Iranian newspapers have come back from a two-week Nowruz vacation ready to renew old partisan fights with new talking points. While websites and news agencies continued to cover the significant stories of the country, it is the print media where the partisan divide is the most obvious. This year it seems that the US presidential elections have sparked an early row.
“The wisest plan of crazy [Donald] Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Agency when asked about the Republican front-runner’s opposition to the nuclear deal. Shariatmadari called the nuclear deal a “golden document” for the United States but insisted that for Iran it has caused nothing but “damages, humiliation and deception.” Instead of making proclamations, Shariatmadari invited the administration to show one achievement of the nuclear deal.