicated their country in his "axis of evil." So you might not expect those same folks to welcome a new radio station that mixes contemporary Persian songs with western pop from the likes of Britney Spears and Enrique Iglesias--and that's funded by Uncle Sam to boot.
You might be wrong. Since beaming its AM signal into Iran last month from two nearby transmitters, Radio Farda (Farsi for Radio Tomorrow) has tallied more than a thousand E-mails from its fans. "It has been really nice to hear a radio which is nonstop music," writes a 19-year-old from Tehran. "Our young Iranian generation is tired of these hellish politics [that have] made a black Iran, full of sorrow."
Hellish politics were a mainstay of Radio Azadi (Radio Freedom), a U.S. government-sponsored service launched in 1998 and replaced in December by Radio Farda. While Azadi pumped five hours of original news, analysis, and cultural programs into Iran each day, Farda offers a round-the-clock diet of pop music sprinkled with hourly 12-minute newscasts and two half-hour daily programs of news analysis. The broadcast hopes to attract 20 percent of all Iranians--up from the roughly 2 percent who tuned in to Azadi--by targeting listeners under 30, fully 70 percent of the population. "We wanted the largest possible audience," says Norman Pattiz of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the presidentially appointed panel that supervises U.S. broadcast efforts abroad. "So we had to marry our mission to the market."
The strategy has met with stunning success in the Middle East, where Voice of America's talk-heavy Arabic service was replaced last March by a musically inclined broadcast called Radio Sawa. The information-driven VOA model didn't work there, says Pattiz: "If listeners don't like our policies, you can't lead with them." Instead, Radio Sawa relies on weekly audience research to hone a playlist of Arabic and western pop tunes. News reports are kept short and punchy--and the result has been a shot in the arm for listenership. In a recent survey from Jordan, 39 percent of young people cited Sawa as their most trusted news station, about double the number who picked state-run radio.
No escape. But because anti-Americanism runs so much lower among Iranians than among Middle Eastern Arabs, Radio Farda has come under fire for playing more music than necessary to retain Iranian audiences. Azar Nafisi, an Iranian literary scholar and author of the forthcoming Reading Lolita in Tehran, would prefer a combination of Farda's snappy pop-culture sensibility and Azadi's hourlong public-affairs shows. "We don't want the music to be just an escape for Iranians," she says. "We need to explain why the act of choosing to listen to music is vital to the creation of a democratic society."
But Farda steers clear of didacticism. It seeks to give the people what they want and has canvassed Iranians outside their country to gauge their tastes, a total departure from the Azadi model. "We aimed for Iranian elites--professors, activists, even some reform-minded members of the clergy and government," says Stephen Fairbanks, Radio Azadi's former director. "These were people who were more effective in bringing about change in the country." Farda management holds that the intelligentsia still listen to its hourly news reports and to VOA's Farsi service. But a University of Tehran political science professor who requested anonymity doubts that elites listen to either. "Radio Farda is going to lose a very influential audience" to international broadcasters like the BBC, the professor says. "And youth are going to enjoy the music and ignore the news."
So far, Radio Sawa's surveys in Jordan suggest otherwise. And Farda news director Ali Farhoodi cautions that bopping to western pop in Iran isn't as mindless as it may seem, with the vice police enforcing bans on much western music and restrictions on women singing in public. "Listening to pop in Iran isn't like listening to American FM," he says. "It's a political statement with a risk involved." Which makes Britney and Enrique sound downright subversive.
This story appears in the January 20, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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