American Jokes, Iranian Gaffes

"Following the difference of opinion between Putin and the U.S. over Syria, Putin defriended Obama on Facebook and Obama responded by unfollowing Putin on Twitter. Of course Obama did this with utmost reluctance, especially since Putin has still kept Joe Biden as a Facebook friends. The elimination of internet ties between the U.S. and Russian presidents indicates a crisis in bilateral relations."

This analysis recently appeared on the website of the Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. It named as its source Al-Bayan, a newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates, but the original source was the American satirical site The Daily Rash, which also fooled media outlets in Pakistan. The gaffe was reprinted by other major Iranian sites, including Iran Online, which is close to the speaker of Iran's parliament, as well as Donya ye Eghtesad, considered one of the most important business newspapers in Iran.

Fars: Gaffe After Gaffe

This isn't the first time Fars has fallen victim to a joke. Last autumn it reported that "a survey conducted by the Gallup polling organization shows 77 percent of rural voters in the U.S. prefer Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over U.S. President Barack Obama. Sixty percent of whites questioned in the survey prefer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because he does not hide the fact that he is a Muslim. According to this report, Dale Swidorsky, a resident of West Virginia, said, 'I like Ahmadinejad more. I would rather play baseball with him than spend time with Obama'."

The original source of this brief report was the American satirical journal, The Onion, which had published the "news" based on an imaginary survey. Other than Fars, another major Iranian media organization, Mehr News Agency, made the same mistake as well. The Onion has been particularly successful in fooling foreign media who are not familiar with its brand of American humor. Last year the Chinese Communist Party organ, The People's Daily, fell for one of its pranks which declared North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as the "sexiest man alive".

Four years earlier Fars had reported that the American actress Annette Bening, along with a high-ranking delegation from Hollywood, had met and held discussions with Fatemeh Rajabi, a radical writer married to the government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham, during their visit to Tehran. But in fact the "report" was initially written by an Iranian blogger as a joke and picked up by the reformist newspaper Etemad as well.

Fake news has long been a vibrant part of American satire, from television news spoofs to satirical magazines and newspapers. Still, this aspect of American culture is unknown to many Iranian media organization, especially those run by conservatives who tend to be lured by news that confirms their worldview and easily miss that the representation is a caricature.

In some cases it can have consequences beyond embarrassment. Four years ago the  documentary filmmaker (and current IranWire editor-in-chief) Maziar Bahari gave a fake interview to the Daily Show's Jason Jones, a comedian who introduced himself as a spy. A month later Bahari was arrested in Tehran on various charges, including being interviewed by a "spy".

A Veteran's Repeated Embarrassments

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has described Kayhan newspaper editor Hossein Shariatmadari as a sharpshooter. But he has not been very sharp in making political predictions, especially when they have been based on fake news.

One of Shariatmadari's biggest faux-pas occurred five years ago (May 31, 2008) when he ran a story with the headline, "Obama Originally Iranian." The report was from "Associated News" quoting the Russian Itar-Tass news agency. According to the report, Dr. Andy Vasshole, a member of the Historical Research Institute at MIT claimed to have documented proof that Barack Hussein Obama was an Iranian Shia whose family lived in Bushehr in southern Iran years ago. His great grandfather left Bushehr after a local dispute and eventually ended up in the U.S. following unsuccessful business ventures in Iraq and Libya.

The following day it turned out that the Kayhan's "report" was in fact a joke first published in an Iranian satirical site, "iTanz", along with a fake photo of Obama with his ancestors in Bushehr.

Then on August 14, 2011, Kayhan carried this headline on its front page: "British Youth: We Will Resist to the End, We Do Not Want Monarchy". The story that came with it was from CNN's Arabic television station. However, there was one minor problem. CNN does not have an Arabic channel. Shariatmadari had been had -- again.

A year and a half ago, another strange headline appeared in Kayhan: "Syrian Fighter Jets Fly Over Tel Aviv, Shaking Israel". The source was "Dumb Press" in Syria which claimed the country's air force had dropped messages over Tel Aviv warning Israelis of an imminent attack. But the next day it was revealed that the source was a satirical report that aired on Israel's Channel Ten television channel.

Misunderstanding America

These examples are just a short introduction to the long list of unfortunate moments where important media organizations embarrassingly fall for prank news, a victim of their own over-ardent willingness to publish anything against the West, however ludicrous. There is also a general lack of knowledge and understanding of West  – from its media institutions to mainstream culture to styles of humor – throughout the Islamic Republic's political and security apparatus, which often associates the United States and its allies with moral corruption.

In this hardline worldview, nothing is beyond conceivable when it comes to America's depraved behavior in the world, an attitude that is reflected in the repeated publishing of fake news reports, a pattern of ineptitude that is neither corrected nor remarked upon.

At its heart, this extreme, caricatured view of America is deeply pathological. It is the same view that leads a former radical official close to Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi to warn that President Obama's daughter will be raped if the United States carries out an attack on Syria. His view of the West is drenched in sex and he believes sexual violence is the only language his adversary understands.