Robin Wright
(Excerpt from The New Yorker)
Rouhani’s victory, an upset, spawned great expectations of change. A pragmatic centrist, he campaigned on the promise of “hope and prudence.” After the election, in a series of speeches and tweets, he pledged new freedoms and challenged past practices, including censorship. His quasi-official account tweeted, “Web filtering unable to produce results. Which important piece of news has #filtering been able to black out in recent years.” Rouhani was particularly tough on the country’s state-controlled television, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (I.R.I.B.):
#Rouhani: If day comes that #IRIB has more news coverage than foreign channels such as BBC, people will reconcile with it
— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) July 3, 2013#Rouhani: When #IRIB airs birth of panda in China but nothing abt unpaid workers protesting, obvious that ppl & youth will ignore it
— Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) July 3, 2013Over the past year, though, Rouhani has conspicuously failed to uphold his promise.
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