Alana Goodman writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a media bias group’s interesting personnel choice.
A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group known for producing a “media bias” chart that rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones.
Meisam Zamanabadi, an analyst with Ad Fontes Media, spent a large part of his career as an editor at Iranian state-run media outlet Hamshahri, a Tehran-run newspaper controlled at the time by then-mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—now speaker of the Iranian parliament and chief regime negotiator.
Ad Fontes, which the influential Poynter Institute has praised as fair and “easy to understand,” is cited by institutions like Cornell University as a good option for news consumers to evaluate media bias. Ad Fontes also promises that corporations that use its ratings can “get great business results by advertising on high quality news.” Major corporations such as General Motors say they use Ad Fontes to “ensure that [our] ads also show up in reliable publications.”
Zamanabadi, who grew up and went to college in Iran, is based in California. Ad Fontes’s website describes him as the “founder & editor of the Tamashagar news agency,” an Iranian sports news website, and says he has worked in “journalism since 1996.”
Before moving to the United States from Iran, Zamanabadi served as the editor of Hamshahri‘s sports pages, according to a copy of his résumé posted online. Hamshahri, a state-controlled newspaper overseen by the municipality of Tehran, has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006.
Posts from Zamanabadi’s online blog indicate that he was an editor at Hamshahri in 2008 and 2009, while Ghalibaf was mayor of Tehran. His résumé also states that he worked for the Iranian Students’ News Agency and the Iran Labor News Agency, both of which have links to the regime.
