The Cost of Silence: A journalist’s reckoning with fear and price paid for speaking—across borders and generations

Editorial

I learned early that silence is not neutral.

In Iran, silence was a survival skill born out of fear. It lived in our living room, reinforced by the images broadcast by the state-controlled television, clerics delivering sermons, boys barely in their teens marching toward the front lines of the Iran–Iraq war, families crying as they said goodbye, knowing it might be the last time. It lived in the way my parents exchanged glances before speaking, in the way questions were swallowed before they ever reached the air. Obedience was not suggested; it was taught.

During the Iran-Iraq war, when the air-raid sirens wailed, my parents would spring into action without saying a word. Lights off. Windows shut. Down the stairs. Under the staircase. Always under the staircase. We had rehearsed this choreography so many times it felt instinctive—even when jolted awake in the middle of the night almost every single night for almost a decade.

Survival was quiet.

As a little girl, I watched the news and wondered why men mutilate female mannequins, heads sawed off, bodies dismembered. Sometimes the images were worse: real women, disfigured by acid attacks. The camera lingered long enough for the lesson to land.

I asked my mother why.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t dramatize it. She said, This is what happens when women don’t follow the rules.

That sentence lodged itself in my body. It became part of how I walked, how I dressed, how I breathed. Fear was not episodic. It was ambient. It followed you into the street, into school, into your own thoughts and years later into adulthood.

People often disappeared. Neighbors learned not to ask where they went. Silence was not absence, it was enforcement.

When my family fled Iran in the late 1980s, we didn’t leave with hope. We left with exhaustion. As a Christian Armenian, a minority in country intent on enforcing its will on the people, leaving was a matter of life and death. We left with what we could carry. I was twelve years old.

America did not feel like a dream to me. It felt like oxygen, a place where thoughts did not have to be policed, words did not need to be whispered, and questions did not invite punishment.

I had lived in a place where speaking could kill you. Suddenly, I was in a country built on the radical idea that speech was protected. I did not take that lightly.

That freedom came with responsibility. It is perhaps the most important reason I became a journalist. Not because I wanted to be on television. Not because I wanted recognition. But because I understood, viscerally, what happens when power is allowed to operate without scrutiny or accountability.

For more than three decades, I spoke when silence would have been easier. I reported questioning officials who didn’t want to be questioned. I covered disasters, corruption, violence, and injustice. I believed, truly believed, that journalism was a public service, a moral contract with the audience.

But there is a particular kind of disorientation that comes from reporting on your own trauma in real time.

Recognizing the Pattern

Since December 28th, there have been mass anti-government protests in Iran, perhaps the largest since the 1979 Revolution. Sparked by currency collapse and economic hardship the movement has evolved into widespread calls for the end of the clerical rule. Human rights organizations report between 2,600-12,000 people have been killed and more than 18,000 arrested. There is no way to know the real numbers.

Even from thousands of miles away, watching footage from Iran, my body remembers the panic tightening in the chest, the silent scream, the terror felt in every cell. The knowledge that there is no escape, not for the Iranians on the ground, not for any of us who are prisoners of our own trauma.

As a journalist, I have reported from the ground, from the margins, from the places where context matters most. I speak Farsi. I understand protest rhetoric, coded defiance, the nuance that disappears in translation.

That perspective is not bias. It is literacy.

These protests are not about reform. They are about dismantling a system built on terror. Opposition voices, inside and outside Iran, have called for action, including Reza Pahlavi, the son of the exiled former late-monarch, who has urged coordinated protests and a democratic referendum. Whether one supports him is beside the point. What matters is that people responded. Lines once thought uncrossable were crossed.

At the same time, the regime wages war on information. Internet blackouts. Throttled connectivity. State media broadcasting recycled or fabricated imagery to inflate pro-regime rallies. People in one city are unaware that protests are happening miles away in another.

Isolation by design.

This is why context matters.

For people watching from the West, Iran often appears as a familiar loop: protests, crackdowns, executions, silence.

What that framing misses is the cost of every step into the street.

After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic did not seize power overnight as a fully formed authoritarian regime. It evolved. It hardened. It normalized behaviors that once would have been unthinkable.

That part also matters.

Authoritarianism does not arrive announcing itself. It begins by testing boundaries—by rewarding silence, punishing dissent, and reframing cruelty as necessity.

The Islamic Republic controls narrative. Media is not a mirror of reality; it is an instrument of fear. Censorship is about distortion. It teaches people what NOT to imagine. Fear is cultivated deliberately. And it works.

Watching Iran Burn From Afar

The world often asks why people keep protesting when the consequences are so severe.

The better question is: What’s the alternative?

Iran is not misunderstood because information is unavailable. It is misunderstood because it is framed lazily. The country has been reduced, for decades, to a caricature, Axis of Evil, fundamentalist, anti-West. That framing erases almost 90 million people most of whom have nothing to do with the regime that governs them.

Most Iranians are not the government. They are its victims.

They are shopkeepers who lower their voices when politics come up. Teachers who weigh every word. Artists who speak in metaphor. Women who know a strand of hair can alter the course of their lives. Parents who teach their children not what to believe, but what not to say.

What the world often misses is that people in Iran are not protesting casually. They are not confused. They are not naïve.

They are risking everything.

The state maintains control through violence and through terror that seeps into the mundane. Executions are not rare. They are deliberate. In 2024 alone, at least 975 people were executed, many for crimes that do not meet international standards, others for political dissent disguised as national security offenses. Protesters are charged under vague national security laws, fast-tracked through sham trials, and killed to send a message. Families are punished even in grief—forced to pay for the bullets that killed their loved ones, pressured to sign false statements, denied the right to mourn publicly. Funerals are monitored so sorrow cannot become resistance.

This is psychological warfare.

In September 2022, Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested for an “improper hijab.” Evidence pointed to fatal head injuries. Authorities claimed pre-existing medical conditions. Her family denied it. The protests that followed, under the banner of Woman, Life, Freedom, reignited a nationwide reckoning. That too ended in bloodshed.

And yet, people still go out into the streets.

Because silence never guaranteed survival, not there, not here, not ever.

The Fracture of Understanding

What is hardest, what stays with me, is not only the brutality itself, but the distance between lived reality and how it is received in the West.

I have watched people scroll past footage of protests, executions, mothers screaming in the streets, and asking, Why don’t they just leave? Or worse, Why should we get involved?

That question carries centuries of dehumanization.

Iran has been framed so thoroughly as its government that its people are rarely afforded individuality. Their deaths are statistics. Their courage is abstract. Their desperation is invisible.

I know what that feels like, because I have lived it on both sides.

When Silence Followed Me Here

I believed that America was different. That while imperfect, I built everything in my adult life and career on the belief that America would protect those who spoke and behaved truthfully.

What I’ve learned instead is that silencing adapts.

I have witnessed the consequences of refusing to compromise journalistic ethics. Question power, exploitation, discrimination, and retaliation and you collide with corporate patriarchy that often uses different tools but familiar tactics: intimidation, isolation, gaslighting, professional exile.

That reality has been reinforced in recent years, as political leaders and tech billionaires have openly shaped media coverage through purchase of major media outlets, threats of lawsuits, the revocation of press access, public attacks on individual journalists, and efforts to discredit entire news organizations. These actions do not merely punish reporters; they influence what gets covered, how aggressively questions are asked, and who is deemed “acceptable” in the room.

Which brings us face to face with yet another truth, and it is one we must all confront, especially in our current political moment: If speech is only protected when it is harmless, then it is not freedom, it is permission.

Authoritarianism does not begin with tanks in the streets.

It begins quietly, in boardrooms where whistleblowers are pushed out for raising ethical concerns; in newsrooms where journalists are sidelined, investigated, or discredited for challenging power; in union halls where organizing is met with retaliation; in universities where speech is policed, funding is threatened, and dissent is reframed as danger rather than debate; and in libraries where books are banned and burned.

Authoritarianism flourishes when silence is incentivized and neutrality is rewarded—when careers advance by looking away and those who speak are labeled difficult and disruptive and while those who comply are praised and promoted.

Why This Feels Familiar — Even Here

For a long time, Americans believed, as I once did, that this cannot happen here.

But people who have lived through authoritarianism recognize the early signs.

People being detained without clear identification.
Due process weakened.
Journalists surveilled, investigated, discredited.
Protesters criminalized.
Speech reframed as threat.
Power demanding loyalty instead of accountability.

No, America is not Iran. Not yet.

But neither was Iran, once.

The radical behavior of the Iranian regime did not begin with mass executions or total censorship. It began with the systematic silencing of moderate voices and the normalization of “temporary” measures that would later be exploited. Warnings were dismissed. Fear was minimized.

For those of us sounding the alarm now, journalists, immigrants, dissidents, this is not theoretical. It is muscle memory.

We know where this road can lead, because we have seen it before. We relive it with ever image of an immigrant being snached off the street, with every child wailing and pleading to be not be separated from a parent, with real time video footage of an unarmed U.S. citizen person being shot to death in broad daylight.

Martin Luther King Jr. said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Who Will Save Us Then?

Recently, I watched It Was Just an Accident, a 2025 thriller written and directed by acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The film follows former political prisoners confronting the ghosts of their past, not for revenge, but for recognition. For truth.

It awakened memories from my childhood in Iran: the bone-chilling certainty that you are never truly safe, that at any moment something arbitrary, violent, or irreversible can happen—and there will be no recourse. That is the internal landscape many Iranians live with.

That residue is what fuels protests in Iran.
It is also what fuels a warning here.

So I ask the question that history always asks too late:

If we silence the people who recognize the danger, who will save us then?

I speak because I know the cost of silence.

And because neutrality, in moments like this, has never been neutral at all.

Why Diverse Voices Are Not Optional

I write this not to change your mind but to say that I will, despite the cost, despite the scars speaking the truth has left behind, I am committed to create and nurture a space where representation in journalism is not about optics. It is about accuracy.

When lived experience is absent from rooms, especially newsrooms, stories flatten. Nuance disappears. Protesters become crowds. Death becomes numbers. Context becomes expendable.

The frustration people like me feel is not about recognition. It is about responsibility.

I launched The Inclusive Voices Project because I could not reconcile my ethics with systems that rewarded silence and punished truth. Because I could not keep telling other people’s stories while being told mine, and those like it, did not belong or matter.

I refuse to flatten complex lives into headlines, refuse to treat underrepresented communities as afterthoughts, refuse to allow lived experience to be dismissed as bias rather than expertise.

This platform exists for one reason: because representation is not a moral accessory in journalism, it is a safeguard.

This is not activism masquerading as journalism. It is journalism reclaimed.

And it exists because silence, whether enforced by a regime or a corporation, always serves power, never people. And, if we allow omission to masquerade as neutrality, we fail the people risking everything to be heard and those who have paid the ultimate price to protect it.

This is reporting rooted in humanity, context, and accountability.

Everyone is Welcome at The Inclusive Voices Project.

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