Country Profile: Iran
Context
The Iranian exile media landscape has no single point of origin, but developed through successive periods of political repression, state control and displacement that predate the Islamic Republic. Under the authoritarian Pahlavi monarchy broadcasting was brought under a state monopoly and became both an extension of hegemonic power and a tool of regime security, including close cooperation with the security service SAVAK. The Islamic Republic kept this same logic, using the media as an instrument of state authority under a different ideology, and relying on the same tools of licensing, censorship, and prosecution that earlier regimes had used. For journalists unwilling to work within these constraints, exile did not begin with the repression that followed the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the crackdown after the disputed 2009 election, the 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jîyan, Azadî)) protests, or the renewed waves of repression, wartime censorship and prolonged internet shutdowns in 2025 and 2026. These successive periods show that media exile in Iran is rooted in a much longer history.
This “historicity,” as one interviewed expert put it, is essential to understanding the shape of today’s Iranian exile media landscape [1].
Of this broader landscape, JX Fund tracks 16 outlets as dedicated exile media, selected on criteria including self-identification as a media outlet, regular original journalistic content, a defined minimum audience, and independence from any non-media parent organization. These outlets mainly operate from the UK, US, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Iraq, often as transnational newsrooms spread across several countries. Most of the outlets were established abroad rather than relocated from Iran. This reflects a defining feature of the Iranian case: independent reporting existed inside Iran, but rarely in the form of stable, autonomous media organizations that could later move into exile.
Three distinct paths fed into the exile media landscape: 1. journalists who entered exile from within Iran’s licensed press, 2. civil society actors and informal networks operating outside it, and 3. outlets founded abroad from the outset.
1. One group of journalists who later entered exile had worked within Iran’s licensed press, including faction-aligned reformist newspapers such as Shargh and Etemad, whose editors held political offices and which were never genuinely independent. A number of journalists from these and similar publications later found work with publicly funded international broadcasters such as BBC Persian or privately funded outlets such as Iran International.
2. A second group worked inside Iran outside the formal media system. Civil society organizations, human rights groups, professional coordinating councils, individual news creators and informal networks documented, verified and circulated information that could not be reported openly through licensed media. Teachers’ and nurses’ coordinating councils, human rights documentation groups, blogs and later Telegram channels were among the structures through which this work was carried out. Some of those involved later left Iran and continued reporting and documentation from abroad, often retaining links to sources and networks inside the country.
3. A third group of outlets was founded abroad from the outset. Some were founded by individual journalists, such as Tehran Bureau or IranWire; others through organized initiatives, such as Radio Zamaneh, founded by Iranian journalists together with a press-freedom NGO. Across these different paths, many outlets rely on citizen-sourced content, including videos, images and information passed through contacts and informal networks inside Iran, then verified and republished from abroad.
Whatever their origin, these outlets now operate under similar constraints.
CHALLENGES FACING IRANIAN MEDIA IN EXILE
Alongside chronic funding shortfalls, structural challenges include legal precarity in host countries, team fragmentation across jurisdictions, and security risks that extend to family members remaining in Iran.
One of the biggest challenges is reaching audiences inside Iran at all: Iranian authorities have actively moved to disrupt even the informal flow of citizen-sourced content, above all through internet shutdowns as a documented tool of information control. A nationwide blackout beginning January 8, 2026, lasted 88 days, followed by periods of partial connectivity and renewed severe restrictions.
[1] This profile draws on two rounds of interviews. In 2023, an earlier mapping study interviewed 20 media makers (5 journalists, 7 outlet representatives, 8 influencers/citizen journalists/media personalities). For this 2026 Country Profile, JX Fund and The FiX conducted 8 further interviews with representatives of Iranian exile media outlets.
“What they wanted to do through this system is not a complete shutdown, they want to have control over people’s connectivity and a total surveillance.”
Azadeh Akbari, Professor of Critical Data & Technology Studies in the Center for Critical Computational Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt
When access began returning network capacity appeared to reach 86% of pre-shutdown levels, but actual traffic recovered to only about 60%, a gap researchers describe as a “hybrid shutdown model,” in which authorities reopen enough visible capacity to project normalization while keeping real bandwidth suppressed. Privileged users with “white SIM cards” — pre-approved accounts exempted from the national firewall — or the paid “Internet Pro” tier could bypass these restrictions largely unaffected, while the rest of the population remained behind the same throttled, filtered connection. As of summer 2026, international traffic had still not returned to its pre-January level. Despite these restrictions, limited information still circulated through alternative channels such as satellite broadcasts, social media, phone calls, and a small number of VPN or satellite-based connections, though far less reliably than under normal conditions. Understanding the impact of these restrictions requires comparing crisis conditions with the media habits they disrupt.
Under normal conditions, Iran has high levels of digital infrastructure, with mobile cellular subscriptions exceeding 166 per 100 people as of 2023. Survey data from 2023 found that 68% of adults in Iran often used social media as a primary news source, versus 35% for satellite TV and 12% for state television. Those habits do not hold once a shutdown begins: data collected during the June 2025 shutdown itself found that only about one in eight users with an urgent need reached effective, working access to circumvention tools, and even among those who did, contacting family (38% fulfillment) and accessing work or financial services (39%) — people’s most urgent needs — were served far less reliably than news (57%). The gap between these two pictures matters for anyone building or funding access tools: platforms and habits that work in ordinary times are not the ones people can actually rely on in a crisis.
Blocking has repeatedly extended to authentication itself: authorities have blocked international SMS verification codes for apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Google, preventing registration even where a VPN connection worked — documented since 2022 and again during the June 2025 shutdown. This pushed many toward domestic apps such as Rubika, SoroushPlus, and Bale, which independent security audits found lack genuine end-to-end encryption and route traffic through a shared, state-linked backend. These developments have turned audience access itself into a strategic question for Iranian exile media: through which channels can audiences inside Iran still be reached reliably?
Telegram is widely used in part because its relatively permissive content moderation lets sensitive material circulate with less friction than on more tightly regulated platforms. However, Telegram’s role as an alternative channel should not be overstated: its relationship with Iranian authorities is not straightforwardly adversarial. Telegram agreed in 2015 to restrict content at the Iranian government’s request, and channel registration rules have required adding a government-linked bot as a co-administrator with database search and activity-monitoring capabilities — the kind of metadata access that can be as revealing to a surveillance state as message content itself. The platform’s continued, if unstable, accessibility inside Iran may itself reflect a degree of calculated tolerance rather than a simple failure of state control.
¹ This profile draws on two rounds of interviews. In 2023, an earlier mapping study interviewed 20 media makers (5 journalists, 7 outlet representatives, 8 influencers/citizen journalists/media personalities). For this 2026 Country Profile, JX Fund and The FiX conducted 8 further interviews with representatives of Iranian exile media outlets.