Newspaper & Periodical Counts, Adult Literacy by Gender (1898-1988)
Daily/weekly/monthly newspaper and periodical counts: 198 papers (1976) -> 237 (1979-80) -> 163 (1988), plus a 1976 adult-literacy-by-gender data point.
Event_Log
011979Islamic RevolutionAssociation
Mohammad Reza Shah's government falls; the Islamic Republic is proclaimed under Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 April 1979.
Why this link: The total count of daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and periodicals fell from 237 (per this chart's own source note, covering the period just before the 1980 university closures) to 163 by 1988 (-31.2%), consistent with the post-revolution press environment -- outlets aligned with the deposed monarchy, leftist parties, and other now-disfavored factions were shut down over these years, while the Iran-Iraq War's own wartime press restrictions and foreign-exchange-scarce paper supply likely compounded the contraction through the 1980s.
Caveat: This chart has only two data points at the start and end of an eight-year span covering both the consolidation of the new Islamic Republic AND the entire Iran-Iraq War, so the two causes cannot be separated within this data; the chart's own source explicitly labels the 1980 figure as 'before university closures,' suggesting the true post-revolution trough may have come earlier than 1988 and only partially recovered by then, which this two-point comparison cannot resolve.
Lag: gradual, 1980-1988Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica