Tehran, Dec 9, (dpa/GNA) – In an extremely unusual move, the president of Iranian state broadcaster IRIB has admitted that it made mistakes in its war reporting this summer.
“Our credibility has been damaged,” Peyman Jebelli told students, the Iranian newspaper Entekhab reported on Tuesday.
Specifically, it concerned a false report that Iran had shot down a modern F-35 fighter jet. “In the case of the alleged crash … an official had informed us that this had happened, and we reported it. But later it turned out that the information was not reliable,” he said.
In June, Israel attacked Iran for 12 days and, together with the US, bombed targets from the air, including nuclear facilities and military and civilian installations across large parts of the country.
The F-35 jet from the US company Lockheed Martin is one of the most advanced fighter planes in the world. There are no confirmed cases of an F-35 being shot down in armed conflict.
IRIB is considered a propaganda channel for the Iranian government.
Jebelli and the broadcaster were sanctioned by the European Union in 2022. At the time, the EU stated that IRIB severely restricted the free flow of information to the Iranian people.
The broadcaster was said to be complicit in human rights violations due to its ideological proximity to the government.
Israel bombed the state broadcaster’s television headquarters during this year’s war.
GNA