The Guardian has an article that sets straight the mix-up over the Iranian "space monkey" photograph that caused a great deal of uproar lately, with accusations that Iran was hiding something by showing a different monkey, and so the entire space flight was just a hoax.
But, let's get the facts straight. The initial picture was merely an archive photo, taken of a monkey during a failed attempt in 2011. The Iranian student news agency (ISNA) had published the photo of the monkey with the red spot back two years ago. It is not unusual of Iranian agencies to publish archive pictures for current news and not provide a caption, leading to confusion among readers.
These things usually start by a bit of shoddy journalism, which is grabbed by the more anti-Iran news sources in the West that proceed to exaggerate the issue and combine it with screaming headlines about Iranian duplicity, turning what should have been a positive news story into yet more Iran-bashing.
Then there was the whole "Mysterious explosion at Fordo" report to consider. The report did not originate from Iranian media (it originated from a claim in a far-right conspiracy website, in an article written by a self-proclaimed former CIA spy in Iran's revolutionary guard named "Reza Khalili" who has made a career of making wild claims about Iran) in contrast to the space monkey story, but again there reason why the story got any traction was because it wasn't handled properly, so the conspiracy theorizing was allowed to run rampant until the IAEA and US govt denied the claims ... but by then the news cycle had turned over, and public opinion had already formed on the issue and had moved onto other things.
All of these things could be avoided with a bit of better basic journalistic practices. It is unnecessary to give opportunities, through negligence, to the opportunists.
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