Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB)

The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s sole legally authorised radio and television broadcaster and the principal state-owned media conglomerate of the Iranian state. It traces its origins to the National Iranian Radio and Television, which assumed its current institutional identity following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Under Article 175 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the head of IRIB is appointed directly by the Supreme Leader. The 2025/26 cycle has been one of the most consequential in IRIB’s post-revolutionary history, defined by the targeted Israeli airstrike on its Tehran headquarters during the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, the killing of IRIB staff during a live broadcast, and the unprecedented supreme-leadership transition that followed the reported killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in late February 2026, all of which have unfolded without any change in IRIB’s structural classification.

Media assets

Television: National– IRIB TV: TV1, TV2, TV3, TV4, TV5, Amoozesh, Quran TV, Namayesh TV, TV Nasim, Ofogh TV, Salamat TV, Nahal TV, DocTV, Varzesh TV, Pooya TV, Tamasha TV, Omid TV, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN); International– Press TV; Al-Alam, Sahar TV, Al Kawthar, Hispan TV, Jam Jam World, iFilm, Al-Quds TV; Regional-Abadan, East Azerbaijan, Western Azerbaijan, Ardabil. Esfahan, Alborz, Ilam, Bushehr, Southern Korasan, Khorasan Razavi, North Korasan, Persian Gulf, Khuzestan

Radio: National– Tehran Radio, Radio Recitation, Payam, Iran Radio Network, Economics Radio Network, Radio Ava, Goftu Radio Network, Quran Radio Network, Farhang Radio, Saba Radio, Health Radio, Young Radio, Sports Radio, Show Radio, Education Radio; International- Pars Today

Print: Jam-e Jam

Ownership and governance

IRIB operates under the direct constitutional authority of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Article 175 of the Constitution vests the appointment and dismissal of the IRIB head exclusively in the Supreme Leader, with the IRIB Supervisory Council comprising two representatives from each of the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The Supervisory Council does not amount to an independent governance board and has not provided operational insulation from supreme-leader authority. Two members of the six-person council are selected by the President, two by Parliament, and two by the Chief Justice, who is himself appointed by the Supreme Leader, consolidating supreme-leader oversight across the council’s composition.

The 2025/26 cycle also saw an unprecedented supreme-leadership transition after the reported killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in late February 2026. Iranian and international reporting indicated that an interim leadership council was formed on 1 March 2026 in accordance with Article 111 of the Constitution and that Mojtaba Khamenei, the late Supreme Leader’s son, subsequently assumed the supreme leadership. The Article 175 authority to appoint and dismiss the IRIB head is therefore now exercised by Mojtaba Khamenei.

Peyman Jebelli, appointed by the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in September 2021, has continued as IRIB Director-General through the cycle. His term is expected to expire in late 2026, and Iranian-affiliated reporting in May 2026 noted intensified speculation over leadership changes at IRIB as the term-end approaches under the new supreme leadership. Jebelli has been politically aligned with the ultra-hardline faction associated with Saeed Jalili, and the previous appointment of Vahid Jalili, Saeed Jalili’s brother, as cultural deputy has consolidated this alignment. Mohsen Bormahani serves as Vice Director-General. The United States Treasury designated Jebelli and six other senior IRIB employees under Executive Order 13846 in November 2022 for their role in the broadcast of coerced confessions of political prisoners; the European Union has also designated Jebelli and other IRIB officials under its Iran human-rights sanctions framework. The United States itself first designated IRIB in 2013 and Canada in 2016.

Source of funding and budget

IRIB is financed through a combination of direct state appropriations from the national budget and advertising revenue, much of which originates from other state-controlled entities and is itself ultimately subject to state appropriation under Iranian law. Recent budget reporting indicates a sharp rise in IRIB allocations: Iran International reported in February 2024 a tripling of IRIB’s annual budget to approximately IRR 240 trillion (around US$480 million at then-current exchange rates) for the 2024/25 budget year, while a February 2025 report citing Iran’s Parliamentary Research Center put the 1404 (2025/26) allocation at approximately 35 trillion tomans, or around IRR 350 trillion, an amount the report noted exceeded the combined budgets of at least ten Iranian ministries. Dollar equivalents vary substantially depending on exchange-rate assumptions, and the increase has been widely attributed to pressure from the ultraconservative Paydari Party, which has consolidated significant influence in the Iranian parliament across the cycle. Earlier annual figures supplied by domestic analysts and publicly available data placed IRIB’s total annual budget at around US$1 billion, with advertising-derived revenue of approximately US$560 million in 2022 (predominantly from state-linked entities), US$200 million from the national budget in 2022, and an additional US$158 million in 2023 government allocations.

The budget increases are notable for their disconnection from audience performance. Audience surveys and opposition and independent reporting indicate a sharp decline in IRIB’s domestic reach and credibility, with Iranian audiences shifting decisively to satellite television and social media platforms for both news and entertainment; an SMM-retained internal-source estimate described a fall in domestic television viewership from 57 per cent to 11 per cent across recent measurement periods. The 2025/26 cycle has not produced any institutional response to this audience decline beyond the budget allocations themselves, and there has been no fundamental reform of IRIB’s funding model, audited financial-transparency mechanism or commercial-revenue diversification strategy.

The reconstruction cost of the IRIB Tehran headquarters following the 16 June 2025 Israeli strike, which damaged or destroyed substantial portions of the broadcasting complex in District 3 of Tehran, has not been publicly itemised in the 2025-26 Iranian state budget materials reviewed for this profile.

Editorial independence

IRIB’s editorial output is structurally aligned with the political, ideological and security positions of the Islamic Republic. The broadcaster operates as the principal state-messaging instrument rather than as an independent news organisation, and internal editorial directives prescribe acceptable topics, framings and narratives for journalists across its national, regional, international and digital portfolios. The United States Treasury Department’s 2022 designation of Jebelli and senior IRIB employees specifically cited IRIB’s role in producing and broadcasting “televised interviews of individuals being forced to confess that their relatives were not killed by Iranian authorities during nationwide protests but died due to accidental, unrelated causes”, and characterised IRIB as “a critical tool in the Iranian government’s mass suppression and censorship campaign against its own people”. Investigations conducted in 2023 and 2024 by the Media and Journalism Research Center, retained as SMM sources for 2026 in the absence of contrary evidence, document the routine issuance of coverage instructions to IRIB staff and the editing of foreign film and television content to remove material judged inconsistent with the Islamic codes that the IRIB Charter is constitutionally mandated to uphold.

The defining editorial-environment event of the cycle was the 16 June 2025 Israeli airstrike on the IRIB Tehran headquarters during a live broadcast. The strike followed an explicit Israeli evacuation warning for Tehran’s District 3 and a public threat by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz that “the Iranian propaganda and incitement mouthpiece” was about “to disappear”. News editor Nima Rajabpour and administrative staff member Masoumeh Azimi were killed in the strike, and at least a dozen other IRIB staff were injured. The IRIB News Network (IRINN) live broadcast was interrupted as presenter Sahar Emami left the studio amid the explosion. The Israel Defense Forces characterised the strike as targeting a facility used for military purposes under civilian cover; the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Federation of Journalists characterised the strike as a war crime and as the targeted killing of media workers respectively. The 16 June 2025 strike was one of the most significant direct military attacks on a state broadcaster documented in the SMM dataset.

Iran has no independent domestic broadcast sector, and independent or reformist print and online outlets have operated under severe legal and security constraints; the legal monopoly on broadcasting held by IRIB under Article 175 of the Constitution structurally precludes the emergence of an independent broadcast sector. No domestic legislation, independent regulatory mechanism or external oversight body capable of guaranteeing or even assessing IRIB’s editorial autonomy has been identified during the 2025/26 SMM review.

AI and digital policy

IRIB has not published a public-facing institutional AI policy. At national level, Iran has developed AI-related initiatives through the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the National Centre for Cyberspace, with policy emphasis on national-security applications, domestic platform-substitution programmes 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 broadcasting or journalism. No public-sector generative AI framework specific to Iranian broadcasting was identified during this review, and AI policy at IRIB remains, where it exists at all, an internal administrative matter handled without published guidance and within the broader framework of the Islamic Republic’s ideological-content controls.

Classification rationale

IRIB remains classified as State-Controlled (SC) for the 2026 cycle. The broadcaster is wholly state-owned, holds a constitutional monopoly over domestic radio and television broadcasting under Article 175 of the Iranian Constitution, and has its head appointed and dismissed directly by the Supreme Leader. Its Supervisory Council does not provide arm’s-length governance, and no independent appointment process, statutory editorial firewall or external oversight mechanism capable of protecting editorial autonomy was identified. IRIB is financed through large state appropriations supplemented by advertising revenue, much of it connected to state-linked entities, and its output operates within the ideological and security priorities of the Islamic Republic. The 2025/26 cycle, including the June 2025 strike on IRIB’s Tehran headquarters and the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, did not alter these structural features. The SC classification therefore remains fully justified.

June 2026