Recently there have been reports on a mailing list I am on that Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan has been arrested in Tehran. Some of the accounts posted indicate that he had recently gone back to Tehran after being in exile for a while and was happy to be back, but was then arrested.

Hossein has been an important blogging pioneer, helping to spread blogging in Farsi, and thus in Iran.

Also he has provided helpful commentary and critiques of western media distortions about Iran.

Last November, I was at a program at the Columbia Journalism School on the Changing Media Landscape, where Hossein spoke as part of a panel. He pointed out the use in the U.S. press of the term “ambitions” to frame the Iran nuclear issue .

Here’s a short excerpt from my blog about the program:

Hossein pointed to the political use of the… weiter lesen