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“It was out of estisal that some Iranians chose war,” writes Nahid Siamdoust in the NYR Online. Estisal, which, loosely translated from Persian, means “having no options” or a state of helplessness, is also, she contends, what has made some Iranians vulnerable to the disinformation being spread by both state and private media—a perhaps more familiar concept to American readers. When the Iranian regime’s state-controlled “static” disrupts the airwaves and blocks out all other networks, Iran International, a pro–regime change satellite channel based out of London and backed by Saudi money, fills the vacuum with monarchist propaganda. With homegrown media largely censored, most Iranians are trapped in an information environment manufactured by either right-wing shah supporters—mostly expatriates and foreigners—or the brutal Islamic Republic’s state media.

Nahid Siamdoust

Born in Iran, Siamdoust is now an assistant professor of media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin and, for 2026, a Humboldt Foundation fellow in Berlin. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent, reporting from Iran and the Middle East for Time magazine, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, and the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the BBC, among other publications. Her first book, Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (2017), is a history of postrevolutionary Iran as reflected in the nation’s music.

This month I wrote to Siamdoust to discuss Iranian underground media, her work as a foreign correspondent, and how her relationship with her country has changed over the years.

Janhavi Munde: During Iran’s Internet blackout in the first few months of this year, people both inside and outside the country were often informationally stranded, unable to learn what was happening at the protests or, at the beginning of the war, where American bombs were being dropped. How do you reliably keep up with goings-on back home? What kinds of sources do you rely on for accurate information?

Nahid Siamdoust: It’s difficult to get accurate information about news and events in Iran, especially during protests and war. It can feel like a hall of mirrors sometimes, especially with all the disinformation. I always try to get information coming directly out of Iran, and even with state censorship, there are a few newspapers that do excellent reporting, and their publications are available online as well. Shargh and Etemad are two of the best. Then there are media outlets that are based outside Iran but stay in close contact with experts and pundits inside the country and also bring in well-informed contributors from abroad. BBC Persian’s daily 60 Minutes program is indispensable, and the Prague-based Radio Farda, a subsidiary of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, also does good work. Other usual suspects in this category are Al Jazeera English and The New York Times.

Aside from these, on the Telegram app I subscribe to a number of channels that post dozens of news items every day, which are usually produced by people inside Iran. A blogger who goes by the name Vahid Online, for example, compiles lots of viral posts in one place, so that’s a good place to start. Of course, I also roam social media on a daily basis and stay in touch with friends, family, and colleagues in Iran. Nothing is better than talking to people in the country, although they each have their own particular viewpoint, so relying solely on personal relations doesn’t give you a complete picture either. You really have to be a bit of a journalist-detective and patch a lot of different pieces together to get a picture of the day’s news in Iran.

You left Iran at a young age, when an Iraqi bomb hit your elementary school during the last year of the Iran–Iraq War. How has your relationship with your country changed in the years since? 

It’s basically been a story of fluctuating intensity, but never falling out of love. I left Iran as a ten-year-old and grew up in multiple countries but eventually returned and worked as a journalist there for about a decade, starting in 2002. When I first returned I was in my twenties, and I had to reconstruct who I was going to be. Was I going to identify myself as an expat or as someone who had returned? My Persian was rusty and my only relations were my extended family. Bit by bit, I built a full life there and came to relate to Iran without a sense of alienation or distance. As a country, Iran has it all—great historical sites and beautiful nature, fantastic food and culture, incredibly kind people, strangers who will go way out of their way to help you—but what is most fascinating to intellectual observers is how, as a modern society, it grapples in real time with big questions like the separation of religion and state, democracy and freedom, gender and liberation. Ironically, as I’ve developed a deeper relationship with Iran and more expertise about the country, it has become riskier for me to return. Given the Iranian government’s often haphazard detainment of dual nationals for use as bargaining chips, many Iranian expatriates—myself included—fear returning to the country they study and care deeply about.

As you write, you have been criticized in the Tehran Times for being, supposedly, the supporter of an American-orchestrated coup, while, simultaneously, Iranian diaspora media outlets in the West that favor regime change have cast you as a sympathizer to the ayatollah. Is there a venue, in or out of Iran, where you have found it possible to articulate criticism of both the regime and the war without being dismissed as a shill?

No, it was worse. The Tehran Times, Iran’s state-run English-language newspaper, conjured me as a member of a shadow government the Biden administration was purportedly planning to install in Iran. At the same time, a right-wing Iranian outlet in the US used the same story from the Tehran Times to argue that the Biden government was working closely with leftist, Islamic Republic–sympathizing analysts. As an Iran scholar, I have carved out that kind of third space for my own voice in academia and journalism, in both my writing and my speeches. But these times are so politically fraught that staking out an independent position and not taking sides with one camp or the other has often been costly, professionally and sometimes personally.

Near the end of your essay, you refer to something the human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr wrote about the need for a kind of “shared mourning” in Iran, one that allows the public to grieve for both people murdered by the regime in January and those slaughtered by American and Israeli bombs. Only then, you write, “can we claim to belong to one nation.” How might Iranian expatriates share in this kind of mourning? How has living abroad changed the way you relate to this struggle?

I have of course experienced Iran from both within and without. From within you face religious and political repression and corruption and economic desperation. From without you witness the demonization of Iran by a powerful political and media system that is at best ignorant and at worst corrupt and destructive in its own way. I think Iranians just need to exercise a lot of critical empathy toward each other. They have all suffered so much trauma, and they are all in the same boat. This is something that is already happening naturally in Iran, where people are setting aside differences and helping one another under crushing economic and political conditions. But in the diaspora, people continue their battles.

You have worked as a full-time journalist in Iran, reporting for a range of media outlets, from Time magazine to Der Spiegel to Al Jazeera. Does your work change when you’re writing for a Western outlet as opposed to a Middle Eastern one? Are editors’ expectations different?

My work itself doesn’t really change, but the effort and time I have to put into explanations and justifications for how I have presented or articulated what I have written can vary considerably based on the outlet. Mainstream US publications often present Iranians and Iran in certain ways, for example as people always resisting their government, women always oppressed by men, “Islam” as determining most if not all aspects of life, a large government bureaucracy flattened as a zealous “regime.” Sometimes these preconceptions squeeze out the space for more authentic, potentially counterintuitive, narratives. But some Middle Eastern publications have their own biases, too. So much comes down to individual editors and their openness and viewpoints, I have found.

Your book Soundtrack of the Revolution explores postrevolutionary Iranian politics from 1979 to 2009 through popular music. How has music figured into this most recent wave of unrest? On a related note, you’ve said in the past that Iranians, as a general rule, are cosmopolitan. After the 1979 revolution, the country has continued to be home to subversive underground artists. What are the possibilities and limitations of underground media production in this moment, especially during periods of Internet shutdown?

Music is such a fascinating window into Iran’s uprisings. It really teaches us so much. The recent unrest of January 2026 and the subsequent war were also accompanied by a musical score of sorts. Media platforms that supported former crown prince Reza Pahlavi and the US-Israeli war against Iran, for example, picked up a symphonic instrumental piece titled The Epic of Khorramshahr as a sort of anthem to champion the war. The irony was that Majid Entezami composed this work in the 1980s to honor Iran’s defense against foreign aggression in the Iran–Iraq War. But simply because it was so evocative of wartime victory—Iran repelled Iraqi forces in the Battle of Khorramshahr—those who were calling for foreign aggression abused it for their own messaging, exposing the absence of authentic musical productions for their belligerent aims.

On the pro-regime side, religious eulogists whose chest-beating ceremonies are best described as all-male, topless Islamic raves released viral tracks in honor of Iran’s Shia imams and its slain leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which garnered support from Shias and other Muslims around the world. As soon as the war stopped, young street musicians filled parks and sidewalks with joyful music to lift people’s spirits. And somewhere in the middle of that, state organs issued concert permits to artists like King Raam, which was unthinkable right up until it happened. An indie rocker with some international success, King Raam was not only an underground musician with subversive lyrics. His father, the well-known environmentalist Kavous Seyed-Emami, was detained and died under suspicious circumstances in Iran’s Evin Prison in 2018, after which King Raam went into exile, railing against the state. Most people suspected he would be detained upon returning to Iran, not given license to perform.

Iran’s cultural scene is very fluid, and the state itself seems to be experimenting with how much it can or must allow to appease a restive, war-torn population. Or maybe it’s using these musicians to present a different public image. Either way, the profusion of cultural and musical content online, and the state’s inability to police—and sometimes lack of interest in policing—everything, has to some extent undone the category of the “underground artist” as it existed let’s say ten or twenty years ago. That doesn’t mean there aren’t avant-garde theater artists or cutting-edge rappers. But the state has much less control over the nation’s cultural space than it once did.

More by Nahid Siamdoust at nybooks.com

Spreading Static

The Iranian state’s repression of homegrown media has produced an information environment ripe for manipulation by the right.

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