During the early morning of June 21, Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari was taken away from his home in Tehran by Iranian authorities. Bahari, a Canadian citizen, has not been heard from since his detainment, in what is just the latest installment in the Iranian government’s ongoing saga of constraining the press – a saga that has increased in intensity over the last three weeks.

The Iranian government, already notorious for its routine press restrictions, has cracked down on the domestic and international media in the days following the country’s contested presidential election. Rarely a welcoming locale for reporters, Iran furthered this reputation by imprisoning 26 journalists in the twelve days after the country took to the polls.

Bahari is the only writer for an American publication on the list of the imprisoned, which was sent to Scoop44 by Sam Trudeau of Reporters Without Borders, a journalist advocacy agency. The rest are Iranian, working for Iranian publications or blogs that have faced severe restrictions in the last three weeks. The list includes such prominent figures as Ali Mazroui, the president of the Iranian Association of Journalists (detained June 20) and Jila Baniyaghoob, the winner of the 2009 Courage in Journalism prize awarded by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Trudeau, the New York Representative and United Nations Correspondent for Reporters Without Borders, explained that while the Iranian government often shuts down reporter’s rights, the recent days have been exceptional.

He noted that most of the prisoners would likely be taken to Evin Prison, which he described as “pretty notorious … reports of abuse and human rights abuses in that prison are not uncommon,” he said. “We have already gotten some preliminary reports of maltreatment.”

While the recent crisis has been in the public eye for three weeks, and has thus received considerable media attention, experts note that government restriction of journalism is certainly not a new phenomenon.

Josh Friedman, the Director of International Programs and a professor at Columbia University’s Journalism School, who is on the executive board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said he was surprised the Iranian government let the foreign media into the country to cover the election in the first place.

“I spent a month there in the early ‘90s during the first Persian Gulf War,” he explained. “I had been working for years to get a visa, and I was the only American there at the time … these people who are not friends of the press, they don’t see the point of a free press.”

The reasons for these restrictions, others explained, are obvious. Wayne Wanta, the executive director of the Center for the Digital Globe at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, explained in an email that government restrictions are often just the given government’s way of “forcing the media to follow their commands.”

So, even as the imprisonment and restriction of reporters may not be new or even surprising, questions remain. For instance, what is the proper conduct for reporters still ‘free’ in Iran? Here, opinion differs.

To some, it seems intuitive that the press should continue to report as it did before the crackdown, regardless of government mandates. But to others, the safety of the individual reporters should trump their urge to file stories and updates.

Trudeau said that the remaining reporters in Iran ought to “try to get around these restrictions,” noting that his organization holds that “there shouldn’t be restrictions on foreign coverage or international correspondence.”

The answer is drastically different – and simple – for Friedman, the winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. “They have to get out,” he said. “It’s very dangerous.”

Wanta voiced a similar opinion, urging caution. “If history has taught us anything about the relationships between reporters and governments, it’s that you don’t mess with radical governments. Governments can do just about anything they want in the name of national security,” he said. “We’ve seen that with the recent arrests of journalists in North Korea. It would be extremely dangerous for reporters to continue filing stories as if nothing had happened.”

Thus, as the streets of Iran overflow with protesters, an international-scale battle is likely being waged in newsrooms across the world. As reporters disappear each day, the information becomes harder and harder to come by, increasing the necessity for unbiased (read: non-government) reports.

The case for journalist freedom in Iran is compelling to those former writers and advocates in the United States, but this case is probably easier described than actually accomplished, warned Trudeau.

Still, he outlined a specific, ambitious set of goals for Iran’s near future: “We can’t accept the results of the election,” he said. “And we have to put pressure on [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to annul them, and at least free journalists, and have another election, and look into the cases of fraud, the allegations of wrongdoing and abuse and violence that have occurred during the protests.”

To do this, though, the government would likely have to stop what Trudeau called a five year “game of cat-and-mouse” with its journalists.

Wanta suggested this is unlikely. “The situation is clearly dangerous currently for journalists in Iran,” he said. “The Iranian government has nothing to lose by placing restrictions on journalists.”

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