Neda Agha-Soltan has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to official election results.

Hamid Dabashi
Special to CNN

One of the most memorable episodes of the U.S. presidential election of 2008 was the much-publicized September 2008 interview that CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric did with Republican vice presidential candidate and then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Quite a number of embarrassing revelations dawned on the American presidential election scene after that interview, including the fact that the person potentially a heartbeat away from U.S. presidency could not name a single newspaper or magazine that she regularly read.

The interview turned out to be so crucial a piece in the course of the presidential campaign that it garnered for Couric the much coveted Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, with the judges considering that interview a "defining moment in the 2008 presidential campaign."

As fate would have it exactly a year after that fateful interview, Katie Couric was destined to have an embarrassing Sarah Palin moment of her own.

In the course of a much anticipated interview with the belligerent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Couric raised the all-important murder of Neda Aqa Soltan while discussing post-election violence in Iran - which Ahmadinejad dismissed as an unfortunate event that he said occurred because of chaos instigated by the United States and United Kingdom.

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