
Whom would you rather watch? News on Iran's main national network, Channel 1 (below), or the "emancipated" Iranian stars on the clothing-optional Tapesh Network, beaming to Iran's youth from Los Angeles?
“For the Iranian teenager, it’s become an idol,” he said. “It entertains, it teaches and it changes; it’s wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“It’s slowly but surely changing our people forever.”
The “it” is satellite TV and the father who was speaking the words was angry and emphatic, as if speaking of a killer virus.
When he turned on the TV moments earlier, he broke into coarse language and rushed to change the channel. It was a naked blonde spreading her legs poolside, an ad for pay-per-view porno from Europe. His 18-year-old son apparently forgot to cover his tracks.
The porno is bad, every Iranian parent says, yet it’s hard to find a home without the illegal dishes and receivers that can get 1,000 or more channels for about $120 equipment and installation cost and no monthly fee. An occasional visit by a technician enables free viewing of the pay-per-view channels.
The parent frets but still wants to watch the 20 or so Persian-language networks beaming mostly from California.
The teen hates the political chaff on the Persian channels but adores the music and movie feeds, which include Iranian rap transmitted on the Islamic government's own satellite networks.
The maid says she doesn’t know anything about anything but somehow instantly knows how to operate the unit.
The government says all satellite TV is bad—it has begun yet another campaign to barge into homes and collect and destroy the equipment—but it is beaming to overseas half-dozen networks of its own.

In another home, I briefly have to myself the almighty remote, perhaps the most sought-after item in the modern Iranian home.
There was a time that the Shahnameh or the ghazals of Hafez were of value in most homes. Now it's this plastic magic box made in China.
The index says there are 1,094 channels. I begin to scan, starting from channel 1. It’s BBC World. Oh, that’s good. I love BBC! EuroNews is on channel 2. Okay, it’s not BBC but still better than the crass commercialism of CNN.
But it’s downhill from then on. There's CNN, FoxNews, Nickelodeon, E Online!. Want the news in Hungarian? It’s channel 45. There are Arab soap operas on Dubai and Bahrain networks (no acting experience required); public service messages in Malay (apparently an ode to practicality of 8mm film); also cricket in Urdu; an angry-sounding sheikh with a crooked beard on the Oman network; an entire channel dedicated to naked men and women prancing around to herd viewers toward a European gambling website; and then there are the screaming Turkish singers so painted-up with makeup, you might mistake them for clowns on children’s programming.
I came to the same conclusion I had when I first saw cable in the U.S.: the world at your fingertips and still nothing on.

Does import of television programming change culture? One look at the blonde and pink waifs ambling up and down Tehran’s Jordan Avenue seems to confirm the contention.
I thought the same 20 years ago when I was young and idealistic, walking the muddy tracks of some Guatemalan village. It was hard to find children with shoes on. Yet, I’d peek into a barest of homes and there was the tube surrounded with half-dozen rapt souls watching “Dallas”.
People with nothing watching people with everything—surely something has to give; at the minimum they’d be disaffected, I declared, as I hoped some more for a Sandinista and Cuban takeover of Latin America.
But things are more complicated than that. Cultures have their own ways of digesting television programming, I found out during the graduate school hours that I was awake.
For example, according to fascinating research by Elihu Katz, Arabs living in Israel, tended to believe the Dallas' stories, far more than the target American audience. But the Russians were the complete opposite. They were constantly suspicious of how exported material was, in their words, designed to manipulate.
Iranians, I would be willing to bet, are closer to the Russians on the specturms of malleability and gullibility. They are enamored with the foreign but also confident in their own infallibility.
Or is the self-assurance they emanate just a cover story?

"It's as good as anything they have in the West, minus the round-the-clock commercials and self-promotions of CNN," says one fan.
There was a time, feels like centuries ago, that talking heads predicted swift change in the politics of Iran because of the satellite networks that had just begun beaming from Los Angeles to Iran.
Their prediction turned out to be as bona fide as the “compassionate conservatism” of George Bush.
It's hard to find a literate Iranian who takes the LA networks seriously beyond their entertainment value.
NT, retired office manager:
“There’s not one [network] that’s worth watching; they are all garbage.
“Content? What content? There’s no content,” N exclaims and chortles. “Look, in most of these channels there’s one guy sitting in a room with a camera. He just tells people watching to call in. So it’s the audience providing the content.”
ZM, retired executive:
“It is really a tragedy that out of 20 channels, there’s not one that is using this opportunity to discuss the issues responsibly, to help spread good information, to spend money to create valuable programming, not to opportunistically make money [through advertising].
“These people are there either to make money or give voice to their hatred. It's not about serving Iranians; it's about serving whomever that can pay $2,000 a hour to hear himself talk.
"It’s really a statement about how under capitalism people morph into ugly, selfish business people with no conscious.
“It’s also a statement about how Iranians are unable to unite. Imagine the quality of programming they could create if they all got together. But I’ve actually seen broadcasters spending airtime casting insults at each other.
HS, retired government employee:
“Voice of America is just as bad as the rest of them. What is appalling is that they are trying to excite people the exact same way American media provoke Americans with exaggerations and fear tactics—like the way they pick one guy, like bin Laden, as the monster and keep repeating the name to keep people tuned-in.
“Voice of America is essentially an American broadcaster targeting people with the American mentality. They never went through the trouble of creating something appropriate for the Iranian culture.
“And their news is consistently pro-American. No other viewpoint, just the same over and over. Don’t they realize people deserve better? Don’t they realize people are more sophisticated than that?
“I think none of these channels will ever be able to make a dent in the status quo. The mullahs should have nothing to fear,"