Iran Update: "Can You Hear Me Now? …Hello?" (…Crackle…)

Are you still in withdrawal over the Iranian suppression of the post-election protests?

At this point, the kind and degree of visual coverage still making it West is telling in itself. For example, this report from CNN yesterday shows people using the commemoration of the martyrdom of a former chief justice as an excuse to silently march through the streets again. Unfortunately, the length and sweep of the video is so limited, there’s no way to get a sense of scope, mood, anything.

More depressingly, the report offers a short and rather futile clip — vividly captured in the citizen photo above, distributed by Reuters — in which Alireza Beheshti, a close assistant of Mousavi, holds a cell phone to a megaphone to allow the leader to address his followers.

If you can’t tell just from Beheshti’s face, however, the CNN reporter informs us the technique worked so poorly, the candidate couldn’t be understood.

(image: unattributed. Via Reuters. Near Ghoba mosque in northern Tehran. June 28, 2009)