How Pairs Are Chosen: 56 Pairs in 15 Editions, Each Line Quoted or Measured

What You Are Looking At

The left column, Tehran Says, holds short verbatim passages from state and state-aligned Iranian outlets. The right column, Iran Shows, holds the same day's free-market prices, U.S. sanctions designations, court filings, and verbatim passages from reformist dailies inside Iran and Persian-language outlets abroad. Every passage keeps its Persian original beside the English, with the outlet, the date and a link to the page it came from.

The Edition Day

An edition covers the 24 hours from 00:00 to 24:00 Tehran time (UTC+03:30; Iran ended daylight saving time in 2022). Only items published inside that window are eligible. When a side has nothing in the window, the page says so with the date.

The Selection Rule

1. All items in the window are split into left and right by the outlet table below, never by a model.
2. A model (gpt-5) groups the day's items into topics and, for each topic, names every item on it.
3. Code ranks topics by the number of items they drew on both sides. The top five that have a state item and a non-state item or same-day figure become pairs, in that order. A right-side item that only repeats the official quoted on the left does not qualify.
4. Within a topic the model picks the state item that most directly states an official position, and the non-state item that reports facts, figures or a non-official person's words. A second model (gpt-5-mini) copies the passage; code confirms that the passage appears character for character in the stored text, or falls back to the item's headline.
5. The researcher pages list every item of every edition, picked or not, so any selection can be checked.

Which Outlet Goes on Which Side

The table is the Persian press monitor's own outlet grouping (sources confirmed September 17, 2026). The grouping describes an outlet's audience and stance; it is not a finding about ownership. BBC Persian and Radio Farda are state-funded, editorially independent by charter.

Translation and the Back-Translation Test

gpt-5-mini translates each Persian passage. A different model, gpt-4.1-mini, translates the English back into Persian. A third call compares the original, the English and the back-translation and scores meaning from 1 to 5. A passage appears only at 4 or 5 (same meaning). Lower scores, missing scores, failed links and passages not found in the stored text stay on the staff page with the reason. To date: 3 items held across 15 editions.

What a Topic Label May Say

The label over each pair is the only line written by software. It has at most 12 words, names a subject, and passes a word screen that rejects judging words (absurd, admits, admitted, alarming, alleged, appalling, astonishing, bad, baseless, bizarre, boasts, bogus, brave, brazen, brutal, bungled, catastrophic, chaotic, claimed, claims, corrupt, cruel, crushing, cynical, damning, dangerous, deadly, defiant, desperate, devastating, dire, disastrous, disgraceful, dismal, dramatic, dubious, embarrassing, empty, excellent, extreme, and others), quotation marks and dashes. A label that fails is rewritten once by a model and checked again; a label that fails twice keeps its pair off the page.

Figures and How Old They May Be

Each figure shows its publisher and the date of the value itself. A value older than its normal cadence is shown as "Latest available" with its own date, never as the edition day's figure.

Sanctions: names the U.S. Treasury added under Iran programs on the edition day, from the OFAC list file, linked to the Treasury's notice for that date. Courts: U.S. federal filings naming Iran with that filing date, from MEF's court data.

Links

Before a page is built, every link it would show is requested once (one request a second per site). A link that fails keeps its item off the page until it answers again.

Data Pulls

Models

gpt-5 groups topics; gpt-5-mini copies passages, translates and compares; gpt-4.1-mini translates back. No model writes summaries, opinions or forecasts here; there are no bylines.