When Fake News Isn't Enough
As the real-life Bahari describes in his memoir, originally titled "Then They Came for Me," his family carries a historical memory of government abuse. His late father was imprisoned by the Shah. His late sister was imprisoned by the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime. Now Bahari has been imprisoned by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime in 2009.
As the movie recounts, a publicity campaign by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member, and other groups led to an intervention by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to Bahari's later release.
It also led to a new friendship between him and Stewart. "When you get someone arrested," as Stewart explained after the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September, "you start to feel closer to them."
Before the movie is released to theaters nationwide on Nov. 14, Stewart and Behari brought it to a screening last Thursday sponsored by CPJ and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
In an onstage discussion afterwards, moderated by yours truly, Bahari revealed his own good humor to be quite intact as he described his continuing work to help other journalists who remain imprisoned.
"Can you go home again?" I asked, referring to the Iran of his ancestors.
"I can go home again," he told me patiently with smile. "But then I won't be able to come back."
Stewart probably won't be booking a flight to Teheran, either. His movie was filmed mostly in Jordan, except for exterior shots done in Iran. He and the movie's co-producer, billionaire Gigi Pritzker, have been accused by Iran's state TV and other pro-government media as being instruments of a Zionist-CIA, etc., etc., conspiracy. The usual smears.
More work remains. The Washington Post's Jason Rezaian was arrested in Iran in July and is still held without charges.
Iran became the world's leading jailer of journalists in 2009, according to the CPJ's tallies, and remains in the top three. Earlier that year American freelance journalist Roxana Saberi was convicted of espionage but released after another publicity campaign.
Yet Iran's current President Hassan Rouhani denied during his recent trip to the United Nations in New York that his country jails any journalists. He's either lying or somebody's keeping the truth from him, too.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
