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

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, journalists who traveled to Iran in search of election stories found instead the biggest uprising in that country since the revolution more than 30 years ago.

Iranians poured into the streets protesting what they charged was an election rigged in

favor of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of the challenger, Mir Hussein

Musavi, rallied day after day risking prison and much worse. Mindful of all the coverage, Iranian

officials arrested dissidents, refused to renew the visas of foreign journalists, and as this CNN clip suggests, clamped down hard on those who remain.

Iran, Resa Sea, permitted to file just one, just one report for all of our networks for the entire day.

Our crews forbidden to witness the situation firsthand.

And for that reason, you're not going to see a live report that we had planned.

Not only did the government try to keep the world from looking in,

it also sought to keep its citizens from looking out.

Babak Rahami is a professor of Iranian and Islamic studies at the University

of California, San Diego. He's in Tehran now and says that the state has been distressingly

effective in cutting off the outside world.

Especially after 4 p.m., the only source of information I have, really, I mean, I'm talking

about a news channel channel is Iran's state

channel. And that's kind of scary because their version of stuff is really one-sided. CNN,

BBC, all these different channels are out, including Internet, just extremely slow, including

telephone lines, especially when you want to call outside of Iran.

But somehow, sometime around 1 a.m., when everyone's sleep, most of these things come back on.

So the feeling of isolation from afternoon onwards is just a mess.

I mean, literally you feel like you're in a prison.

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