From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The news this week was the passage of tougher sanctions against Iran,

but it was hard not to see the symbolism in the timing. Almost exactly a year after disputed elections in Iran sparked massive protests that captured the world's attention.

Last summer, the images of protesters, members of what was dubbed the Green Movement, roused American sympathies for a while.

But by the new year, the images and the story seemed to fade away.

Now, a year later, many journalists,

especially Iranian-Americans, are taking stock. Reza Aslan is one such reporter,

author most recently of Beyond Fundamentalism, confronting religious extremism in the age of

globalization, he argues that the U.S. media got the story wrong.

How they got it wrong, depended on who was doing the reporting or analysis.

It almost became a Rorschach test of sorts for the media.

If you were on the conservative side of the spectrum, then you saw this as the best hope that

the United States had in dealing

with Iran's nuclear ambitions. If you were on the liberal side, you saw this as young secularists

finally standing up to the theocrats that ruled that country. Well, nothing could be further from the

truth. It was actually quite a diverse, eclectic movement. So break it down for me, all these different

people with different aims in mind when they took to the streets. We had young secularists from

North Tehran and the rich suburbs of Isfahan. But at the same time, you had very conservative people

from Mashad and from Kham, the religious capital.

You had the business class, the merchants who felt as though the international isolation that has become so much worse under Ahmadinejad had really taken a bite out of their profits.

You had the traditional clerical establishment who felt as though the rapid

militarization of Iranian politics had pushed aside the religious fabric of society. And what they all

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