U.S. TV Stations Stir It Up In Iran

July 9 -- — When student demonstrations began rocking Tehran last month, Sarah H. learned what was happening outside her apartment in the Iranian capital in part from an unlikely source — a satellite TV channel beamed in from distant Los Angeles.

Along with her friends, Sarah, a 25-year-old former English literature student who asked that her name be change for fear of arrest, quickly determined it was too dangerous to join the protests in the early hours of June 11, shortly after baton-wielding police and militias arrived to disperse the crowd and the protests turned nasty.

But in the anxious days that followed, she was hungry for news about the demonstrations that rocked the sealed-off Amirabad area around the Tehran University dormitories.

While the Internet quickly sprouted Web logs and postings, Sarah found the most visceral news of the demonstrations could be found on a handful of satellite channels brought in from L.A.

With a lively, often impassioned mix of political talk-shows, news summaries and patriotic music from a bygone age, Farsi-language satellite TV stations established by Iranian immigrants in Southern California were broadcasting up-to-the-minute news of the protests, inviting viewers to call in and share their experiences, and exhorting Iranians to join the cause.

Their raucous on-air rabble-rousing did not go unnoticed by the Iranian government, which had been attempting to crackdown on protests against Islamic clerical rule spreading across the country. Within days, senior hardline Iranian leaders were denouncing the "evil" TV stations that "America had established."

Stirring Audiences

Since the Islamic revolution more than 20 years ago, the Iranian government has been quick, if not necessarily adept, at pointing accusatory fingers at the United States — the "Great Satan" in hardline Tehranspeak — for a host of problems facing the nation.

And while she's no fan of the hardliners, Sarah believes this time there was an element of truth to the government's claims.

"These satellite TVs were informing people about the riots and Tehrani people could easily find out in which part of the city there were riots," she told ABCNEWS.com in a telephone interview from Tehran. "They were moving people to go to the riots."

Satellite dishes are technically illegal in Iran. But in a society that draws a sharp distinction between public and private spaces, where homes are refuges from the theocracy's strict rules, foreign satellite channels are a fact of upper middle-class Iranian life.