Mousavi "defeated" - not ; Guardian limp - true

To the Editor
The Guardian

Will the Guardian please stop calling Mousavi the "defeated" candidate in the Iranian elections? There is good evidence that the poll was rigged, and in days gone by Guardian journalists would have collated and published this evidence. Now it is left to citizens to do this work.
Richard Lawson

This is my third attempt to get this point across, and clearly it is not going to get in this time. I have seen no letters about Iran in the Guardian letters page - I may have missed them, but I don't think so.

The Guardian editorial lnie seems to be flaccid and immobile, unsure what to do, confused because they are not sure if it is OK to be "for Iran" or "against Iran".

Guardian Policy Committee meeting: Agenda Item 3: Policy on Iran: Bush was "against Iran" so the Guardian should be "for Iran". Problem: Iran is against women, so do we hate Bush more than we love women? Put it to the vote. The majority hates Bush more than they love women. So that's it. Mousavi was defeated. Next Item on agenda: Journalist expenses. All agreed? Ok. Next item...

The Guardian, like most others, clearly does not understand the difference between a people and its government. AhmadiNajad no more speaks for the Iranian nation than Brown speaks for the British nation. A nation is a complex system of alternate and conflicting interests. Sometimes those interests can be summed up by a leader; sometimes not, and for Iran, this is one of the times when the leader most clearly and definitely does not speak for the nation.

So on the issue of the Iran elections, the Guardian is as crisp and strong as the outer leaf of a limp lettuce that has been left out of the fridge for three days in a warm room. Just as the media generally were when George Idiot Bush stole the American election in 2005.

I must say it gives me immense pleasure to criticise the media in this way. Before the days of blogging, when the media fell down on the job, we thought the thought but dared not talk the talk, for fear that they would ban us totally. Now, I do not care that they do not publish corrective or critical letters. The Web is here to correct the uncorrected power of the Fourth Estate, and eventually, in the end, dead tree journalism will be all the better for the compteition coming from its younger sister.