May 18, 2011

Irony Alert: Iran Launches Human Rights News Agency

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Message to the Mac McClellands and Nick Kristofs of the world. You will soon have some new competition. As will The Onion:

A senior Iranian lawmaker says the country will soon launch an English-language news agency to report on human rights conditions in the West.

Member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Parliament (Majlis), Mohammad Karim Abedi, told Fars News Agency on Monday that the new news agency would seek to assert human rights in the US and Britain.

Called The Human Rights News Agency, Abedi said that the new agency would report on instances of rights violation in Europe and the US. He said such abuses have gone unnoticed over the years by the world media.

Thanks to its focus on the West, the news agency can conveniently ignore the situation back home. Say, for instance, the Ahmadinejad regime’s stifling censorship of the press, its penchant for juvenile executions, and its bloody crackdowns on political dissidents and religious minorities.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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