Media Storm - Ad-funded news: Who pays for hate & clickbait?

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! There are loosely three main funding models that make up our mainstream media. The first is public service models that are not run for profit, like the BBC, the second is donor-led journalism and the third is the big one – advertising. And we have the advertising model to thank for the acceleration of sensationalist, clickbait journalism. Because if you’re selling adverts, you’re selling your readers’ attention. When news outlets have to meet advertiser-set traffic quotas, that creates a lot of pressure for quantity over quality. Digital journalists are often desk-bound, required to produce dozens of articles a day out of recycled online material, with no time to pursue quality investigations or seek out minority lived experience. And the more money a broadcaster or a paper are paid for advertising, the more they will do anything to get traffic to their channel or website.  So in comes dangerous media malpractices, like opinion masquerading as fact, sensationalism and scapegoating. Richard Wilson, founder of the Stop Funding Hate campaign. The pressure group, which is celebrating a decade this year, asks companies to stop advertising in - and therefore stop providing funds for - certain British news outlets who spread disinformation and hateful rhetoric. In the shorter term, following the efforts of Stop Funding Hate supporters, GB News has reportedly lost over £131 million. In the long term, they're building a movement which can make hate unprofitable for good, by tackling the systemic failures which currently make publishing hateful clickbait more lucrative than responsible journalism.   This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  Edited by Toka Omer The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Media Stormers. Today we have a Solutions Focus special episode for you. Before we get into it, we need to revisit some facts about the news media. There are three main funding models that make up our mainstream media. The first is public service models that are not run for profit like the BBC. The second is donor-led journalism, like, well, us. And the third is the big one, advertising. Another fact about our news media, 90% of UK media is owned and controlled by just three companies,

companies that in turn are largely owned by highly influential billionaires. DMG media owns the Daily Mail, the Metro and INews News UK, one of Rupert Murdoch's babies, owns the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times, and Reach PLC owns papers like The Mirror, the Stars and the Expresses. Since the arrival of the internet and fast-paced digitised information, plus a pandemic, to boot. The news industry's traditional paper-selling business model has been obliterated, and the industry is still on its knees trying to pick up the pieces, and so they rely more and more on advertising. And we basically have the advertising model to thank for the acceleration

of sensationalist clickbait journalism, because if you're selling adverts, you're selling your readers' attention. And as we've been covering on Media Storm for years now, sensationalism often leads to us and them narratives, demonise marginalised groups. When news outlets have to meet advertiser set traffic quotas, that creates a lot of pressure for quantity over quality. Digital journalists are often deskbound, required to produce dozens of articles a day out of recycled online material, with no time to pursue quality investigations or seek out minority lived experience. And here's the thing, the more money a broadcaster or a paper are paid for advertising, the more they will do anything to get traffic to their channel or website.

And this is where you get opinion masquerading as fact, one of the most dangerous media malpractices. And the rise of opinion disguised as news channels such as Gb News or Talk TV. Now, Gbby News has two main backers, the Dubai-based Lagartam Group and the British hedge fund manager, Sir Paul Marshall. They effectively cross-subsidised Reforms leader Nigel Farage by employing him. In his first 18 months as an MP, Farage pocketed £585,000 from his Gube News platform. And major brands also bankrolled the channel.

Marks and Spencers, compare the market, Jellycat, the BFI, Waitrose, Bupa. All of these brands had or have advertised on GB News' website or channel. But do advertisers even care? As long as their advert is getting viewed, does it matter what brought them there? even if it's unfettered lies about minority groups or even hate speech. Well, that is the question our guest today is going to try and help us answer. We're going to be talking to the founder of the campaign group Stop Funding Hate. Now, Stop Funding Hate persuades advertisers to pull their support from publications and outlets

that spread hate and division. Their mission is to advance human rights by making hate unprofitable. And they are about to get to their 10-year anniversary. The campaign was launched in, August 2016 in a year which saw an unprecedented number of negative headlines about migrants and refugees in the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Express in particular. Well, it's great to know that things have radically improved in the last 10 years. I know, but this is part of what makes this a valuable conversation. How has the advertiser landscape changed in a decade? Has reporting

on refugee or other minority stories developed at all? What progress has the campaign achieved? What makes an advertiser ethical? And will we ever stop funding hate? Most outlets are locked in a constant battle for editorial independence, which is especially problematic when it comes to the news. We're under assault from the regulator. We're under assault in terms of our advertising.

They're horrible, don't advertise with them and people who some were scared. I think the advertising industry is complicit in this, and not standing up to stop funding hate. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson and I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm, bad ads, which brands fund hate speech? This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you.

It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapy denim wide leg. Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Our guest today is an author and the director and co-founder of Stop Funding Hate. He previously worked for Amnesty International UK and the Child Poverty Action Group.

And he's been involved in human rights campaigning since 2001. Welcome, Richard Wilson. Thank you very much for having me up. Stop Funding Hate is a pressure group which asks companies to stop advertising in and therefore stop providing funds for certain British newspapers. Can you tell us, Richard, how and when the concept was born? So we started in the summer 2016, and this was in the context of the referendum that happened that year

and the aftermath of that referendum. And I think what a lot of people may remember is that there was, then, as there is now, there was a lot of, very inflammatory anti-migrants coverage in a number of UK newspapers, particularly the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Express. And it had always been a problem, but it felt like it was really reaching crescendo in 2016. I think there were over 100 anti-migrant front pages that year across UK newspapers. What was happening at the same time, there was a big surge of hate crime. So the toxic messages in the media were actually leading to real life violence and, you know,

hostile incidents on the streets. For much of my life, large parts of our media had been regularly whipping up fear and hatred towards refugees and migrants and other communities. And I remember at the time I had a job where there was a press team. They were going to get the newspaper to lay them all out in the kitchen. And that was where we all had our lunch. I remember going down to the kitchen, having lunch and seeing day after day these horrible messages. And I would get to the point where I'd turn the newspaper over because I did want to have to look at those messages about the time in my lunch. And I remember looking through a copy of the Sun one day. And I noticed that my mobile phone company at the time was advertising

in the Sun. And so then you feel complicit. You feel you're connected to this and you're inadvertently making that problem worse. So I started talking to friends and we set up a Facebook group. And to my astonishment, the Facebook group gained about 200 members in a really short space of time and lots of people started feeding in. At that moment, I think a lot of us started to realize that it wasn't just us on our own in isolation that had been, you know, worrying about this.

This was a feeling that a lot of people had for a long time when we were kind of discovering each other and finding a way that we might work together to use a kind of collective, that we had to push back. So that was really in the start of it. It's funny that that's your origin story because it was exactly at that time and exactly for those reasons that I decided to go into the refugee sector. I graduated from uni on the day of the Brexit referendum. As you can imagine, it was a very cheerful occasion. People were crying as they went to their graduation. So I decided to go to the refugee sector and then it was there that I decided to go into journalism because of what I saw to be the growth

inaccuracies in immigration coverage. So Media Storm's very first episode when Heather and I teamed up delved into what was behind the headline reporting of record numbers of migrants reaching the UK in dinghies in the years that follows. Now nearly five years later we are still picking apart the same headlines, the same stereotypes, the same inconsistencies in reporting. As recently as last we did so on our Refugee Week episode about so-called deterrents. How have you seen reporting about refugees or migrants change, or have you seen it change, since you started your campaign? It's really interesting because I think I would divide it into two phases.

So actually since 2021, so the time that media storm has been going, if anything, it's got worse, I would say overall. And specifically, what we've started to see, particularly from channels like GV News, is a really systematic association of migrants and refugees with specific types of crimes, particularly sexual violence, that refugees and asylum seekers are especially a threat to women and girls, as if men generally or men from other backgrounds were not. What's really striking, though, is prior to 2021,

within a couple of years of our campaign starting, there was this fascinating shift where the Daily Express publicly said they were going to stop the anti-migrant front pages. Around 2018, the Daily Mail reached out to us and said, we want to hear people's concerns. We recognise that we need to move in a more positive direction. And for a period of time, migration really dropped off the front pages and things started to calm down, it seemed. And then you started to see that public opinion polls were bringing up immigration SMS. So there was a real shift in public awareness or public perception of how important this was compared to other issues. But around 2020, 2021, it was almost like there was a backlash really to the progress that had been made before.

And 2021 was when GV News was launched. At the same time, talk TV was launched, which still carries on the internet, even though, and a number of broadcasting as a normal TV station. And at the same time, Offcon started to water down its enforcement of its standard. So there have been a range of sort of connected factors that have made things in a lot, in a number of ways worse than they were in 2021. The one thing I would say is that I think if there hadn't been such a strong pushback, it would have been even worse.

And it's been very important that there's been a kind of dissonance that there have been voices saying, this is not healthy, this is not normal. and over the longer term, I'm optimistic that it can be turned around again. But it does seem to show that, you know, it's two steps forward, one step back, rather than kind of continuous progress. I can agree more. And I feel a little bit, as a journalist in this area, I'm constantly putting out new fires. I'm constantly on the defence batting away the latest myth. You know, you've given this example of sexual violence and racialised migrant men being more prone to committing sexual violence as women and girls.

than anyone else. The evidence does not support this. Globally, there have been so many studies with very inconsistent findings. The majority show, actually, that foreign nationals tend to be underrepresented among criminal perpetrators. I could honestly spend hours going into the data like at a UK level, and there are flaws in the statistics that we have available. But what I can say with absolute certainty is there is no fact-based worldview that underpins whatever the latest anti-migrant myth is. And as soon as we debunk one, there's another one waiting in the wings. And all of them follow the same pattern of just very predictable racist tropes that are not only racist, they're also evasive of the core fundamental problems in our society, whether that is

misogyny and gender-based violence, or whether it is, you know, austerity and the crippling of our public services. I feel frustrated sometimes that you can put so much effort into debunking one myth, but there's always another one waiting because there's a whole business model, right? This whole GB News business model that thrives off of generating the next racist stereotype. And human beings will always have it in them to latch onto whatever fearmongering racism is out there. I think it's true. And I think also people tend to take at face value what they're presented with.

And people are busy. Most people, most of the time, don't have the time to go and read all the foot. and extensively research things, I think there's an expectation that if you're presented with a new story and that's, you're told, this is the news, this is important, it's understandable that people will come to see, well, that's a really important issue because it's being talked about day after day after day.

And I think the problem is like you say, it's structural. We're in the midst of this ecosystem where actually it's easier now than if you think about it, any time in human history, to spread dangerous lives. Because it's very cheap to set up a website, It's the social media space as well. The algorithms on social media will prioritize content that makes people angry, that evokes other strong emotions.

So if you're in the business of demonising minority groups for your own gain or your own profit, it's never been easier to do it. Meanwhile, good quality journalism takes time, it takes resources, it takes effort, and that's also been negatively impacted by changes in technology. I think our view and certainly, you know, my perception from having done this work for the last 10 years is ultimately this won't get better without fundamentally fixing the media ecosystem. So let's get more into the ins and outs of the campaign then. So how does it work? Let's say you identify a brand that's advertising on a channel or a newspaper that is spreading lies or hate.

How do you begin to campaign to get them to pull their advertising? The real power behind stop funding hate is the thousands of supporters that the campaign has. A big advertiser doesn't really care what I think individually. But if thousands of their customers get in touch with them and say, this matters to us, that company has a business incentive to take that seriously. So just as the media or parts of the media have this business model of hate, well, actually advertisers, in a sense by definition, if they're spending money on adverts, that shows that they care of their customers.

and think about them or what the public thinks about them, and they've got a business reason to listen. So I think one of the distinctive features of this way of campaigning is that it's not just about asking nicely. It's about thinking what collective power and influence do we have as the public that we can actually bring to bear that compels media outlets to pay attention. And following the money is a sort of long-standing tradition. I guess the innovation with us is that you're going at one step removed.

So you're talking to a company who, may not have a particular stake in what the media is doing one way or the other. In many cases, it's no skin of their nose to shift their advertising to another media outlet. There's plenty of choice. And by then that's sort of it's by one degree, you then influence or you can influence or you can impact the media that's behaving that problematic way. Now, since you've started the campaign, the media landscape has changed quite a lot. So can you just talk us through how the advertiser-funded media landscape has changed

over the decade that you've been running your campaign? It's been really profound. So one of the most important changes, and this has been global, has been a further, massive shift in advertising money towards online spaces. So more and more of the money that's spent on any kind of advertising, that's newspaper, print advertising or outdoor advertising,

but more and more of that advertising is being spent on the internet. I think it's over a trillion US dollars worldwide is spent on advertising. each year and I think at least two thirds of that now is digital. The reason that's had such a profound impact, which I think we're only still getting our head round, is that digital advertising particularly lends itself to toxic clickbait if you don't put other protections in place. Because obviously you've always had newspapers that were put an inflammatory story on the front page to sell the newspaper.

But there's only one front page a day. Now we've got a situation where the mail online will publish I think it's now over 1,500 stories a day. And any one of those stories could be clickbaited. So there's a stronger financial incentive for media like the mail to produce toxic clickbaits. Well, let's talk about some of Stop Funding Hate's successes. Just some of the advertisers that have pulled their ads from GB News recently include Verishaw, the BFI, and Cult Beauty, all after Stop Funding Hate led community focus.

campaigns to pressure them. What would you say is Stop Funding Hate's biggest success? That's a really interesting question. I think if I was going to pick one thing, it would be that this is now an issue that advertisers think about and to some extent worry about. When we first started, the idea that as a company, you would have to apply an ethical lens to your advertising just wasn't a thing, really. There'd be a company that would have a really well thought through policy in terms of making sure that they don't have child labour in their supply chain and that the sustainability aspects of their operations are being looked at properly, but they had a kind of blind spot about their advertising.

We're now in a situation where whether a media outlet like GD News likes it or not, whether a brand agrees with what sort of funny hate supporters are saying or not, there's a recognition that they have to think about this. There has to be aligned somewhere about what they're prepared to associate with. And that's bigger than anything, any individual thing that we've done, because that's a cultural change and it's a change in mindset. Individual cases within the campaign, I think, would be, you know, for example, Giva News has never made money since it launched.

So it launched in 2021. They've now lost £131 million as advertisers, most big advertisers continue to stay away. And, you know, stop funding Kate's long-term goal is to make hate unprofitable. So we've collectively shown that there's a cost to going down that path in a way that wasn't the case, for example, when Foxxview's first launched in the 1990s. They became quite profitable.

They're profitable now. So we've collectively successfully challenged the business model to some extent. The hard part is that obviously there's a much bigger picture. And it appears to be the case that the owners of GGBUs may have other reasons beyond just commercial reasons for wanting to support the channel. And the other thing is the scale of, you know, clearly it's not just GVNU's. It's a problem that this pattern of behaviour is a problem in many other parts of the UK media and across the world as well.

In the end, I think it is a numbers game. If enough people raise their voice, enough with enough advertisers, the logic does work. And this is ultimately a human creative problem, which is also why I think it's a problem that collectively humans can solve. Now let's turn our attention more to GB News. Stop Funding Hate has had a particular focus on the channel for a few years now, one which the channel itself has admitted that it has,

felt the effects of. We have been through the whole thing where, you know, there was this, well, they're horrible, don't advertise with them, and people who some were scared off from advertising on the channel. And still are. I think the advertising industry is complicit in this and not standing up to stop funding hate. Stop funding hate has received criticism,

mostly from right-wing publications and outlets, but it has also come under scrutiny from neutral publications, such as the Press Gazette and the Eye, for engaging in so-called council culture. In 2017, when Paper Chase announced that they would stop advertising with the Daily Mail, the outlet described stop funding hate as, quote, a small group of hard left individuals seeking to suppress legitimate debate and impose their views on the media.

What is your response to allegations of damaging free speech? Thanks for reminding us of those comments. The one that my favorite attack was spiked online accused us of wanting to ruin Christmas, which amazing and not true, by the way, as well, we love Christmas. But I think it's understandable that people, this entire business model, is driven by profiting from extractive and unpleasant stories targeting minority groups. It's understandable there's going to be a pushback. It's quite hard to say, we don't like it, you're making it more difficult to make money from hate. It's much more rhetorically powerful to be able to say, no, this is a terrible attack on freedom of expression.

and free speech. But I mean, you know, I was involved in human rights campaign for a long time before. I was involved in launching stop funding hate. There's nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that says that toxic hate channels should be subsidised through advertising money from phone companies and furniture makers. It's a red herring, essentially. The powerful thing about ordinary people using their free speech to ask companies they shop with not to fund problematic media is that it allows you to tackle what I think many people would see as a

dysfunction in the media. The fact that hate is profitable, it allows you to tackle that in a way that doesn't require heavy-handed government intervention. And if you turn it on its head, if you wanted to make the argument that, you know, Lego pulling their ads from the day mail was genuinely a human rights abuse, you'd have to believe that Lego had some sort of moral obligation to fund the daily bail, which, bizarrely, I mean, the kind of people that make this argument tend to be people that, in my experience, will also be very, in other contexts, will be very big fans of the free market, right? So we would say, actually, this is the free market in action. And that's, I think many people say that's freedom in action rather than

an abuse of freedom. I think also at its like basis level, stop funding hate is also like an awareness campaign. All it's really simply doing is telling people, hey, did you know that, that this company that you buy your groceries from is funding this thing. And then it's up to that person to decide whether they agree with it or not, right? There's nobody forcing a person to send an email to Marks and Spencers, right? The only reason that we've had the impact we've had is being because this is tapped into a big, big undercurrent of concern that has been there for a long time. And people were looking for a way to take action. And people will then take action in the way that they make their own in their first.

find their own way, they find their own words that they want to say to a company. And I think that's one of the reasons that it lands because it's real, it's authentic. Now, Nigel Farage, who is a GB News presenter, has also spoken about stop funding hate. There's an organisation called Stop Funding Hate. And if anybody advertises on GB News, they will get dozens of emails every day from stop funding hate saying you're funding a channel that is damaging democracy, you're funding a channel that is causing division. And frankly, you know, if you're a marketing officer

for a holiday company, you probably think, you know what, we can't be bothered with this. So we're under assault from the regulator. We're under assault in terms of our advertising, without which keeping the channel going, long term is not easy. Note that Nigel Farage is currently a sitting MP and a primetime GB news presenter.

But this is not true. new. Offcom confirmed that Farage was allowed to present his nightly GB news program throughout the general election campaign in 2024 after the media regulator said there was no clear consensus among the British public to stop politicians presenting shows on news channels. In August 2024, it was revealed that Farage was earning in excess of a million pounds a year from his employment outside Parliament in addition to his salary as an MP. The figure included earnings of nearly 1.2 million pounds. per year from his work presenting on Gb News.

Even Andrew Neal, who helped found Gb News before quitting shortly after its launch, said he was amazed politicians sitting in the Houses of Parliament could present political TV programmes. And it's not just the names mentioned. Ben Habib used to feature up to three times a week on Gb News when he was co-deputy leader of Reform UK, but he says he hasn't been asked on since he left. Rupert Lowe was a regular on GB News until he split and started his own. own party. Richard, does GB News mean that Reform UK effectively just has its own television station?

I think when you lay out the facts that you just have, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a TV station that's very heavily skewed in the direction of one political party, namely the one led by Nigel Farage. And I think it raises some really, really big questions about how Offcom has allowed this to happen and how fit Offcom really is in its kind. current form to deal with a world where a billionaire can sink over £100 million into a TV station, which is at the same time as it's losing all this money, paying enormous amounts of money to the leader of political party. It's hard to see how offcom in its current form is really going to be effective at what all of us as a society need it to do in order to protect our democracy.

So let's talk about offcom. Offcom is the independent regulatory authority for UK television and radio. The UK news broadcasting ecosystem is meant to go as such. In return for a license, there's an obligation to be accurate and impartial. Broadcasters are required to offer appropriate challenge and context and are supposed to promote a range of viewpoints. This year, the New World magazine assembled a team of 20 experienced journalists to watch multiple hours of GB News output to see if it's complying with the laws and codes supposed to protect broadcasting in the UK. They chose 15 hours of prime time output with each program rated by two reviewers. The results showed there were numerous breaches of impartiality, a widespread disregard for

accuracy, a predominant framing of news in ways that overlap with reform's political agenda, a systemic use of reform politicians, candidates and supporters, and an overwhelmingly right-wing bias in the choice of guests and issues. Offcom has found GV News to be in breach of its broadcasting code many times. In 2024, it imposed a 100k fine on Gb News for breaking impartiality rules over a program hosted by Rishi Sunak. However, in 2025, G.B. News successfully challenged Offcom in the High Court over programs hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Following its defeat, Ofcom then dropped an investigation into GB News's use of Nigel Farage, and it withdrew three previous rulings over GB News' use of other politicians. Ultimately, none of this has had

much of an effect on GV News' interests in impartiality or accuracy. So, Richard, is Offcom fit for purpose when it comes to regulating channels like GV News? I think the short answer is no, sadly, in the midst of a global disinformation crisis where we are facing levels of dangerous hate and lies online and in our media that arguably greater than we've ever seen before. Ofcom feels like a very 20th century institution that isn't really equipped to deal with the 21st century world. I mean, one of the features of offcom even on its better days is it takes months, possibly even more than a year, sometimes to come to a decision about a piece of content.

So by the time, Offcom may have made a ruling, that bit of content may have been spread across the internet, shared around the world, seeing millions and millions of millions. of times. But even in that context, Offcom has got a lot worse in the last few years. There was a time when it had a reputation for being a lot more robust. I think the figures were in sort of 2019, Ofcom would found somewhere between 70 and 80 breaches of its code, made rulings that, you know, that there'd been that many failures in media standards and then took action. In 2025, they only found 15 breaches. What's really sad and striking is that for years, broadcast media enjoyed much higher levels of trust than newspapers.

Part of the reason for that is that Offcom was doing a more robust job of regulating broadcast space for a long time than the press and place handler if so, which has been widely derided for being ineffective. So if Offcom's now taking a back seat and refusing to uphold the rules that was previously enforcing, in the end, that will both allow dangerous levels of hate to go unchallenged, but it would also make it even harder for the public to trust the news that they're seeing and hearing, which carries other really big risk for democracy. I wanted to ask you a question, actually, because it's something that's been on my mind for a while.

So when we first started Media Storm nearly five years ago, I felt like at that time we were able to identify some of the biggest stories and the biggest scandals in the news media quite readily every week, draw attention to them, call them out, discuss them. yet even just five years on, it feels like the churn of outrageous, scandalous things being said, especially about minority communities, is just almost like too much to keep up with. Even in just researching recent G.B. News hate speech, I mean, earlier this month, we had a GB News presenter repeatedly saying there were no riots in Belfast when, in fact, the homes of non-white people were set on fire.

You know, we've had houses and multiple occupancy being mentioned on GB News over 200. times in the past six months and being linked very tenuously to illegal immigrants. Just this week, we've had a presenter on GV News say that gay men are statistically more likely to sexually assault their adoptive children. There's been a presenter who appeared to suggest the LGBT community included paedophiles. I mean, honestly, the list just goes on and on. And it's like, it's hard to find that there's like a space to call out every single thing. Do you feel like this?

Do you feel like that is a deliberate tactic? That's a really interesting question. And it makes me think of two things. So there was an interview with the CEO at the time of one of the co-owners of Gubri News, a company called Lagarton. And he was asked a question about the extent to which GV News had changed the discourse. And he specifically replied referencing something called the Oberton Window, which is, as I understand it, a sort of way of understanding.

what the boundaries of acceptable discourse and how they change. And not only did he say that he thought that GVUZE has shifted the Oebson window, he revealed that Lagarton had people they were paying to systematically monitor other channels to try and assess the extent to which GV News was changing the national conversation. If you then add that together with the way that GVN News has been behaving and the examples that you started there for instance, it's quite worrying if the aim is to shift the Overson window, the actual practice of the channel is to pump out tropes,

which I think would be widely recognised as dangerous. What do we do about it? I think it's so, so important that we don't become resigned to it. And I think whether that's the intention or not, if we become resigned to it, we're doing the other side's job for them. And in some ways, I think it's mentally more important to go to advertisers because the more extreme the rhetoric becomes,

the more uncomfortable advertisers become. So even if Offcom's not going to do anything, We know that from the fact that juvenile still has very few high profile advertisers, we know that this is something that advertisers are uncomfortable with. It's important as well that we find everywhere possible to discourage other channels from following suits. In some ways, the more extreme the rhetoric becomes, the clearer it is to people, but of how dangerous it is. And the example that's really haunted me at the moment,

but I think it's important for more people to think about. And to be aware of is just over the weekend, a man went on a rampage in Edinburgh with a night. attacking a number of people he presumed to be Muslim. And when he was lying on the floor being arrested by the police, someone filmed what he was saying. And what he said was that he was protecting the country from Muslims who he said were,

and then he talked about Muslims raping our daughters, I think was the phrase that he used. So you see a direct connection between that inflammatory trope that has been repeatedly pushed out in many UK media outlets, over the last year or two or more and online. And the rhetoric used by someone in the street had just gone on a violent rampage that thankfully no one was killed in that instance,

but many people were injured. I think one of the ways to cut through this and make sure that we don't just sort of become overwhelmed by it is to keep pointing out the clear connection between the stuff that's being said on screens and real world incidents like that because I think even people who might be sympathetic to many other things that Juven News would say

or that Nigel Farage might say, I still believe in this. The overwhelming majority of people don't want violence on their streets and their communities. They don't want the neighbours attack. They don't want these kinds of incidents. So I think the key to really challenging this is to show that it has these real-word consequences. I have to say, and this is positive, that I totally agree with you, Richard, on that point. I have seen an uptick in engagement in my critical migration content from sort of centre-right groups who were, maybe thinking about reform, humouring reform, and then saw the Belfast riots, or rather the third summer of consecutive racist violence on the streets,

and have started to feel really actually very afraid of the consequences of entertaining that school of thought. So the final thing we want to ask you before we turn to solutions is that, and I'm sorry to take you back again to these attacks that you faced, but stop funding hate has faced a number of misleading attacks by UK media outlets. One example we want to talk about is last year the Telegraph ran a story accusing stop funding hate of amplifying social media accounts that had posted anti-Semitic content. The article also made other damaging claims about the campaign. The Telegraph ended up deleting this article and it agreed to pay legal costs. How frequently do you face smear campaigns like this and how does the campaign handle it?

It comes in waves. There was a period of time where it was every... every couple of months we would get another misleading attack. So in that particular example, the telegraph had, they said, you know, we've, we understand that, or we believe that Stopfinding hates been amplifying, you know, accounts that have shared anti-Semitic content. And we, I mean, be really clear about this. We're, we're appalled by that suggestion and by all forms of hate and, you know,

anti-Semitism, obviously. So we were really concerned and we were like, well, you know, who, who, we, we, we, we, we, we, We tweeted that said these things because we'd never want to do that. So could you tell us which accounts it was? Can you send us the examples? And they didn't send us the examples. And we said, well, we would never know when you do that. And then they published their story.

And we said, well, we'd still like to see the examples. And they didn't respond. So we got lawyers involved and us again to see the examples. So we never got to the bottom of what they had found that they said was evidence that we'd amplified those things. And instead they chose to delete the article and pay our costs. That indicates that they basically weren't, were banking on not being challenged. They were going after a group that they didn't think would have the resources to challenge them because they didn't even have the most basic requirements met, not just to meet a legal challenge,

but to publish an article in the first place. They were just blindly shooting down, you know, and banking on the fact that no one would take them on. It's very hard to make sense of One way the other, I think they realized that they, you know, what they had, whatever it was, was not as compelling as what may perhaps thought. And in terms of how we deal with it, we've been, I guess it's been happening, it's happened so many times that we've kind of, we've got a sense of how it works. But I think the most important lesson has been something that is probably important to mention, which is almost every single time that we've had a really inflammatory, unpleasant media

article, it's then been followed by a massive wave of online abuse and attack. and sometimes that will, very often that will target individuals. So we had one instance a few years ago where board members were targeted and one board member was targeted via her workplace, for example. We've had individual team members being trolled and abused in really unpleasant ways. And what's very striking is when it's someone who isn't a middle-aged right guy like me, the abuse is all the more unpleasant. And so there's a real, one of the most serious harms that comes from talking to

toxic media is less the content of the article as the impact it can have on individuals through the online abuse it gets. And we've changed how we work so that we try to not put individuals so much in the public eye where we can avoid it. And then the other thing we're doing is we talk to a lot of other organisations who have been unfairly targeted in the last few years to try to develop a kind of shared understanding of how we can best protect ourselves organizationally and how we can protect and support each other. It's led us to try to think about how do we, you know, how do we collectively protect civil society more from unfair media attacks as well as,

as well, drawing on our own experiences. Well, to wrap up this conversation, let's turn towards more specific solutions. So Stop Funding Hate has created a list of ethical advertisers. What makes an advertiser ethical and what is the goal in creating this list? The long-term goal is to move towards a world where, If you're a respectable company that wants to do the right thing, you're really thoughtful about where you're spending your advertising money. So just as I mentioned before, respectable companies don't buy products that involve slave labor or child labor, and they're very careful to audit their supply chains to ensure that they're not doing that.

If we can get to a world where enough big companies are auditing their advertising supply chain and ensuring that they're not funding media that profit from hate. and spreading disinformation, you could reach a critical mass where suddenly it just doesn't become possible to push the stuff anymore. A, I think that would, we think that would have a really transformative effect in the world and the positive way. And B, I think we would argue that a lot of other things that everyone cares about won't get better until we can fix that dysfunction. So that's the long-term goal. It's important to kind of promote the idea that this is a, this thing that responsible companies do and to, you know, positively recognize the companies that make the right choice. And one of the things that makes me hopeful is there will be pushback, but that is a longstanding way of bringing about positive change that can be really powerful if enough companies come on board with it.

Finally, a big question. If you could fix the way we do news, what would it look like? What would your ideal news media landscape be? Wouldn't it be brilliant and amazing if we had a media that could be relied on to, if not tell the truth, be trying. as best it can to tell the truth and report accurately and fairly. And when they fell short, would promptly recognise that and address it. And I think one thing that helps us is we do know what good journalism looks like, and we know that there's a difference between good journalism and propaganda. And that doesn't mean that every piece of journalism has to be, you know, the investigation that exposed Watergate or, you know, it could be any kind of news,

but it's making sure that there's a level of integrity and honesty that it's, is maintained and we can get away from hateful clipbait that's just about profit and that's profit and before truth and before people's well-being. It's just about scaling that so that the vast majority of media outlets would be following those recognised good journalist practices rather than at the moment sadly it seems like a minority. In some ways that sounds like quite bureaucratic answer but if you think about it the role that accurate media plays in bringing about a healthy society where people get on with each other, where people respect to each other. It's one of the single most important things I think that would make our

society better. Richard, thank you so much for joining us on Media Storm to wrap up, tell us where people can follow the campaign and how they can get involved. Easiest way is probably the website and stopfundinghate.com. Thank you for listening. Next week, it's time for Newswatch again. So send in any unhinged headlines you want us to dissect. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends and leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on

social media media mail at Mel at Helena Wadier and follow the show via at MediaStorm pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen O'Wodier and Matilda Malinson. It was edited by Toka Omar, the music is by Samphire.