Kayhan

Kayhan (Persian: کيهان, meaning “the Cosmos”) is one of Iran’s oldest and most ideologically influential newspapers and the cluster’s only newspaper-only SMM-tracked outlet. It was founded in Tehran in 1942 by Abdolrahman Faramarzi and Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution was taken over by the revolutionary state and became one of the flagship publications of Iran’s hardline establishment. Kayhan is described by Iranian and international analysts as the most ideologically conservative Iranian daily, and its Editor-in-Chief is widely identified as the Supreme Leader’s representative within the Iranian press.

Media assets

Newspaper: Kayhan Al Arabi

Ownership and governance

Kayhan sits in the same direct Supreme Leader appointment pathway as the Islamic Development Organization (IIDO) within the Iran cluster, and is distinct from the IRIB Article 175 chain, the IRNA ministerial chain under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the IRGC affiliation of Fars and the adjacent Tasnim, and the ACECR / Jahad Daneshgahi anchor of ISNA. Iranian and international sources, including Iran International, consistently identify Kayhan’s Editor-in-Chief as “the Supreme Leader’s official representative at Kayhan Publications”. Following the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, any future appointment or dismissal authority over Kayhan’s Supreme-Leader representative would rest with Mojtaba Khamenei.

Hossein Shariatmadari has served as Kayhan’s editor-in-chief/managing editor since 1993, a tenure of approximately 33 years by the close of the 2025/26 review period and one of the longest continuous editorial appointments in any Iranian state-affiliated outlet. Shariatmadari is a longtime loyalist of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and is widely described in Iranian and international reporting as a close associate of the supreme-leader institution. He continued in the role through the cycle’s defining events, with editorial contributions documented across 2025 and into 2026. There is no independent governing board, no editorial council or supervisory body exercising arm’s-length authority over Kayhan’s editorial production, and the SMM 2025/26 review identified no public-domain accountability mechanism that would permit external scrutiny of the newspaper’s governance or editorial standards.

Source of funding and budget

Kayhan does not publish audited financial statements, annual reports or detailed budget breakdowns, and no public-domain financial-transparency mechanism exists for the newspaper. SMM-retained expert sources, drawing on prior cycle interviews with Iranian media observers and analysts conducted in April 2024, estimate that Kayhan is predominantly supported through state and Supreme-Leader-aligned institutional funding, with advertising playing a limited role given the newspaper’s ideologically niche readership. Iran International has described Kayhan as a “Khamenei-funded hardline newspaper”. No audited Kayhan financial statements or public budget line were identified, and the funding characterisation should be treated as an SMM-retained expert estimate rather than a published official budget line.

The 2025/26 Iranian fiscal cycle has been marked by sharp increases in state allocations for some state-media and ideological institutions, notably IRIB (documented in the separate IRIB profile), but the SMM 2025/26 review did not identify a published audited Kayhan budget figure for the 1404 (2025/26) Iranian fiscal year, and limited publication of detailed agency-level budget tables for the current fiscal cycle has made institution-level fiscal scrutiny difficult. Dollar-equivalent estimates for Kayhan’s contemporary subsidy stream vary substantially depending on exchange-rate assumptions.

Editorial independence

Kayhan operates without editorial autonomy and functions as the flagship ideological-vanguard newspaper of the Iranian hardline establishment. Its editorial line is closely synchronised with the supreme-leader institution’s political and ideological priorities, and Editor-in-Chief Shariatmadari has stated in a notable February 2022 editorial that Kayhan’s positions are “shared by the Supreme Leader”. The newspaper’s editorial output routinely targets reformist Iranian politicians, independent journalists, civil-society organisations, foreign governments perceived as adversaries of the Iranian state, and other Iranian outlets perceived as insufficiently aligned with the hardline establishment.

A notable institutional event for Kayhan during the 2025/26 cycle was the formal admonition of the newspaper by Iran’s Press Supervisory Board in April 2025, following the publication of an unsigned Kayhan column widely attributed to Shariatmadari that referenced an assassination of United States President Donald Trump in retaliation for the January 2020 killing of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. The Press Supervisory Board accused Kayhan of “harming the national interest”, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs distanced itself from the column’s framing. Shariatmadari and Kayhan have previously argued that the newspaper’s positions reflect the Supreme Leader’s line, including in the 2022 editorial cited above. The episode illustrates Kayhan’s unusual position: it is structurally subordinate to the Supreme-Leader institution, yet it sometimes operates at the hardline edge of the state-media spectrum, publishing positions that other state bodies later decline to endorse.

During the 2025/26 cycle, Kayhan operated as a principal hardline editorial voice covering the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, the 2026 supreme-leadership transition and periodic domestic unrest and intensified repression during 2025 and 2026, with editorial framing consistently aligned with the supreme-leader institution’s positions across all three areas. External evaluations by Reporters Without Borders, the Middle East Media Research Institute, United Against Nuclear Iran and other analysts consistently describe Kayhan as a flagship ideological publication of the Iranian hardline establishment rather than as an independent newspaper.

AI and digital policy

Kayhan has not published a public-facing institutional AI policy. As with IRIB, IIDO, IRNA, Fars, Tasnim and ISNA, 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 Kayhan was identified during this review, and AI policy at the newspaper remains an internal administrative matter handled without published guidance.

Classification rationale

Kayhan remains classified as State-Controlled (SC) for the 2026 cycle. The newspaper is published by Kayhan/Keyhan Institute and operates under the direct political authority of the Supreme-Leader institution, with Hossein Shariatmadari serving as editor-in-chief/managing editor since 1993 and widely identified as the Supreme Leader’s representative at Kayhan Publications; following the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, any future appointment or dismissal authority over that representative role would rest with Mojtaba Khamenei. Kayhan has no independent governing board, statutory editorial firewall or audited financial disclosure, and SMM-retained expert sources estimate that it is predominantly supported through state and Supreme-Leader-aligned institutional funding. The 2025/26 cycle, including the April 2025 Press Supervisory Board warning over Kayhan’s Trump column, the June 2025 Iran-Israel war and the 2026 supreme-leadership transition, produced no reform of these structural features, and the SC classification therefore remains justified.

June 2026