Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization (IIDO)

The Islamic Development Organization, also translated as the Islamic Propagation Organization (Persian: سازمان تبلیغات اسلامی) and referred to in the State Media Monitor dataset as the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization (IIDO), is the supervising body for a cluster of Iranian print and digital state media including the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency (MNA), alongside an extensive publishing operation, the Art Bureau and a network of religious and cultural institutions. The organisation was established on 22 June 1981 by decree of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and operates under the supervision of Iran’s supreme leadership. The Tehran Times, founded in 1979 as Iran’s first English-language daily, has long positioned itself as a conduit for the Islamic Republic’s ideological messaging abroad; Mehr News Agency was launched in 2002 within the same institutional media ecosystem associated with IIDO and Tehran Times.

Media assets

Publishing: Tehran Times

News agency: Mehr News Agency (MNA)

Ownership and governance

IIDO operates under the direct supervision of Iran’s supreme leadership. The IIDO director is appointed by the Supreme Leader and reports to the supreme leadership across the organisation’s ideological-promotion, media, cultural and religious-institutional portfolios. Following the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, the IIDO director’s appointment authority is exercised by Mojtaba Khamenei.

Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Qomi has served as IIDO director since August 2018, when he was appointed by the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to succeed Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mahdi Khamoushi, who had held the post for more than a decade. Qomi’s tenure has continued through the 2025/26 review period, with Iranian state media confirming his continued role through late 2025 in connection with cultural and ideological-publishing events. Qomi is a senior Shia cleric with deep connections to Iran’s political establishment and a record of leading ideological and cultural initiatives aligned with supreme-leader directives, including the publication of materials supporting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “Second Phase of the Revolution” framework. Older Iranian budget reporting and media-observer analysis described IIDO as comprising eleven affiliated institutions and as one of the highest-funded religious and ideological organisations in the state budget.

The IIDO-associated outlets and the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency operate within the same broader Iranian state-media ecosystem and reflect a high degree of editorial alignment on national-security, regional and ideological questions, but they sit in different supervisory arrangements within the Iranian state structure.

Source of funding and budget

IIDO does not publish audited financial statements, annual reports or detailed budget breakdowns, and no public-domain financial-transparency mechanism exists. SMM-retained expert sources, drawing on prior cycle interviews with Iranian media observers and analysts with knowledge of internal IIDO operations, estimate that roughly three quarters of the operating costs of IIDO-associated media are covered by direct state allocations, with the remainder drawn from advertising and state-linked commercial activity. The 75 per cent figure should be treated as an SMM-retained expert estimate rather than a published official budget line. This funding structure, however exactly proportioned, makes the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency financially dependent on public funding and structurally aligned with state-linked commercial counterparties.

Earlier reporting placed IIDO’s overall 2018 budget at approximately 430 billion tomans (around US$100 million at then-current exchange rates), with the organisation identified at that time as one of the highest-funded religious and ideological organisations in Iran’s state budget. No comparable audited public figure was identified for the 2025/26 cycle, and dollar-equivalent estimates for IIDO’s contemporary budget vary substantially depending on exchange-rate assumptions and on the boundary chosen between IIDO’s media-arm budget and its broader cultural, religious and publishing operations. The SMM 2025/26 review identified no audited financial-disclosure mechanism, no commercial-revenue diversification strategy and no reform of IIDO’s funding model during the cycle.

Editorial independence

The IIDO-associated media arms function as direct instruments of the Iranian state’s communication strategy. The Tehran Times publicly describes its role as “a loud voice of the Islamic Revolution and the loudspeaker of the oppressed people of the world”, and in practice operates as an English-language platform amplifying the Iranian government’s foreign-policy and ideological positions. Mehr News Agency openly acknowledges its institutional connection to government authorities, which provides privileged access to official information at the cost of editorial independence from those authorities.

The 2025/26 cycle has reinforced this institutional editorial posture across the IIDO-associated outlets. During the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency operated as principal English and multilingual channels for Iranian state messaging on the conflict, including coverage of the 16 June 2025 Israeli airstrike on IRIB’s Tehran headquarters covered in the separate IRIB profile. During the 2026 supreme-leadership transition and the broader 2025-2026 Iranian protest cycle, the IIDO-associated outlets continued to operate as state-aligned channels, with Mehr explicitly acknowledging the transition and addressing Mojtaba Khamenei in his new role as Supreme Leader.

To date, no independent regulatory framework, statute or oversight body exists to safeguard or verify the editorial independence of IIDO’s media operations. External evaluations from Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists consistently describe Iran’s broader media environment as state-controlled and lacking safeguards against government interference; this context supports the classification of the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency as state-aligned and structurally subordinated to Iranian state messaging priorities.

AI and digital policy

IIDO has not published a public-facing institutional AI policy. As with IRIB, 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 or broadcasting. No public-sector generative AI framework specific to the IIDO-associated outlets was identified during this review, and AI policy at the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency remains an internal administrative matter handled without published guidance.

Classification rationale

IIDO remains classified as State-Controlled (SC) for the 2026 cycle. The organisation operates under the direct supervision of Iran’s Supreme Leader, with its director appointed by supreme-leader decree (the authority now exercised by Mojtaba Khamenei following the 2026 transition), and Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Qomi has served as director since August 2018. The IIDO-associated outlets, the Tehran Times and Mehr News Agency, operate without statutory editorial firewalls, publish within the ideological framework of the Islamic Republic, and depend substantially on state allocations and state-linked commercial revenue; Tasnim News Agency, although ideologically aligned with the same state-media environment, is more commonly identified as IRGC-affiliated and is treated as adjacent rather than as an IIDO media arm in this profile. The 2025/26 cycle, including the June 2025 Iran-Israel war and the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, produced no reform of IIDO governance, funding transparency or editorial autonomy, and the SC classification therefore remains fully justified.

June 2026