No, the Babylon Bee didn’t make this one up. It’s real.
Meisam Zamanabadi, who manages Iran’s Prime Minister’s X account from his lovely home in California, also works for a media “watchdog” group that monitors media bias and provides “media literacy” curriculum for American schools.
WAR: Iran’s English-language propaganda operation is headquartered in Glendale, California. Meysam Zamanabadi has managed Iranian Parliament social media for years from US soil. He advises the Parliament Speaker directly. The Islamic Republic has been running its wartime… pic.twitter.com/qd7MYiqkGn
— @amuse (@amuse) April 13, 2026
The man literally gets paid $11,000 a month by the Iranians and has a nice side gig as a “media consultant.” Among those gigs is working for Ad Fontes as a “media analyst,” helping produce reliability ratings for outlets.
Universities like Cornell and journalism nonprofits like Poynter have cited and praised the media bias ratings of this organization, Ad Fontes Media, like it’s a neutral third party.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 21, 2026
You can’t make things like this up.
A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group known for producing a “media bias” chart that rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones.
Meisam Zamanabadi, an analyst with Ad Fontes Media, spent a large part of his career as an editor at Iranian state-run media outlet Hamshahri, a Tehran-run newspaper controlled at the time by then-mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—now speaker of the Iranian parliament and chief regime negotiator.
Ad Fontes, which the influential Poynter Institute has praised as fair and “easy to understand,” is cited by institutions like Cornell University as a good option for news consumers to evaluate media bias. Ad Fontes also promises that corporations that use its ratings can “get great business results by advertising on high quality news.” Major corporations such as General Motors say they use Ad Fontes to “ensure that [our] ads also show up in reliable publications.”
Zamanabadi, who grew up and went to college in Iran, is based in California. Ad Fontes’s website describes him as the “founder & editor of the Tamashagar news agency,” an Iranian sports news website, and says he has worked in “journalism since 1996.”
NOW do you see why we keep asking you to join our VIP program? “Media bias” groups like Ad Fontes are able to direct advertising dollars toward or away from websites based on their “reliability” ratings, which in turn helps amplify or demonetize content, shaping the information battlefield.
When Cornell or Poynter, put their stamp of approval on something, it has an enormous impact on the so-called “mainstream,” directing the flow of dollars and eyeballs.
And Iran is right in the middle of it. As are, you can be certain, China, Qatar, and other bad actors.
Before moving to the United States from Iran, Zamanabadi served as the editor of Hamshahri‘s sports pages, according to a copy of his résumé posted online. Hamshahri, a state-controlled newspaper overseen by the municipality of Tehran, has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006.
Posts from Zamanabadi’s online blog indicate that he was an editor at Hamshahri in 2008 and 2009, while Ghalibaf was mayor of Tehran. His résumé also states that he worked for the Iranian Students’ News Agency and the Iran Labor News Agency, both of which have links to the regime.
Zamanabadi has maintained ties to Iranian government media while living in the United States. He has appeared as a commentator on Iranian state TV multiple times since 2024, according to his Instagram. Last summer, he also successfully lobbied the Asian International Sports Press Association to pass a “resolution condemning the Israeli regime’s military aggression on Iranian soil” during the 12-day war. Zamanabadi serves as vice president of the Asian International Sports Press Association, according to its website.
The revelation comes amid questions about Ad Fontes’s reliability. The group publishes a “Media Bias Chart” that categorizes U.S. news outlets by political leanings and trustworthiness using two axes: one for ideological bias that runs from -42 on the left to +42 on the right and another for reliability that goes from 0 to 64.
Ad Fontes says it rates news sources “based on a rigorous, non-partisan content analysis methodology” and markets its analysis to schools and teachers as a supposed tool for teaching media literacy. The group’s website says a “pod of at least three human analysts” including “one person who self-identifies as being right-leaning, one as center, and one as left-leaning” rate news stories, podcast episodes, and television programs.
“Media bias” and “fact-checking” organizations serve an important function in the media and advertising world. They exist to “pre-bunk” anything a conservative says and promote as reliable anything that a leftist says. They provide, essentially, the credentials that shape who is and is not heard and believed by vast numbers of people.
Big corporations tend to be risk-averse, so they seek credentialed outlets on which to advertise. They shape the market for information, and that is the real point. Alter the incentive structure, and you shape the results.
It’s similar to how the SPLC shapes who is considered an “extremist” group and who is not. The SPLC can label somebody a “hate group,” and that has ripple effects throughout the government and media world. It is totally bogus, but it works.
That an Iranian regime propagandist sits right in the middle of this apparatus of influence shows you how corrupt the whole process is.
Not that this will surprise you. Nor will it surprise you to know that there will be no media firestorm about it, because the mainstream outlets benefit from this arrangement.
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