Media turn to Twitter to defy Iran reporting ban

  
"The revolution may not be televised in Iran, but it may well be tweeted," user 'kaplanmyrth' said in one of the concise messages flooding an Iranelection feed on Twitter.
  
Iranian authorities accused some foreign media of being the "mouthpiece of rioters" Wednesday in the wake of demonstrations by supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who wants a fresh election.
  
With foreign media now barred from taking to the streets to report on the aftermath of the disputed election, heavy use is being made of so-called user-generated content.
  
Alongside reports compiled from correspondents in Iran -- often under false names -- newspapers and websites are reprinting emails, the contents of phone calls, and messages from Twitter and social networking site Facebook.
  
The BBC's London-based Persian service, banned from having a correspondent in Iran, is getting more than 4,000 emails and hundreds of phone calls from Iran daily.
  
Having carefully analysed the content for reliability, it is broadcasting it back to a wider audience in Iran.
  
Sadeq Saba, a senior analyst at BBC Persian, said: "We are receiving videos, we are receiving emails, phone calls and text messages, not only from Tehran from other cities around the country. So we get a picture of what is happening outside of Tehran."
  
Saba said he had been speaking to a "reliable source" in the Iranian city of Rasht earlier Wednesday.
  
"He was telling me that every day, people have been gathering to demonstrate and demand the annulment of the election, which has become a national demand for Mousavi's supporters.
  
"But he also told me that the Basiji (pro-government militia) are going into certain parts of the city causing fear and some of them are armed.
  
"They are a really feared institution and that is one of the reasons that the demonstrations are not as large as they might have been."
  
Like many international media organisations, The Times newspaper sent a correspondent to cover last Friday's elections but he had to leave the country when his 10-day visa expired on Monday.
  
Foreign editor Richard Beeston told AFP: "Since then, we've had two or three people working for us, foreigners and Iranians.
  
"We are not using their real names because the authorities have made it very clear that they will be arrested or have their accreditation taken away."
  
The Times also has a London-based Iranian monitoring Twitter and Facebook.
  
"We are very aware that opponents of the regime will be putting out material that is uncheckable and possibly propaganda. Where possible, we just run quotes from people we have actually spoken to ourselves," Beeston said.
  
The Los Angeles Times wrote Wednesday: "The Middle East is witnessing Iran slip into a guerrilla-style Internet and Twitter game of strategies and slogans pecked out by protesters attempting to outflank a government that has largely shut down communication outlets..."
  
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who has been covering the story in Iran, wrote Wednesday that outlets such as text-messaging and social networking services "have been rendered sporadic by government interference."
  
"The aptly named Ministry of Guidance announced that the work credentials of nonresident journalists had been revoked and that authorities 'would not be responsible' for anything that befell reporters who continued to cover the daily resistance," he wrote.
  
Back in Britain, Sky News television was using content from Twitter to complement the coverage from its foreign editor, who is in the Iranian capital.
  
Ruth Barnett, a multimedia producer on the channel, admitted that it was difficult to check who the Twitter users are.
  
"But what we feel we've been able to do is isolate people that we think are pretty reliable -- either because things that they have said have been corroborated by other sources or our own information, or because they were already established as Iranian tweeters ahead of time," she told AFP.
  
AFPGÇÖs office in Tehran is subjected to the same media restrictions as other foreign media.