Tasnim News Agency (تسنیم) is a hardline Iranian news agency launched in 2012, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with a dedicated English service launched in August 2013.
Operates a Persian-language wire and an English-language wire from Tehran. Reports across politics, economy, and society but specialises in IRGC-coverage: missile tests, drone footage, regional proxy operations, named announcements from IRGC commanders. Editorial line tracks the Office of the Supreme Leader and the IRGC public-relations apparatus. Casualty figures on protest deaths inside Iran are not accepted by international human-rights monitors. BBC Monitoring catalogues Tasnim as a primary node in the Iranian state media stack.
Tasnim is what the IRGC wants the world to hear in English. It is fluent, fast, and on-message in a way the older Persian-only state agencies never were. The English service was built precisely because the Islamic Republic needed an outlet that could feed Reuters and AP and the wire desks of the Global South before the diaspora outlets could. The honest framing for any foreign reader is that a Tasnim story is the IRGC's preferred version of an event written for export.
Because foreign readers who run a Google News search on an Iranian story routinely hit Tasnim in the top results and treat it as a neutral source. It is not.
What it is
تسنیم (Tasnim) is an Iranian news agency launched in 2012 and tightly affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Its Persian service opened in late 2012 and its English service on 9 August 2013. BBC Monitoring describes Tasnim as a hardline outlet that excels at military-affairs coverage because of its IRGC access, often the first to publish footage of Iranian missile launches and drone tests. It plays the IRGC’s official line on the 2022 to 2024 protest cycle, on the Mahsa Movement casualty count, on opposition figures, and on the Iranian role in regional proxy wars. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation lists Tasnim among the most influential disseminators of Iranian state narratives on the war in Ukraine.
Sources
- BBC Monitoring: Tasnim News Agency profile
- Ukraine Centre for Countering Disinformation: Iran’s propaganda, Tasnim News Agency (14 October 2024)
- Tasnim News Agency: official self-description
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