Culture minister meets foreign correspondents

TEHRAN –(Iranart)- Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Seyyed Abbas Salehi held a meeting with a group of foreign correspondents on Wednesday.

Seventy journalists, cameramen and photojournalists of various media from Austria, Azerbaijan, Spain, Germany, the U.S., the UK, Russia, Japan, China, Italy, France and several other countries attended the meeting, the office of the deputy culture ministry for press affairs announced on Thursday.

“The official diplomacy of a country would be inefficient if the country lacks astute media diplomacy,” Salehi said in a speech at the meeting.

“Culture, art and literature represent a large part of the history and present condition of Iran, and they need to be widely disseminated around the world,” he added.

“Iranian society has been suffering from depression in the world over the past four decades after the victory of Islamic Revolution, and the various aspects of the depression can be disseminated by the foreign media across the world,” he noted.

The correspondents attending the meeting lamented a lack of cooperation plans in official Iranian organizations to interact with the foreign journalists.            

Afterwards, Salehi asked Deputy Culture Minister for Press Affairs Mohammad Soltanifar to initiate a mechanism to facilitate interaction between the foreign journalists and Iranian organizations.