Dilip Simeon's blog

I have a secret. I kept it hidden for longer than I care to admit. It felt unprofessional, vaguely shameful. It wasn’t who I wanted to be. But here it is: I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” Every morning, I read The Washington Post, the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. In my office at Time magazine, I had a TV playing CNN on mute. I listened to NPR in the shower. On weekends, I devoured the New Yorker. It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it! Usually, it made me feel more curious, not less. But half a dozen years ago, something changed. The news started to get under my skin. After my morning reading, I felt so drained that I couldn’t write — or do anything creative. I’d listen to “Morning Edition” and feel lethargic, unmotivated, and the day had barely begun...

NB : To this timely statement I will add just one observation directed at all those groups and individuals who seem to derive their meaning of life via abuse, hatred, machismo and what in north India we call rangdaari . I have commented on this useless controversy here  - read it if you can still engage in rational conversation. Can all spokespersons of the ruling party and its allies - not to mention other devotees of the Almighty - please try and get pleasure out of the small things in life? Eat some mangoes, or ice cream. Enjoy the company of friends and loved ones, unless they too have gone over the cliff-edge of communal lunacy.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are a pathetic disgrace. If this is your religion, your patriotism, your nationalism, all I can say is God help us. Put a lid on it. DS IMSD support free speech; condemn hate speech, death threats Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD) deplores the divisive and hate-driven politics behind the statements made by the ...

The comments on Peter Oborne’s excellent article on Julian Assange in The Guardian on May 20 are a damning indictment of the media’s ability to instill near universal acceptance of “facts” which are easily proven lies. The Guardian chose a comment full of these entirely untrue assertions as its “Guardian pick” to head the section: If you look through all the comments, they repeat again and again that Wikileaks published un-redacted documents, including names of U.S. agents, which put lives at risk. The entire basis of most of the comments is simply untrue – and none of the readers seems to have any information to contradict them.  Julian Assange has never said that governments should have no secrets. That would be a ridiculous position and clearly some information held by government is rightly confidential. He has said that governments should be very much more open to the public, and that most government secrecy is unjustified.  Nor has Wikileaks ever dumped data unread ...

Article 14 of the Constitution of India reads: “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.” Article 14  is an excellent portal, reflecting the best traditions of Indian journalism. I wholeheartedly commend it to readers. Here are some representative articles India’s Proposed New Privacy Law Will Make The Right To Privacy Hard To Enforce If Verdicts Favour Govt, Judges Can Get Top Jobs: Study Debunking a Myth: Only 17 Political Parties Of 105 In EC List Got Electoral Bonds. Muslims & Dalits Face The Worst Residential Segregation & Discrimination In Urban Cities, Study Confirms India’s Unemployment Crisis: The Distress Is Worse Than The Data Suggest   Beaten, Abused By Inmates & Labelled A ‘Terrorist’, Former Lawyer On Bail In Delhi Riots Case Expresses Faith In Constitution   ‘In Karnataka, Cultural Practices Basavanna Fought Against Are Getting Reintroduced’ ...

Colourful onion-domed churches capped with sparkling snow, seductive spies in lavish mink coats, dancing bears, strong-willed revolutionaries…we see these tropes everywhere. They feature in Netflix shows such as Shadow and Bone, in Marvel blockbusters, gritty Cold War-inspired thrillers, and children’s animated films like Anastasia. Western pop-culture’s fascination with Russia – or, rather, with a simplified and fantastical version of Russia’s complicated history – is understandable. Back in the 1960s, at the height of the ideological rivalry between the US and the USSR, Russians were Hollywood’s go-to villains. When news of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 United States presidential election broke, old tropes came back with a vengeance and, once again, Hollywood started looking to Eastern Europe for inspiration. The way the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union are portrayed in American media isn’t just unrealistic – at times it borders on absurdism. Liberties are taken with history...

TalkTV is in trouble. Despite the millions Rupert Murdoch has invested in his newly launched television channel, and the supposedly magnetic presence of Piers Morgan, its numbers have sometimes been so low that the official broadcasting rating agency has not registered a single viewer. Last Wednesday, Piers Morgan Uncensored , the nightly showcase of debate and un-woke opinions intended to be TalkTV’s centrepiece, was said to have attracted 24,000 people, and then lost over half of them, leaving it with an estimated audience of 10,000. Over at GB News , the similarly right-inclined talk-based outlet that has survived its equally disastrous launch, it was presumably pints of bitter and sausage rolls all round: that night its competing offering – hosted by the somewhat niche Canadian pundit Mark Steyn – reportedly won the ratings battle with a princely initial viewing figure of 54,000. It was for research rather than recreation that I watched Morgan’s show that night. It was an underwh...

Several shots ring out in quick succession, cutting through a clear, blue spring morning in Jenin, in the West Bank. Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. The cameraman filming the scene scrambles backwards to take cover behind a low concrete wall. Then a man cries out in Arabic: "Injured! Shireen, Shireen, oh man, Shireen! Ambulance!" When the camera operator pans around the corner, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh can be seen lying motionless, face down on the ground as another Palestinian reporter, Shatha Hanaysha, crouches down beside her, using a tree trunk for cover. Hanaysha reaches out and tries to rouse her as gunshots continue.  There's no response. Both women are wearing helmets and blue protective vests marked "Press." In the moments that follow, a man in a white T-shirt makes several attempts to move Abu Akleh, but is forced back repeatedly by gunfire. Finally, after a few long minutes, he manages to drag her body from the street....

As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s  self-stated motivation : his racist belief that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration in a “great replacement” theory. Over at  Fox News , however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area. The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy. Fox News,  according to  Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News ...