Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran enters the State Media Monitor’s 2026 cycle with one of the most institutionally diverse and ideologically uniform state-aligned media ecosystems in the wider MENA region. The 2026 review covers six fully profiled Iranian outlets in the main SMM database, all classified State-Controlled (SC), and seven additional Iranian outlets recorded in the wider Global State Media List as Captured Private (CaPr) or state-/parastatal-aligned outlets. No outlet is classified Independent Public (IP), Independent State-Managed (ISM), Independent State-Funded (ISF), Independent State-Funded and State-Managed (ISFM) or Captured Public (CaPu) at the close of the 2025/26 cycle.

The six profiled SC outlets are IRIB, the Islamic Development Organization (IIDO), IRNA, Fars News Agency, ISNA and Kayhan. The seven outlets recorded in the wider Global State Media List are the publishing operations of Javan, Vatan Emrooz, Khorasan, Quds and Jomhouri Eslami, all carried in continuous CaPr classification from 2022 through 2026, together with Tasnim News Agency and Sobh-e Sadegh, both added to the list as CaPr in this cycle. Their exact ownership pathways vary and should not all be described as IRGC-affiliated unless formal evidence supports that classification for each outlet.

Constitutional and institutional framework

The Iranian state media architecture is anchored in the constitution of the Islamic Republic, in particular Article 175, which places the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting under the direct appointment authority of the Supreme Leader, and in the supplementary structures of decree-based supreme-leader supervision, ministerial supervision under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, parastatal anchoring in academic and quasi-academic institutions, and the operational footprint of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). These structures produce five distinct governance pathways through which the SMM-tracked outlets are supervised:

• Article 175 / direct constitutional Supreme Leader appointment for IRIB
• Direct Supreme-Leader institutional supervision by decree for IIDO and Kayhan
• Ministerial supervision under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for IRNA
• IRGC affiliation for Fars News Agency and Tasnim News Agency, and for the wider Revolutionary Guards Media CaPr portfolio where evidence supports that grouping
• Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR / Jahad Daneshgahi) anchoring for ISNA

No SMM-tracked Iranian outlet operates under an arm’s-length statutory editorial firewall, none is governed by an independent supervisory board exercising arm’s-length authority over its editorial production, and none publishes audited financial statements that would permit external scrutiny of its funding sources or operating budgets.

Government and political context

Iran is governed by a complex constitutional architecture combining elected republican institutions with appointed and clerical bodies under the supreme-leadership institution. The Presidency was held throughout the 2025/26 cycle by Masoud Pezeshkian, who took office on 28 July 2024 following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in May 2024 and the subsequent presidential election. Pezeshkian’s government is regarded as moderate within the Iranian political spectrum and includes Seyyed Abbas Salehi as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance (since 21 August 2024), in his second non-consecutive term in that role.

The cycle’s defining political event was the 2026 supreme-leadership transition. The reported killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in late February 2026 led to the formation on 1 March 2026 of an interim leadership arrangement under Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution, involving President Pezeshkian, Head of the Judiciary Gholamhossein Mohseni-Eje’i and a Guardian Council jurist, reported in several accounts as Alireza Arafi. The arrangement was succeeded by the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei to the supreme leadership; appointment authorities tied to the Supreme-Leader institution, including those relevant to IRIB (under Article 175), IIDO and Kayhan, now rest with the new supreme-leader office.

Cluster events during the 2025/26 cycle

The 2025/26 cycle produced four institutional developments that together define the analytical character of the Iran cluster for this update.

The June 2025 Iran-Israel war, which began on 13 June 2025, produced the cycle’s most consequential single event for the cluster: on 16 June 2025, an Israeli airstrike hit IRIB’s Tehran headquarters during a live broadcast, killing IRIB news editor Nima Rajabpour and administrative staff member Masoumeh Azimi, injuring more than a dozen IRIB staff, and forcing presenter Sahar Emami to leave the studio mid-broadcast. The Israeli Defence Minister had stated before the strike that the “Iranian propaganda and incitement mouthpiece” was about “to disappear”, and the International Federation of Journalists characterised the strike as a “targeted killing of media workers”. The strike is one of the most significant direct military attacks on a state broadcaster documented in the SMM dataset.

The 2026 supreme-leadership transition reshaped the appointment authority for the cluster’s Supreme-Leader-supervised outlets (IRIB, IIDO and Kayhan) without producing operational reform in any of them. The agencies and newspapers continued to publish through the transition period, and IIDO-associated media specifically addressed Mojtaba Khamenei in his new role following the elevation.

In April 2025, Iran’s Press Supervisory Board issued an admonition of Kayhan over an unsigned column widely attributed to Editor-in-Chief Hossein Shariatmadari that referenced the assassination of United States President Donald Trump in retaliation for the January 2020 killing of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs distanced itself from the column’s framing. The episode is one of the cycle’s few documented instances of intra-state institutional criticism of an Iranian state-aligned outlet and illustrates Kayhan’s structurally subordinate but hardline-edge position within the cluster, in which it sometimes publishes positions that other state bodies later decline to endorse.

The most recent IRNA leadership transition, in September 2024, from Ali Naderi (a hardline appointee from October 2021 under the Raisi government) to Hossein Jaberi-Ansari (under the Pezeshkian government), was a notable change of tone at the official Iranian state news agency, although the structural features of state ownership, ministerial supervision, absence of an editorial firewall and absence of audited financial disclosure remained unchanged across the transition.

Funding ecosystem

No SMM-tracked Iranian outlet publishes audited financial statements, and no public-domain financial-transparency mechanism exists across the cluster. The most consequential publicly reported budget figure of the cycle is that of IRIB. Iran International reported in February 2024 an IRIB budget of approximately IRR 240 trillion for the Iranian 1403 fiscal year (2024 to 2025), already a sharp increase over preceding years. Iran’s Parliamentary Research Center in February 2025 reported an IRIB budget of approximately IRR 350 trillion (around 35 trillion tomans) for the 1404 Iranian fiscal year (2025 to 2026), a level reported to exceed the combined budgets of at least ten Iranian ministries and to have prompted internal criticism among journalists and civil servants as politically rather than performance motivated.

The SMM 2025/26 review did not identify comparable published audited budget figures for the other five SMM-tracked Iran outlets, and limited publication of detailed agency-level budget tables for the 1404 fiscal year has made institution-level fiscal scrutiny difficult across the cluster. SMM-retained expert sources, drawing on prior cycle interviews conducted in April 2024, indicate that IIDO operates with an approximately 75 per cent state-subsidy share, IRNA at approximately 80 per cent state allocation, ISNA predominantly through state subsidies with the remainder from advertising and ACECR-affiliated institutional support, Fars predominantly through IRGC-affiliated institutional channels (at an estimated 2023 operational budget of approximately US$9 million), and Kayhan predominantly through state and Supreme-Leader-aligned institutional funding. All five funding-share characterisations are SMM-retained expert estimates rather than published official budget lines. Funding for the seven CaPr-classified Revolutionary Guards Media outlets is similarly opaque, with no audited financial disclosure identified for any of them.

The wider sanctions environment, including United States Treasury OFAC designations of Iranian media and influence-operation entities and wider Western sanctions on Iranian state-affiliated media actors, continues to shape both the financial position and the international operational footprint of the cluster.

Editorial environment

The cluster’s six profiled SC outlets and seven CaPr outlets all operate within the legal and ideological constraints of the Iranian media environment, in which criticism of the Supreme-Leader institution, the IRGC, the constitutional foundations of the Islamic Republic and core foreign-policy positions is subject to administrative, legal and prosecutorial consequences. The Iranian Constitution and supplementary press laws set the licensing framework within which all outlets operate. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Press Supervisory Board exercise day-to-day press licensing and oversight, while the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution shapes broader cultural-policy direction.

Within these constraints, the cluster nevertheless exhibits documented intra-state tonal differentiation. ISNA was historically characterised by Western media analysts and academic reviewers as one of Iran’s relatively moderate news outlets, with editorial leanings toward the reformist political camp and an institutional affinity for the era of President Mohammad Khatami; SMM’s August 2025 baseline reclassified ISNA from ISF to SC after SMM’s content review found a contraction of editorial latitude on Gaza and regional-security coverage during 2024 and 2025, and the 2025/26 cycle produced no movement back toward the editorial latitude that supported the earlier ISF classification. Kayhan, by contrast, operates at the hardline edge of the cluster as the flagship ideological-vanguard publication, with Editor-in-Chief Hossein Shariatmadari (in post since 1993) widely identified as the Supreme Leader’s representative at Kayhan Publications. IRNA operates as the principal official-state news channel under ministerial supervision, with the September 2024 leadership transition associated with the change of government producing a documented tonal shift on cultural and social-affairs coverage but not on political, security or foreign-policy outputs. IRIB and IIDO continue as the cluster’s principal broadcasting and ideological-organisation institutions under direct Supreme Leader authority, and Fars together with Tasnim constitute the principal IRGC-aligned news-agency footprint.

Online influence operations and parastatal information environment

Iran’s online influence operations remained an important part of the state-aligned information environment during the cycle, with United States Treasury OFAC documenting an increasingly aggressive campaign aimed at foreign audiences in the period preceding and during the review window. Two late-2024 OFAC designations reviewed during the 2025/26 cycle are relevant: on 27 September 2024, OFAC designated Emennet Pasargad and associated individuals under Executive Order 13848 for election-interference activities targeting the 2020 and 2024 United States presidential elections; on 31 December 2024, OFAC designated the Cognitive Design Production Center, a subordinate organisation of the IRGC, under Executive Order 13848 for planning influence operations to incite socio-political tensions among the United States electorate. Earlier influence-operation actions including the 2018 Reuters exposure of the International Union of Virtual Media (IUVM) and the 2024 sanctioning of Bayan Gostar remain part of the documentary record. These influence-operation entities are not classified as SMM-tracked outlets because their primary function is institutional rather than journalistic; their designation is nevertheless consistent with the broader institutional architecture of the Iran cluster and is referenced in the Fars News Agency profile.

A parallel category of military and paramilitary communication platforms, including Sepah News (the IRGC’s official news site), Basij News (the media arm of the Basij paramilitary force) and Defa Press (associated with the Iranian armed forces and the Ministry of Defence), operates within the broader Iranian state-aligned information environment. These platforms are not included as SMM-tracked outlets because their primary function is institutional and military communication and propaganda rather than general-purpose journalism, but they are referenced in the IRIB, Fars and Kayhan profiles where institutionally relevant.

AI and digital policy

No SMM-tracked Iranian outlet has published a public-facing institutional AI policy. 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. The platform-substitution and filtering framework continues to shape both the operating environment of the SMM-tracked outlets and the operational footprint of the influence-operation entities documented above.

Press freedom environment

Iran has been classified consistently in the bottom fifteen countries of the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index since 2002. In the 2026 Index, RSF ranked Iran 177th of 180 countries, a fall of one place from 176th in 2025. RSF attributed the deterioration to “the regime’s crackdown and the US-Israeli war on its soil” and identifies Iran among the world’s largest jailers of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House and other international media-monitoring organisations have consistently characterised the Iranian media environment as state-controlled and lacking safeguards against government interference.

Outlook

The Iranian state-aligned media architecture is consolidated rather than reformed at the close of the 2025/26 cycle. The thirteen SMM-tracked outlets cover two State Media Matrix typologies (six SC and seven CaPr) across five distinct governance pathways, the supreme-leadership transition has shifted appointment authorities but not operational structures, and the cycle’s editorial-latitude contraction at ISNA (formalised in the August 2025 baseline) confirms the closing of what had been the cluster’s most documented historical zone of relative editorial autonomy. Iranian online influence operations continue to expand and to draw United States sanctions designations, while the cluster’s domestic structural anchors of state licensing, supreme-leader and ministerial supervision, IRGC affiliation and ACECR anchoring remain in place. The SMM will continue to monitor candidate outlets noted in the Other Iranian state and captured media overview article for potential inclusion in future cycles, including Mashregh News, Ettela’at and Hamshahri, each of which would require separate ownership and funding verification before a formal classification.

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