WASHINGTON: She is largely unknown in the US. But the American anchorwoman for Iran’s state-run broadcaster, detained last weekend by US authorities, is a familiar face on its English-language channel.
As a newscaster for Press TV, Marzieh Hashemi has been conducting interviews and reading the news as written by government loyalists in Iran. It’s a long way from New Orleans, where she was born Melanie Franklin in 1959 to a Christian family.
In college in Louisiana, encounters with Iranian students in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution saw her convert to Islam. A marriage brought her to Iran, where she learned fluent Farsi and began working for the country’s state broadcaster 25 years ago.
Her journalism and her public comments mirror her host country’s official ideology.
“When I got familiar with Islamic Revolution in Iran, and I saw it was a political and religious revolution, I was attracted to this,” Hashemi once told an interviewer in Farsi. “I saw this as a political movement to the revolution.”
Now, after her apparent arrest by the FBI, her family is questioning why the 59-year-old grandmother was imprisoned by the US Her detention comes at a time of escalating US-Iran tensions, including President Donald Trump’s maximalist approach to Iran after pulling America out of its nuclear deal.
Hashemi was detained Sunday in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington by the FBI on a material witness warrant, according to her elder son, Hossein Hashemi.
The FBI said in an email that it had no comment.
Federal law allows judges to order witnesses to be arrested and detained if the government can prove their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case and that they would be a flight risk and unlikely to respond to a subpoena. The statute generally requires those witnesses to be promptly released once they are deposed.
Hashemi studied journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. A yearbook photo shows her smiling with other colleagues at WPRG, now KLSU, the student-run radio station.
“When we were in school together, that was during the Iran hostage crisis. LSU had a sizeable number of Iranian students who were going to school there,” said radio newsman Jim Engster of Baton Rouge, who was also in the photograph.
“The time we were in school was less than 25 years from LSU being an all-white school. So Melanie was a trailblazer too as a black female journalist. There were a few others but not many.”
Hashemi said that’s where she learned about Iran’s revolution, which saw Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi replaced by an Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite cleric who had final say on state matters as the country’s supreme leader.
“I started to ask them about the revolution, because there were many demonstrations by pro-Khomeini demonstrators and also against the revolution in that university,” she later recounted. “I wanted to know that what they are doing and find out who is the Ayatollah Khomeini, and it was very interesting for me as an activist.”
Hashemi ended up in Iran working at Iran’s state broadcaster, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB.
There are no private television or radio stations in Iran. Satellite dishes, while widespread, also are illegal. That leaves IRIB with a monopoly on domestic airwaves.
Since the revolution, IRIB has been in the hands of hard-liners who back Iran’s government. Their broadcasts mirror those of other state-run channels across the Mideast, with direct criticism of leaders incredibly rare.
Press TV, launched in June 2007, is IRIB’s English-language service. While airing in Iran, it focuses predominantly on international affairs through the lens of how leaders in the Islamic Republic see the world. The hashtag “FreePalestine” accompanies stories on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fierce criticism of British and American foreign policy is common.
Its broadcasts have drawn Western criticism.
In 2012, the Anti-Defamation League described the channel as “one of the world’s leading dispensers of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in English.”
The channel was pulled from the air in Britain in 2011 after a complaint by Maziar Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist for Newsweek who was imprisoned by Iran after the 2009 disputed re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the Green Movement protests. Bahari said the channel aired an interview that had been scripted by his captors, who threatened to execute him unless he cooperated.
For her part, Hashemi both helmed newscasts critical of the West and offered her own criticisms as well.
In 2009, she said she believed Western media exaggerated popular support in Iran for Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist who was later put under house arrest, where he has languished for years after challenging Ahmadinejad in 2009 and leading the Green Movement protests.
“What is shown many times in the West, for example, when people saw that there was a very large demonstration supporting Mr. Mousavi, people got the feeling that the country was falling apart and that the majority of Iranians actually supported Mr. Mousavi,” Hashemi told NPR. “No, the majority of them did not, and the other side of the spectrum has not been shown as much, I believe.”
It remains unclear why Hashemi was arrested. However, it isn’t the first time she’s been questioned by US authorities, her son said.
For the past decade, “she has been harassed on a regular basis when she goes to airports,” he said. “Whenever she boards a plane, prior to it she will have interviews or interrogation, if we might call it that— things that are not very typical is what she’s had to deal with for some time.”
From New Orleans to Tehran: Life of detained Iran newscaster Marzieh Hashemi
From New Orleans to Tehran: Life of detained Iran newscaster Marzieh Hashemi
- Hashemi studied journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge
- Hashemi ended up in Iran working at Iran’s state broadcaster
America’s news channel for Middle East fires staff, goes off air after funding cuts
- Chief Jeffrey Gedmin said he had given up on the US administration’s freeze lifting anytime soon
CAIRO: The head of a US-funded Arabic-language television and online news outlet that claims a 30 million-strong audience in the Middle East and North Africa terminated most staff and TV programming Saturday, accusing the Trump administration and Elon Musk of having “irresponsibly and unlawfully” cut off funding.
In notices to Alhurra news staffers about their dismissals, chief Jeffrey Gedmin said he had given up on the US administration’s freeze lifting anytime soon for the congressionally approved money for Al Hurra and its US-funded Arabic language sister organizations.
Gedmin accused Kari Lake, President Donald Trump’s appointee to the American government agency overseeing Al Hurra, Voice of America and other US-funded news programming abroad, of dodging his efforts to speak with her about the funding cutoff.
“I’m left to conclude that she is deliberately starving us of the money we need to pay you, our dedicated and hard-working staff,” Gedmin said in severance letters obtained by The Associated Press and excerpted on the website of Al Hurra’s parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Mohamed Al-Sabagh, an Egyptian journalist working at the Al Hurra news website in Dubai, told the AP that all the staff in the website and the television channel received emails terminating their contracts.
Alhurra is the latest US government-funded news outlet — after Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and others — to cut staff and services amid what the outlets say is the move by the Trump administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to withhold their congressional appropriations.
Lake, appointed to oversee the US Agency for Global Media, describes her agency as being consumed by a “giant rot” that requires the agency’s destruction and rebuilding.
The US-backed news organizations were set up starting in the Cold War between the West and Soviet Union. Their designated goal was to provide objective news about the United States and other subjects overseas, often to people under authoritarian governments without access to a free press.
The George W. Bush administration created Al Hurra in 2003, the same year his administration’s invasion of Iraq overthrew that country’s leader. Al Hurra’s journalists covered the US occupation and sectarian and extremist violence that followed, with some them dying on the job during the 2011 Arab Spring, and other political changes across the Middle East.
While Al Hurra over the years faced charges of bias from both conservatives and liberals in the United States, it was one of the few outlets in its region providing space for freedom of the press and speech.
In his note to staffers, Getmin said his organization would retain a couple of dozen staffers and a “presence” online as court battles over the cuts play out in US courts.
“It makes no sense,” Gedmin wrote, “to silence America’s voice in the Middle East.”
Lebanon’s civil war anniversary poll: Half of respondents fear conflict could return
- 63.3% favor abolishing sectarian political system for secular state model
- 42.5% report direct personal or family harm from recent conflict
BEIRUT: As Lebanon marks 50 years since the outbreak of its civil war on April 13, a new poll has revealed half of the Lebanese people questioned are worried the conflict could return amid a fragile ceasefire.
The survey, conducted jointly by Annahar newspaper and International Information, sampled 1,200 Lebanese citizens across all regions between March 25 and April 2.
It showed that 51.7 percent expressed varying degrees of concern about the war’s return, while 63.3 percent believed establishing a secular civil state by abolishing the sectarian political system represented the best path forward for the country.
A total of 42.5 percent of respondents reported direct harm to themselves or family members, including deaths or injuries (23.7 percent), property damage (19.9 percent), and forced displacement (19.5 percent).
In assessing Lebanese attitudes toward Iran’s role in Lebanon, 78.6 percent of respondents evaluated this role as negative, and 75.3 percent identified Israel as Lebanon’s primary adversary.
The survey came as Israel resumed attacks on Lebanon, claiming it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.
In a statement, Annahar’s management described the poll as an essential tool to understand present realities by examining present and past questions, noting the significant timing on the half-century mark of a conflict whose full lessons remain unlearned.
Public opinion remains deeply divided on how to characterize the war that erupted on April 13, 1975, with 40.7 percent describing it as a Lebanese civil war while 38.5 percent view it as a war for others “fought on our soil.”
A smaller segment (8.8 percent) consider it primarily a war related to Palestinian settlement issues.
Information about the war continued to be transmitted largely through personal channels, with 81.9 percent citing family and friends as their primary source of knowledge, followed by media (44.8 percent), personal experience (28.3 percent), and academic sources (13.4 percent), according to the poll.
Saudi brands and agencies win seven Grand Prix trophies at Dubai Lynx Awards 2025
Dubai Lynx, a prominent creative festival and awards program organized by Cannes Lions, announced its annual winners at an awards ceremony on Wednesday in Dubai.
WPP-owned VML was crowned Network of the Year followed by BBDO Worldwide and McCann Worldgroup.
Omnicom-owned Hearts & Science was awarded Media Network of the Year followed by other Omnicom agencies OMD and PHD in second and third.
Other special awards included MENA Agency of the Year, which went to creative firm Impact BBDO Dubai followed by FP7 McCann Dubai and BigTime Creative Shop Riyadh.
The latter was also named Independent Agency of the Year. Serviceplan Middle East in Dubai and Abdullah & Shokri in Cairo ranked second and third respectively.
Saudi Arabian brands and agencies bagged a total of seven Grand Prix trophies in several categories. Some of the winning campaigns included “Birthmark Stories” for HungerStation by VML; “5 vs 5” for Riyadh Season by BigTime Creative Shop; and “The Second Release” for Billboard magazine by SRMG Labs.
“This year, we’ve seen a compelling shift towards content that not only engages and entertains but also effectively drives business results,” Marian Brannelly, Lions’ global director of awards, told Arab News.
New sub-categories such as Use of Humor received 3 percent of all entries while the creator-focused categories within the Social & Influencer category received 14 percent of all entries.
Brannelly said that “humor played a big role” this year, “tackling even sensitive topics and giving campaigns a fresh and relatable feel.”
She added: “It’s also commendable to see work that not only evokes emotions but also clearly communicates the brand’s message and product value through compelling storytelling.
“Balancing purpose with commercial impact is crucial, and this year’s winners have showcased how to do it.”
GCC nations are global leaders in post-COVID digitalization efforts, says IMF expert
- Deputy head of organization’s Middle East and Central Asia department says ‘we see rapid progress in this region in general, which is not the case for other parts of the world’
- Deputy head of organization’s Middle East and Central Asia department says ‘we see rapid progress in this region in general, which is not the case for other parts of the world’
RIYADH: There is a positive correlation between digitalization and enhanced macroeconomic favorability in Gulf Cooperation Council economies, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund’s Middle East and Central Asia department.
During a roundtable discussion in Riyadh on Thursday, Zeine Zeidan, the department’s deputy director, spoke about the rapid digital development that has taken place within the GCC region in recent years and the significant support this provides for both the public and private sectors.
“The region is going through a very interesting economic transformation,” he said.
The IMF has explored the ways in which digitalization is now a key pillar in the national visions of GCC countries, he continued, and has become a crucial factor in efforts to grow gross domestic product, streamline government operations, improve living standards and accelerate nationwide connectivity.
Zeidan highlighted in particular the accelerated process of digitalization in the region since the COVID-19 pandemic, which he said is reflected by developments in areas such as telehealth, digital banking, e-commerce and virtual courts.
“Between 2020 and now, we see rapid progress in this region in general, which is not the case for other parts of the world,” he said. “And on average, this is a region that is even well ahead of the aggregate by a considerable amount.”
That said, the IMF made recommendations for the further enhancement of digitalization efforts in the region’s public and private sectors. In the former, for instance, there needs to be a greater push for digital engagement with citizens and the digitalization of core government systems. Moreover, data-privacy laws and cybersecurity guidelines must be reviewed and updated to reduce risks and encourage trust. Regulations that can complement an evolving digital industry must also be put in place uniformly across the region.
In the financial sector, the benefits of digital payments and e-commerce should be promoted, in addition to industry-led developments in financial technology that can drive competition. To scale up markets, cross-border cooperation and payments are also recommended.
As for the corporate sector and labor market, the IMF recommended that small and medium-size financial enterprises should learn to adopt new technologies and constantly update their skills. It also advised targeted investments in digital infrastructure, industry and innovation.
In addition, a major emphasis in the corporate and labor market should be placed on education and training to enhance digital skills, especially considering the potential shifts expected in the job market as a result of advances in artificial intelligence.
“The history of technology over the past few decades has shown that there has always been that job creation,” Zeidan said. “So, you lose jobs somewhere, you create a lot of jobs somewhere else.”
Asked by Arab News whether there were concerns about loss of educational and career diversity, or that creativity and critical-thinking skills might be pushed to the back burner by the focus on digital education, he said that AI does not replace human thinking.
The idea, he explained, is to use AI “to foster creativity,” not “replace your thinking.” The biggest challenge, he predicted, will be to build digital skills within the education system while preserving that human creativity and thinking.
Saudi Arabia’s GovTech Maturity Index rating grew from a little over 0.7 to just below 1.0 between 2020 and 2022, ranking it the highest among GCC countries, followed by the UAE and Qatar. The index, which measures the maturity of nations in terms of digital government transformation, has a regional average of 0.85.
Although the GCC region ranks among the best globally in terms of digital connectivity, some individual countries might benefit from improvements to advanced information and communications technology skills, Zeidan said. Many individuals have basic skills but advanced knowledge is still lacking, he added. However the advanced infrastructure in the region gives GCC countries the scope to improve digital skills and industry integration.
Despite the positives, the region does have some catching up to do in certain aspects.
“The contribution of the digital economy to the GDP in general … is still much slower in Saudi Arabia, which is the most advanced in the region, compared to the United States,” Zeidan said.
Digital access efforts, on the other hand, are performing well, with the GCC region closing the gap on advanced economies globally, as evidenced by the IMF’s newly developed Enhanced Digital Access Index, which measures various aspects of a country’s digital infrastructure and inclusivity.
Saudi Arabia jumped 2.9 percent in terms of contributions from the digital economy between 2017 to 2020. During this time, SR73 billion ($19.5 billion) of GDP was provided by the digital economy through leveraging of digital infrastructure, according to the index.
Zeidan also recommended additional efforts in the fields of digital innovation and regulation to further enhance the preparedness of GCC countries for advances in AI.
Sharjah Media City launches Podcast Room to support content creators
- The project aims to provide a professional environment equipped with cutting-edge technology to help emerging talents produce high-quality content
SHARJAH, UAE: Sharjah Media City, also known as Shams, has announced the launch of the Podcast Room as part of its efforts to support content creators, innovators, and the digital media industry in the region, it was announced on Wednesday.
The project aims to provide a professional environment equipped with cutting-edge technology to help emerging talents and professionals produce high-quality content, according to a statement.
The Podcast Room offers an integrated platform for recording and editing audio and video content, including podcasts, interviews, and media discussions, giving creators new opportunities to expand their reach and connect with a wider audience. The project aligns with Shams’ vision of supporting the creative economy and empowering local and Arab talents.
Rashid Abdullah Al-Obad, director of Shams, said: “The launch of the Podcast Room at Shams reflects our vision to strengthen the content creation ecosystem in the region by providing an integrated platform that enables creators to develop their work with the highest standards of quality and professional excellence. We remain committed to supporting media talents by offering cutting-edge technologies and advanced infrastructure.”
The Podcast Room comprises a designed space equipped with state-of-the-art audio recording technology, professional soundproofing, an advanced microphone system, and advanced shooting equipment to ensure superior content production.
It also offers live broadcasting services, multi-episode recording, and high-quality audio and video editing tools, providing content creators with the flexibility to develop their media projects seamlessly.
The Podcast Room offers a variety of design options, with each setup thoughtfully crafted to meet the needs of diverse programs and highlight the unique creative identity of every piece of content.
The room can be booked through the website: https://www.shams.ae/the-podcast-room.
