In an essay for Columbia Journalism Review, writer Jordan Michael Smith says the capture of U.S. diplomats by Iranian students 30 years ago this week had “pernicious” effects on the U.S. public’s attitude on Iran.

“In particular, the U.S. media’s obsessive coverage of the hostage crisis encouraged Americans to see Iran and Islam as monolithically hostile—fanatical, irrational, and unappeasable,” writes Smith, a press officer for the Project on National Security Reform, which is funded in part by the U.S. Congress. “Thirty years later, these impressions largely remain intact, and color U.S. attempts to engage with the Persian nation and the Middle East at large.”

Smith says the late-night daily TV news program, ABC’s America Held Hostage, which later became Nightline, “capitalized on—and contributed to—public hysteria.” The news coverage rarely gave historical context, such as mentioning that Washington overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in a 1953 coup.

Without making apologies for the behavior of Iran’s leaders, Smith concludes “It is a tragedy that the American image of the country derives from a horrible but misrepresented event thirty years ago.”

This week in Iran, the media wars went on. A state-sponsored “unity rally” turned into an anti-government protest, and Iran’s officials and state news agency accused Western media of distorting the facts and fomenting violence, the Los Angeles Times reports. Three journalists were arrested, London's TimesOnline reports. And, according to Canada’s National Post, Tehran named a new minister in charge of media and communications: the man “known as ‘the brain’ behind the president’s strategy of Holocaust denial."