Fars News Agency

Fars News Agency is one of Iran’s principal IRGC-affiliated news organisations and one of the most internationally visible Iranian state-aligned media outlets, publishing primarily in Persian, with English and Arabic services. The agency was founded in 2003 by Hamidreza Moghadam Far, who later served as its Chief Executive Officer from 2007 to 2011, and has been led since 2017 by Payam Tirandaz, who was placed on the United States Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list in September 2023 alongside the agency itself. Fars sits in a distinct governance position within the Iran cluster relative to other SMM-tracked outlets in the country: where IRIB and IIDO are appointed by the Supreme Leader, and IRNA operates under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Fars is widely identified by the United States Treasury, international monitors and Iranian media observers as closely affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) rather than as a Supreme Leader or ministerial appointment.

Media assets

News agency: Fars News Agency, publishing in Persian, English and Arabic

Ownership and governance

Fars News Agency operates outside the direct Article 175 Supreme Leader appointment chain that governs IRIB and outside the ministerial chain that governs IRNA. Its formal legal structure remains opaque, and no public corporate documentation establishing arm’s-length governance has been identified during the SMM 2025/26 review. International monitors, Iranian media observers and the United States Department of the Treasury consistently identify the agency as closely affiliated with the IRGC, with editorial and senior-management appointments understood to be subject to IRGC vetting. Fars is similar in this respect to Tasnim News Agency, another widely identified IRGC-affiliated outlet; together, the two agencies constitute the principal IRGC-aligned news-agency footprint in the Iranian state-media landscape.

Payam Tirandaz has served as Chief Executive Officer of Fars News Agency since 2017. Earlier leadership reportedly included Mehdi Fazaeli, Hamidreza Moghadamfar and Seyyed Nizam-al-Din Mousavi before Tirandaz took over in 2017. Tirandaz is a former member of the Basij paramilitary force, a former IRIB employee, and a co-founder of the Basij-affiliated Shabake Khabar Daneshjo student news network. The United States Treasury identified Mohammad Mehdi Sayyari Zahan, the United States-designated deputy head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization at the time of designation, as the chair of the Fars News Agency board of directors. Mohsen Mahdian has previously been identified as Editor-in-Chief of the agency; the SMM 2025/26 review did not verify whether he remained in that post throughout the cycle.

On 15 September 2023, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Fars News Agency under Executive Order 13553 (the broader Iranian human-rights sanctions framework), and concurrently designated Payam Tirandaz for having acted on behalf of Fars News Agency, as part of a wider OFAC action timed to the anniversary of the death in custody of Mahsa “Zhina” Amini. Treasury stated that Fars is “owned or controlled by, or having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of” the IRGC, that the agency provided special intelligence reports to the IRGC commander, and that it coordinated with Basij Resistance Force leadership on domestic security matters. The designation freezes any Fars or Tirandaz assets under United States jurisdiction and prohibits United States persons from transacting with the agency or its CEO. Earlier United States sanctions actions during 2020 had restricted Fars’s access to United States-domiciled internet and platform services, although these earlier actions were distinct from the September 2023 OFAC designation.

Source of funding and budget

Fars News Agency does not publish audited financial statements, annual reports or detailed budget breakdowns, and no public-domain financial-transparency mechanism exists for the agency. SMM-retained expert sources, drawing on prior cycle interviews with Iranian media observers and analysts with knowledge of internal Fars operations conducted in April 2024, indicate that the agency is primarily state-funded, with most of its budget likely channelled through IRGC-affiliated institutions; the same sources estimated Fars’s operational budget at approximately US$9 million for 2023. This figure should be treated as an SMM-retained expert estimate rather than a published official budget line.

The 2025/26 cycle’s broader environment, including United States sanctions and wider Western sanctions on Iranian state-affiliated media actors, the financial-system effects of the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, and the volatile rial-to-dollar exchange rate, complicates dollar-equivalent comparisons across budget years for an IRGC-affiliated agency operating substantially outside the international financial system. The SMM 2025/26 review identified no audited financial-disclosure mechanism, no commercial-revenue diversification strategy, and no reform of Fars’s funding model during the cycle. The agency’s continued multilingual and overseas reporting operations suggest continued institutional support from IRGC-affiliated channels notwithstanding international sanctions.

Editorial independence

Fars News Agency operates without editorial autonomy and functions as a principal IRGC-aligned messaging instrument in the Iranian state media landscape. Its output is described by United States Treasury, the BBC, and a substantial number of international media-monitoring organisations as routinely advancing IRGC narrative priorities on national security, regional intervention, and the “Resistance Axis” framework that organises Iran’s external-relations doctrine. Treasury’s September 2023 designation cited the agency’s role in providing special intelligence reports to the IRGC commander and in disseminating disinformation and ideologically driven coverage targeting reformist voices, civil-society actors, and foreign governments perceived as hostile to Iran.

During the 2025/26 cycle, Fars operated as a principal Persian, English and Arabic-language IRGC-aligned channel covering the June 2025 Iran-Israel war (including the deaths of senior IRGC commanders during the conflict, which directly affected the IRGC institutional chain to which Fars is aligned), the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, and periodic domestic unrest and intensified repression during 2025 and 2026. The agency’s editorial framing across these events has been consistent with the IRGC’s institutional positioning rather than independent reporting.

Treasury, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and other analysts describe Fars as a core node in Iran’s IRGC-aligned information apparatus; Reporters Without Borders’s broader Iran reporting places the agency within an environment of severe state control, and the Atlantic Council has documented Iran’s broader digital-influence operations including IRGC-aligned channels. Fars operates fully within the legal and ideological constraints of this environment and the SMM 2025/26 review identified no editorial-policy development at the agency that would suggest movement away from IRGC-aligned editorial production.

AI and digital policy

Fars News Agency has not published a public-facing institutional AI policy. As with IRIB, IIDO and IRNA, Iran’s national AI initiatives are pursued through the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the National Centre for Cyberspace, with policy emphasis on national-security applications, domestic platform substitution and the management of foreign-platform access through the country’s filtering and traffic-control infrastructure rather than on the regulation of generative-AI use in news production. No public-sector generative AI framework specific to Fars was identified during this review, and AI policy at the agency remains an internal administrative matter handled without published guidance.

Classification rationale

Fars News Agency remains classified as State-Controlled (SC) for the 2026 cycle. The agency is widely identified as IRGC-affiliated and was designated by the United States Treasury in September 2023 under Executive Order 13553, alongside its CEO Payam Tirandaz; Treasury stated that Fars is owned or controlled by, or has acted for or on behalf of, the IRGC, and identified Mohammad Mehdi Sayyari Zahan, then deputy head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization, as chair of the agency’s board. Fars has no publicly documented arm’s-length governance arrangement, statutory editorial firewall or audited financial disclosure, and its funding appears to come primarily through IRGC-linked state channels according to SMM-retained expert sources, with its editorial output consistently aligned with IRGC messaging priorities. The 2025/26 cycle, including the June 2025 Iran-Israel war and the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, produced no evidence of governance, funding or editorial reform, and the SC classification remains justified.

June 2026