Hmm so what else is it? The article suggests it's a matter of getting Iranians to read pre-approved material, which sounds a lot like "fabricating the illusion of intellectual freedom".

That is selection bias. Of both the media and of you. First, media select news that they think people are interested in to get sales or clicks, second, of all the stories they report, you remember exactly the worst. So after the first step it already isn't an accurate representation of reality, and after the second step we get your comment as the result of that double-filter.

Is that really all you see?

That all exists, but if you're not seeing anything else, please consider changing the channel. A few suggestions:

- https://www.gutenberg.org/ - http://www.sciencemag.org/ - http://one.npr.org/ - https://www.ted.com/ - https://www.plos.org/

I mean absolutely no disrespect, but to imply that the West is somehow less intellectually productive than Iran betrays ignorance, at best. Everywhere I look, people are hard at work trying to do meaningful things. Some of it's garbage, but Westerners are definitely doing something with their intellectual freedom, though you won't hear about it on reality TV (duh).