Censorship in Iran is the limiting or suppressing of the publishing, dissemination, and viewing of certain information in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The majority of such censorship is implemented or mandated by the Iranian government.

Censored content often includes information that relates to women's rights, freedom of speech, democracy, pornography, certain news sources, certain religious content, and many websites.

Censored media include essentially all capable of reaching an even marginal audience, including television, print media, radio, film, museum and gallery exhibits, and the Internet. Iranians attempting to access most informational databases and search engines are met with a page reading: "The requested page is forbidden." Most forms of media are vetted for acceptability by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Reporters Without Borders ranks Iran's press situation as "Very serious", the worst ranking on their five-point scale. Iran's Internet censorship policy is labeled "Pervasive" by the OpenNet Initiative's global Internet filtering map, also the worst ranking used.

Coordinates: 32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53

Iran (ⁱ/ɪˈrɑːn/ or /aɪˈræn/;Persian: ایران‎ [ʔiˈɾɒn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران‎ Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān), is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran", which in Persian means "Land of the Aryans", has been in use natively since the Sassanian era. It came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia ( /ˈpɜrʒə/ or /ˈpɜrʃə/). Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, "Iran" is the name used officially in political contexts.

The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km² (636,372 sq mi), Iran has a population of around 79 million. It is a country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in the Middle East and central Eurasia. Iran is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. As Iran is a littoral state of the Caspian Sea, which is an inland sea, Kazakhstan and Russia are also Iran's direct neighbors to the north. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey. Tehran is the capital, the country's largest city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power, and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the second largest proven natural gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest proven petroleum reserves.

Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz; November 28, 1962) is an American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian. He is widely known as host of The Daily Show, a satirical news program that airs on Comedy Central.

Stewart started as a stand-up comedian, but branched into television as host of Short Attention Span Theater for Comedy Central. He went on to host his own show on MTV, called The Jon Stewart Show, and then hosted another show on MTV called You Wrote It, You Watch It. He has also had several film roles as an actor. Stewart became the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central in early 1999. He is also a writer and co-executive-producer of the show. After Stewart joined, The Daily Show steadily gained popularity and critical acclaim, resulting in his sixteen Emmy Awards.

Stewart has gained acclaim as an acerbic, satirical critic of personality-driven media shows, in particular those of the US media networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. Critics say Stewart benefits from a double standard: he critiques other news shows from the safe, removed position of his "fake news" desk. Stewart agrees, saying that neither his show nor his channel purports to be anything other than satire and comedy. In spite of its self-professed entertainment mandate, The Daily Show has been nominated for news and journalism awards. Stewart hosted the 78th and 80th Academy Awards. He is the co-author of America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, which was one of the best-selling books in the U.S. in 2004 and Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race released in 2010.

Maziar Bahari (مازیار بهاری, (born 1967) is an Iranian Canadian journalist, film maker and human rights activist. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011. Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government from June 2009 to October 20, 2009, and has written a New York Times best seller family memoir, Then They Came for Me.

Bahari was born in Tehran, Iran but moved to Canada in 1988 to study film and political science. His family has been involved in dissent politics in Iran, his father was imprisoned by the shah's regime in the 1950s, and his sister Maryam under the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He is married to Paola Gourley, an Italian-English lawyer working in London, who gave birth to their first child in October 2009 shortly after his release from prison.

He graduated with a degree in communications from Concordia University in Montreal. Soon after, Bahari made his first film, The Voyage of the Saint Louis, about the attempt by 937 German Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany on that ship in 1939, who were turned away by both Cuba and the United States and ultimately forced to return to the Third Reich. In producing the film, Bahari became the first Muslim to make a film about the Holocaust. When asked what motivated him to make the film, he cited the courses he took at Concordia, where he:

Arash Hejazi (Persian: آرش حجازی‎), born 1971 in Tehran, Iran, is an Iranian novelist, fiction writer and translator of literary works from English and Portuguese into Persian. He is also an editor in Caravan Books Publishing House (Iran), and Book Fiesta Literary Magazine. He is a member of the Tehran Union of Publishers and Booksellers (TUPB) and was the managing editor of its journal, Sanat-e-Nashr (Publishing Industry), from 2006 to 2007. He was one of the nominees to receive the Freedom to Publish Prize held by International Publishers’ Association (IPA) in 2006. He is also a novel writer, whose best known novel The Princess of the Land of Eternity was shortlisted for two major Iranian literary prizes and has sold more than 20,000 copies in Iran since its first publication in 2003. He in 2009 he received his MA in Publishing from Oxford Brookes University. His dissertation on censorship in Iran was published in the publishing journal Logos in 2011, and his memoir The Gaze of the Gazelle about growing up in Iran after the Islamic Revolution was published by Chicago University Press in 2011.