The other morning I swung by the local offices of Press TV, the Iranian-government-funded English-language news channel, to see how they were handling the fallout from the disputed Iranian election. The Press TV offices are in a neighborhood of southern Beirut called Bir Hassan, a mixed, commercial district whose other inhabitants include the Iranian Embassy, the headquarters of UNIFIL, the studios of Al-Manar (Hezbollah’s television channel), and, for good measure, Beirut’s only golf club.

Ali Rizk, the network’s affable Beirut news director, had offered to show me around, but first, he told me when I arrived, he had to run down to the studios to do some live “spontaneous translation” of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s speech before the Fatah Congress. Rizk, like virtually every member of Press TV’s Beirut bureau, is part Lebanese and of no Iranian extraction — he was born in Australia to Lebanese parents who had fled the country during the civil war here. (Other staffers include correspondent Serena Shim, a Lebanese-American who was born in Detroit, and Sara Moussa, a producer who lived previously in the US. In fact, according to Rizk, there are only two Iranians on the Beirut staff of Press TV, and both work for the website, which is the only part of the Beirut operation that is entirely in Farsi; Rizk says that the website is intended mainly for Iranians, whereas the English-language network itself is not even carried by cable networks in Tehran.) Rizk’s family moved back to Lebanon when Rizk was twelve. From 2003 to 2008, he lived in Tehran, working for another Iranian news channel, but he grew homesick for Beirut, and returned when he took the job with Press TV. He publicly supported Obama for the presidency, and says that he is still optimistic about Obama’s Middle East strategy.

Rizk and I took the elevator downstairs to his building’s sub-basement, where a private production company maintains studios for Press TV and a handful of other networks. The sets were simple, or maybe just inexpensive — the ensemble for Press TV’s “Middle East Today: Beirut Edition” consisted of two black chairs and a wide glass table. Rizk sat down at a small table with a microphone stand, in an empty corner of the room, and put on headphones; before him, two televisions showed, respectively, Press TV’s live broadcast and a direct feed from the Fatah Congress, where the man seated next to Abbas was waving his hands around and yelling at the audience. “This is the same thing we Arabs always do,” Rizk said, taking off the headphones briefly. “A lot of gesturing and little substance.”

When Abbas finally began speaking, I ducked into the production booth, so I could watch the broadcast. On half a dozen TV monitors, I could see coverage of Abbas’s speech on four different networks: Al Jazeera, Al Hurra (the American-funded Arabic channel), Al Kawthar (an Iranian Arabic channel), and Press TV; Al-Manar, which was also displayed, chose to skip the speech in favor of a talk show. Rizk’s translation was competent and fluid, if slightly digressive; at one point, Abbas spoke of “the other side,” and Rizk said, “the other side, of course in reference to Hamas.” (Hamas is the Palestinian organization favored by the Iranian regime.)

After twenty minutes or so, Press TV’s coverage ended (the other networks stayed with it for some time; Abbas himself carried on for another hour), and an anchor based in Tehran came on to sum things up. “Of course, Fatah cannot be mentioned without Hamas, the elected government,” the anchor said. “There has been a combined failed peace process in which Fatah really cannot put anything to its credit.”

Rizk and I went upstairs to chat in Press TV’s small, modern news room. The question of bias is, of course, the thing that most dogs Press TV’s operation. The channel was explicitly set up to counteract what the Iranian regime considered a “stranglehold” on English media by Western voices, which means that its bias, such as it is, is institutionalized, but not meant to be overly dogmatic. “It is just like CNN, or Al Jazeera English, except funded by the Iranian government,” Rizk told me. Its purpose  he said, is not so much to be purely without ideology as it is to be “a counterpoint.”

Still, there have been delicate moments, the Iranian election chief among them. At the end of June, the network took some flak for a story that disputed the cause of death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a protester who was killed by Basiji militiamen in Tehran. In early July, a British radio presenter quit a show he hosted on Press TV in London, after concluding that the network had ceased to be “reasonably fair.” And just the other day, the UK broadcast regulator found a Press TV show hosted by MP George Galloway in violation of impartiality standards, for its an anti-Israeli slant. (On issues concerning Israel, there is little evident nuance — once, in early May, I checked the Press TV website to find that two of the five “most popular” stories were “Israeli occupation worse than swine flu,” and “Jews to blame for US recession: poll.”) Last month, BBC’s Newsnight hosted a debate on the subject of whether Press TV ought to be banned in the UK. In response (to that and other prodding), a Press TV employee penned an essay on the Guardian’s website defending the channel:

It is simply not fair to characterise Press TV as a mouthpiece for the Iranian government. It is true that we are state-funded (like the BBC World Service) but that does not mean we slavishly follow the Tehran line. Our international staff have a huge variety of worldviews, and we realise that in the modern media environment state propaganda is a thing of the past. All you need to do is watch the channel to realise that Press TV gives a platform to a wide diversity of views — pro-Israel and anti-Iranian government among them.

Rizk points to Press TV’s coverage of the protests as an example of the network’s balance. “Did you see the pictures from Mousavi’s protests?” he said. “Press TV was the ones that took them.” (This may owe much to the fact that foreign news organizations were prohibited from covering the demonstrations.) He went on, the only difference between Press TV and, say, the BBC’s Farsi service, which found its broadcasts jammed in Iran during the demonstrations, was discretion. Press TV was “careful not to make the same mistakes which BBC Farsi maybe made. Like filming some place you’re not supposed to film, things like this.” (The final verdict on Press TV’s coverage of the protests is far from rendered, but in mid July, some close observers did notice a shift toward more sympathetic and thorough depictions of the protesters. One website suggested that this came about following “a shift in the Supreme Leader’s political position.”)

Meanwhile, the Beirut bureau, Rizk and his colleagues say, carries on more or less unhindered. Their local coverage can be both penetrating and sophisticated. On the morning I spent at the offices, a lengthy report by correspondent Mariam Saleh about Druze leader Walid Jumblat’s defection from the March 14 alliance played repeatedly, interspersed with ads for an hour-long documentary on mine-clearance efforts (scheduled for mid August). For a time, “Middle East Today” boasted of regular appearances by local Western journalists, although I know of at least two who have stopped appearing on the show since the election. “All of the political leaders, both March 14 and March 8, like going on with us,” producer Sara Moussa told me, “because they can say whatever they want. We don’t have any taboos.”

As for institutional pressures, Rizk claims there are none. “It’s just financed by the government,” he said. “That’s all.”

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