Peyman Jebelli, head of the Iranian broadcasting corporation, was forced to admit during a discussion with students in Tehran that false reports on Iranian television about shooting down Israeli F-35 aircraft severely damaged the reputation and credibility of the organization's broadcasts.
Jebelli made the remarks after a female student, from an audience of conservative students supporting the regime, held up a sign stating that Iranian citizens learned what was happening in the war through the Qatari television channel Al Jazeera and not through the local broadcasting authority. The act prompted the senior official to address the loss of credibility by his organization.
"One thing damaged our credibility, and I wish this issue hadn't come up now so I wouldn't have to mention it," Jebelli said. He added, "One thing damaged our credibility, and that was the shooting down of the F-35 aircraft. Were we in the sky to witness the crash of the fighter jet? Were we behind the defense system? Someone from military sources informed us, and then in the end they understood for some reason that the information was not reliable and gave us another update. Media sources should not stake their credibility on the reliability of other institutions and organizations," Jebelli said.
The reports about shooting down Israeli fighter jets over Iranian skies repeated themselves in Iranian media and were accompanied by bizarre images of crashed aircraft that were distributed on social networks. The images themselves were quickly revealed to be particularly sloppy fakes and the reports about shooting down the stealth aircraft were usually shelved and deleted just hours after they appeared.
Despite the admission of damage to broadcasting credibility, Jebelli continued to claim during his speech that his country succeeded in striking Israel's "computer system" and essentially caused it to cease functioning. Jebelli claimed that "we stunned the world through resistance" and continued to hold the regime's accepted line that the confrontation with Israel in June, which had devastating results for the Iranian leadership, was actually a victory for the Tehran regime.
