The Fars News Agency is a
news agency
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and All-news radio, radio and News broadcasting, television Broadcasting, broadcasters. A news agency may ...
in
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
managed by the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC; fa, سپاه پاسداران انقلاب اسلامی, Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enghelāb-e Eslāmi, lit=Army of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution also Sepāh or Pasdaran for short) is a branch o ...
(IRGC), an armed wing loyal to Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei. While it describes itself as "Iran's leading independent news agency",
it is widely described by Western news media to be a "semi-official" news agency of the
Government of Iran. All its content is
free content,
Creative Commons license
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...
d.
History
Fars News Agency was founded in 2003. In addition to
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
reporting, the agency also provides news in
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
,
Turkish,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
, and
Dari
Dari (, , ), also known as Dari Persian (, ), is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognised and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language,Lazard, G.Darī ...
.
Notable stories
Interview with Egyptian president
In June 2012, Fars released an interview with
Egyptian President
The president of Egypt is the executive head of state of Egypt and the de facto appointer of the official head of government under the Egyptian Constitution of 2014. Under the various iterations of the Constitution of Egypt following the Egy ...
Mohamed Morsi
Mohamed Mohamed Morsi Eissa al-AyyatThe spellings of his first and last names vary. survey of 14 news organizations plus Wikipedia in July 2012
Egypt–Israel peace treaty
The Egypt–Israel peace treaty ( ar, معاهدة السلام المصرية الإسرائيلية, Mu`āhadat as-Salām al-Misrīyah al-'Isrā'īlīyah; he, הסכם השלום בין ישראל למצרים, ''Heskem HaShalom Bein Yisrael ...
.
Morsi later disputed the authenticity of the interview.
Fars responded by providing what it said was audio of the interview.
Arabic newscaster
Al Arabiya
Arabiya ( ar, العربية, transliterated: '; meaning "The Arabic One" or "The Arab One") is an international Arabic news television channel, currently based in Dubai, that is operated by the media conglomerate MBC.
The channel is a fl ...
quoted unnamed experts who said it was not Morsi's voice.
Reposted story by ''The Onion''
In September 2012, the agency picked up a story from ''
The Onion
''The Onion'' is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satire, satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on ...
'', a satirical newspaper, about a supposed survey showing "an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for
Iranian President
The president of Iran ( fa, رئیسجمهور ایران, Rayis Jomhur-e Irān) is the head of government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The president is the second highest-ranking official of Iran after the Supreme Leader.
The president ...
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ( fa, محمود احمدینژاد, Mahmūd Ahmadīnežād ), born Mahmoud Sabbaghian ( fa, محمود صباغیان, Mahmoud Sabbāghyān, 28 October 1956), than
U.S. President
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States ...
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
in the upcoming U.S. elections".
The Iranian version copied the original word-for-word, even including a made-up quote from a fictional
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States while the B ...
resident who says he would rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."
Fars News Agency later apologized for its mistake, but claimed that a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside of the American political system to President Obama and American statesmen.
Time machine story
In April 2013, the agency carried a story claiming a 27-year-old Iranian scientist had invented a
time machine
Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a w ...
that allowed people to see into the future. A few days later the story was removed, and replaced with a story quoting an Iranian government official that no such device had been registered.
Alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda reports
In January 2014, Fars posted a series of articles that suggested U.S. security policy was being driven by an "alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda".
The report said that proof was found in a
Federal Security Service report carried out by
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...
.
The report said that the United States government had been secretly run by a "shadow government" of space aliens since 1945.
Salman Rushdie fatwa
In February 2016, Fars was one of 40 Iranian news agencies that pledged money toward the bounty against
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and We ...
in regards to
The Satanic Verses controversy
The ''Satanic Verses'' controversy, also known as the Rushdie Affair, was a controversy sparked by the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie's novel ''The Satanic Verses''. It centered on the novel's references to the Satanic Verses of the Qura ...
.
Fars promised $30,000 for the killing of Rushdie.
Sanctions
Iranian state News Agency, Fars, an associate of Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps, has been blocked by the new sanctions applied by US treasury's Office. These sanctions started on 25 January 2020.
Yemenite Jews
In November 2020, the Agency sparked controversy after it shared an article by ''
Kayhan'' editor
Hossein Shariatmadari
Hossein Shariatmadari ( fa, حسین شريعتمداری) is the managing editor of ''Kayhan'', a conservative Iranian newspaper.
Career
A strong supporter of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he has been described as being "a close confidant of ...
denying the Holocaust
''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'' is a 1993 book by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, in which the author discusses the Holocaust denial movement. Lipstadt named British writer David Irving as a Holocaust denier, l ...
and saying that the "real Holocaust" was against
Yemenite Christians by the Jewish
Himyarite Kingdom
The Himyarite Kingdom ( ar, مملكة حِمْيَر, Mamlakat Ḥimyar, he, ממלכת חִמְיָר), or Himyar ( ar, حِمْيَر, ''Ḥimyar'', / 𐩹𐩧𐩺𐩵𐩬) (fl. 110 BCE–520s CE), historically referred to as the Homerit ...
in 524 CE. Critics denounced the article as an
anti-Semitic piece seeking to dehumanize Jews and downplay the brutality of the Holocaust.
See also
*
List of Iranian news agencies
This is a list of notable news agencies in Iran:
* KhabarOnline News Agency(Khabar online)
* AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA)
* Cultural Heritage News Agency (CNA)
* Fars News Agency
* Eslahatnews
* Iranian Agriculture News Agency (IANA)
* Iran Bo ...
References
External links
*
*
{{Authority control
2003 establishments in Iran
Organizations established in 2003
News agencies based in Iran
Iranian news websites
Creative Commons-licensed websites