By Mehdi Yarmohamadi, Interdisciplinary Researcher in Experimental Cinema and Performance Art. Originally published in Farhikhtegan:
Media, in its most profound philosophical sense, is the “site of presence” -a field where a nation gathers to behold itself, recognizes its own ontological fissures and bonds, and, in a continuous dialectic, shapes its collective selfhood. With this premise, the national media constitutes a symbolic covenant: a pact between the observer and the observed. This covenant only holds authenticity when the television screen acts as a mirror, reflecting the lived realities of society.
The management crisis of the media in recent years, rather than stemming from technical limitations or resource scarcity, is rooted in a fundamental, strategic, and ontological error: a management style that seeks authoritarian engineering rather than the reflection of the nation’s lived reality. Being “national” signifies inclusivity, encompassing all segments of society with all their diversity, contradictions, intellectual differences, and cultural plurality. When information is reduced to the production of a monolithic, sanitized, and prescribed narrative instead of reflecting the truth, the media forfeits its authority. Today’s audience, finding neither their concrete concerns, fundamental inquiries, nor their suffering and hopes in this mirror, is inevitably driven to seek their lived truth in rival narratives, trans-border media, and parallel spaces. This migration is the audience’s existential reaction to being recognized -an inevitable response to their exclusion from the official image of the country.
In this context, the role of public figures, intellectual authorities, and artists assumes complex dimensions. In dynamic and living media, beloved figures, authentic experts, and popular artists are more than mere hosts, actors, or pundits; they are the symbolic capital and collective memory of a nation. They serve as living bridges between the media institution and the body of society, reproducing public trust through their emotional and rational discourse. The gradual, abrupt, or selective removal of these figures from the television screen signifies the collapse of these communicative bridges and the severing of the emotional ties between media and audience.
By replacing these figures with closed circles of like-minded individuals, media managers have transformed the space of dialogue, tolerance, and the genuine exchange of ideas into lectures, rigid demarcations, and monologue. When audiences encounter individuals in various programs whose mission is merely to reproduce a closed discourse, they suffer from a chronic alienation from the media. Here, the crisis of trust transforms into a crisis of semantic legitimacy; the media is no longer a site for the confluence of ideas but a podium for specific factions.
It must be remembered that being “national,” beyond an administrative or organizational label, is a fundamental public right. Media is truly “national” only when the nation sees itself recognized within it -with all its complexities, diversities, contradictions, and even criticisms. The challenge lies in the fact that by erasing the problem and suppressing the diversity of thought, neither is peace restored, nor do the conflicts disappear; rather, they are relegated to the deeper strata of society and into uncontrollable spaces.
The path out of this structural impasse lies in the epistemic humility of managers. First and foremost, media executives must accept that truth is not the monopoly of an official, closed narrative, but is fluid within the fabric of daily life, the dynamism of elites, and the plurality of the people’s lifeworld. As long as the media camera seeks to indoctrinate and engineer behavior rather than observe the people, this mirror will remain broken or opaque.
To revive the national media, one must return to the authentic Iranian lifeworld. There is no shield for safeguarding a nation’s security, solidarity, and long-term interests more robust than an aware, critical, questioning, and self-confident society -a society that can behold itself in the mirror of its media, with all its beauty and its wounds, and place full trust in this reflection. Now, on the eve of a new era of high-level management of the national media, the fundamental concern of returning to the Iranian lifeworld is more relevant than ever. It is hoped that the incoming administration, by correctly grasping this ontological necessity, will seize the opportunity to transition from an era of monologue to an age of dialogue, and by reforming approaches and regaining public trust, restore the media to its authentic position: a full-scale mirror for all colors, voices, and concerns of this land.
