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 ...

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 ...

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.

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