Media Storm - Bad Think Tanks: How fake facts get into the news

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Last week, we talked about ‘New research shows…’ headlines, and how the media commodifies science into clickbait. This week, it's part two of that episode, looking at bad social science. Because this issue is not just about influencers selling us bogus diets and face creams. There’s also think tanks selling us bogus research on highly political topics: like abortion, immigration, or fossil fuels. Their funding is highly opaque, but if you trace the money, it tells a terrifying story about who shapes the truth in our information economy. Joining us this week is Peter Jukes, the co-founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times, who has written on the Murdoch empire, Russian influence, and "dark money" in politics – and exposed many a think tank scandal. We talk about the bad think tanks based at 55 Tufton Street, how media narratives about immigration and climate change were meticulously planned and peddled, and how we as news consumers can change the narrative. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  It was edited by ⁠Christy Callaway-Gale⁠ The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now streaming on Disney Plus, the Hulu original series Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum, on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. New episodes week over week. Watch the Hulu Original Series Furious, now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain, a grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Morning, morning, morning. Good morning, Matilda. How are you today? I am good. Great. Wow. Fantastic intro ramblings done. Are you good? I am good. I did actually have something to say this morning. A little PSA to our listeners. So my sister,

who is an OG Media Storm listener and follower, probably like the first person to ever follow us on Instagram, found herself not following Media Storm on Instagram anymore. Why? And she swears it was not her. It was not on purpose. So she thinks that some kind of like meta overlords have unfollowed her. What?

Yeah, now obviously we can't prove this. And it would be really funny if like my sister was just pissed off at me and just unfollowed media storm. But I genuinely don't think it was that. So she said she had messaged us, sent us a reel about something that she thought would be a good media storm topic. And then realized that she was no longer following us. Is this a thing? Have we seen, I don't know, like liberal creators posting about certain topics getting systematically unfollowed without consent? It has been known to be a thing, but obviously they would never admit that.

We can't really say it's a thing. But I guess just a shout out to all our listeners. Please check that you're still following us. Yeah, please do. You know what? Speaking of being unfollowed, I had an incident the other day where I saw my following had dropped by like 200 people. And this hadn't happened before.

So I thought, God, oh my God, what did I post? Did I post something really controversial? and I looked at the day that they dropped off the 13th of July. That just happens to be my wedding anniversary. And I posted a post about my husband. And I thought, oh my God, 200 people were following me on the condition that I was sexually available. Oh, my God. I literally only pretty much post about politics.

That is definitely a thing, though, for female, political, or like news and current affairs creators, right? Yeah, no, so I posted a story of the analytics because it cracked me up so much and I got messages from quite a lot of female political content creators including Isabel Farah who came on, who's come on media storm before,

she's a British-Lebanese comedian and political satirist and she was like, yeah, I posted about being pregnant and just like half my following dropped. The logic of that is insane. Yeah, and extremely sexist. Yeah, exactly, yeah, sad. Well, good riddance to those followers. And hello, any new followers.

Shall we get on with the show? Let's do it. Last week, we talked about new research shows headlines and how the media commodifies science into clickbait. Whether it's for clickbait or e-commerce or PR journalism, we're inundated with health articles that too often feed us useless non-information, like coffee cures cancer or. Coffee causes cancer. These might not kill you, but by systematically undermining the public's

understanding of science, they may be doing a huge amount of harm. It is precisely this that allows things like anti-vax conspiracy theories, climate denialism, or exploitative wellness influencing to flourish. It also allows anti-truthers like Donald Trump to undermine trust in experts and evidence. Today is part two of that episode, but instead of bad, science, talking about bad social science because this issue is not just about influencers selling us bogus diets and face creams. There's also think tanks selling us bogus research on highly political real-life topics like abortion, immigration, fossil fuels. Their funding is highly opaque, but if you trace the money, it tells a terrifying story about who shapes the truth in our information

economy. There is a link between last week's episode and today. We as a society are desperate to find quick fixes, one-pill solutions to complex issues. This bad research responds to an instinct to medicalize social and political problems, to conceive of them in a reductionist, biomedical framework and peddle cheap solutions. We'd rather be told some new fad diet can fix obesity, than wrap our heads around urban planning that promotes exercise or economic reforms to ensure poor people can afford unprocessed and fresh food. And we'd rather be told deporting foreigners will eradicate male violence against women than address the structural, cultural issues within our own society

necessary to even make a start. The thing we need to fight isn't just out there in dark money trails and private parties between politicians and think tanks and funders. It's in us. in our selective biases and echo chambers and willingness to accept easy narratives. But there is also corruption. And today, we'll call it out. The government wants you to think that the new net migration figures are good, they're not.

Analysis of Xactivity found a 40% increase in abortion mentions over four years. Is climate change? It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. Unless we can improve media literacy for everyone in the UK. Social cohesion is at risk and even democracy. itself is threatened. Welcome to MediaStorm, 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, research shows bad think tanks, bad data, bad headlines. Welcome to the Media Storm studio. Our guest today is the co-founder and executive editor of Byline Times, an independent, reader-funded investigative

newspaper. He's an author by background who moved into accountability journalism via the phone hacking scandal and has written on the Murdoch Empire, Russian influence and dark money in politics. Welcome to Media Storm Peter Dukes. Delighted to be here, finally. Finally. Now, we will begin this episode looking at the industry's churning out bad research. After the break, we'll take a look at the news media's role in spreading it and how to arm against it. Peter, as editor of Biobiles, line times, you have commissioned a huge body of investigative work digging into one address, 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, London. Now, listeners, this may be one of the most influential addresses you've never heard of. Peter, what happens at 55 Tufton Street? And why are you so

wary of it? That's a physical address and was where at a seven to nine think tanks, pressure groups gathered about 15 years ago. And basically, Basically, it's an American model of where people pay you money. Clients often hidden, you never know who they are. Maybe an oil firm or some contractor, 40 grand or something like that. And then these organizations would, in covert ways using dodgy research, their media contacts, their other parliamentary contacts, basically get your point of view across. would produce news, research that says, oh, you know, fossil fuels are great, or, you know, we should legalise cannabis.

There were all kinds of operations. But what the key thing about them was their opacity and their reliance on right-wing connections, particularly transatlantic. So what you're seeing is here, this unique sort of ecosystem, which developed the last 15 years, of very rich people, influencing the public. debate through various clandestine means. So it was very clever because you couldn't quite work out whether left wing or right wing. Taxpayers alliance, you know, it sounds like a grassroots organization. It's a Tufton Street entity. Obviously, it was an alliance not to pay taxes. Tax avoiders. Tax evaders alliance. And underlying that is a kind of, you know, industries which do not benefit from scrutiny or regulation will happily fund anybody in

Tufton Street, particularly fossil fuels, tobacco. And I think the worst thing about what they do is they're very close to the media. I mean, we saw this in Brexit. You basically get an op-ed or an article in the telegraph or in the Times in the mail, and you could trace the origin of that article to some businessman, and nearly always businessmen, giving a Tafton Street entity a load of Dosh. And we're going to dive way more into those media ties. But just to clarify, I guess, Peter, you would agree that there are good think tanks out there.

As a journalist, I often look to the IFS Institute for Fiscal Studies or Chatham House. I use a lot. How do we tell the difference between good think tanks and bad think tanks? It's very clear act of transparency and so diagnosis. who funds them, right? So, you know, these other think tanks, they have very transparent, their foundations, memberships.

And as we know in academia and good think tanks, they deliberately sort of remove these conflicts of interest. There's no distortion of the evidence. It's not party-prey, it's not an act of propaganda, or trying to influence public opinionists, try to inform. So it's not that difficult to tell. But it does require some searching around.

And, you know, the whole, hopefully the charity commission is cleaning up its act because a lot of these things are charities they get tax exemption. But the guy who was charity commissioner, William Shawkawks, Bargopher Rupert Murdoch, was kind of a chair of one of the societies on the board of the Henry Jackson Society.

So that whole civil society world where they're supposed to be charity and transparency and public interest really darkened and became more opaque thanks to their influence. And like any model, which is lucrative and politically successful, unfortunately, other people copy it and you're going to get them race to the bottom. So that was a unique phenomenon that began in the early noughties and became rife. Wow.

Well, now let's look at some of the misconceptions that have come out of this Tufton Street address. Peter, you've argued that these think tanks function to keep discredited ideas going. One of those specific ones is the low-tax, low-regulation, economic ideal that underpinned the infamous Liz Truss-Quarteg mini-budget. So are those ideas actually discredited? And by what methods do you think think tanks keep them alive? Well, I mean, there's one great act of discreditment of the fiasco of their zero-government approach,

which is Lisztrust's premiership. and what happened within a few days. I, you know, Liz Trust's budget, held by Nigel Farage, as an ultimate conservative budget, was the test of the idea you can basically, and you're seeing this in America, allow millionaires, billionaires,

give them more money, deplete public services, and what that does to the economy. Now, the economy thrives on consumer demand and, you know, probity of finances. Liz, trust, very, very quickly. She couldn't add up. Quasi Quarteng, her chancellor, dining and drinking with hedge funds as chancellor who was celebrating his 10 years now into the crypto business. So you had this

very short-term speculative idea of the economy. That the long-term understand it, that people need wages, they need security. If they're on benefits, they still buy things. Well, the proof of the pudding is in the catastrophic eating. I'd say another really good. example of the complete bankruptcy of their ideas is the Adam Smith Institute. And Junil famously wore one of their ties when he was presenting the daily politics and showing his alignment. The ideology of Adam Smith was, you know, free markets, right? Now, one of the first things Adam Smith warned about free markets was the special problem of monopoly. And quite often they're working with monopolies, whether it's tech or in finance or instructive industries,

with no problem at all. So Adam Smith believed it a generally open free market, but the thing he most warned against was government officials meeting in private conclave with businessmen and fixing deals, government to business, against the public interest. The biggest example of this, which Boulin Times recorded started recording in April 2020, as soon as well as, as lockdown happened was the PPE and COVID contract scandal. There you saw a VIP lane, mainly seemed to benefit conservative associates, getting preferential treatment for often dodgy and faulty personal protective equipment, which was needed by the NHS in the COVID pandemic, and billions. I mean, you know, the amounts, they were costing hundreds of millions just to store

the dodgy products, which then needs to be burnt. So this. This is a market dysfunction. This is corporatism. This is exactly what Adam Smith warned against 250 years ago. They said not a word about it. There wasn't one word of criticism. And so that is just they don't believe what they say and what they say they don't believe.

It's just deeply misleading branding, this think tank's name being the Adam Smith Institute. It's appropriating the reputation of this, you know, revered economist. In the same way that I think calling themselves think tanks sort of appropriates the reputation of these objective academic institutes to do something completely different. I want to look at one specific example of these institutions funneling dodgy data into the mainstream. And this is really, this is my sort of my beat and my personal passion. And it's about immigration.

And today it's about, it's this migrant crime narrative. Now, one of the Tufton Street think tanks today is called the Center for Migration Control, the CMC. And they have a near single-minded focus on trying to. to prove that rape is a foreigner problem. Nigel Farage loves to quote them. For example, last year he told the media, an Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country.

That statistic used highly outdated population data from before the huge 2023 immigration surge. That means it inevitably underestimated how many Afghans were in the UK population and overcalculated their crime rate. It also ignored variables like sex or age. Afghan migrants are disproportionately likely to be male and males are disproportionately likely to rape whatever their nationality. All of this to say, the migrant rape narrative has rapidly become one of the most dominant strands of our immigration debate.

How much of it is based on this dodgy think tank data? Well, and the Fiz Ahmed, our head of investigations, has done a recent update, which I could point your listeners to later. And basically, they have shifted from the libertarian narrative, as a lot of the right have, the kind of libertarian globalized, free movement of capital. And obviously, they don't like free movement of labour. They've shifted quite severely and warringly to a kind of blood libel.

I mean, you know, the whole, the rape pugees, that whole language was used during Brexit, during the Syrian crisis provoked by Putin, the refugees there, very much as a trope, a classic trope of barbarian invaders fighting age men to activate some of the most base instincts of people, their fears and their prejudices. And this utter willingness, yes,

to twist the facts in the most provocative way. And that's where the money is coming from. Farage's party has millions, into its coffers, they turn up at a Tufton Street meeting and say, we need this result, right? We're looking at the Great Replacement Theory, which is this bizarre theory that liberals are importing foreigners in order to get rid of the white population. And they will do it. They will do it. Because they are without compunction, they're not driven by judgment and facts. I'm not saying or every single one of them,

but the one you've adduced is the exact example of that. And it has the imprimatur of academic respectability and research. But it's got the respect to be of the famous academic Matthew Goodwin. I mean, it is radicalized by money, I think, more than anything. These people, the kind of people in this area have drifted to the right, not out of deep conviction often. It's often because that's where the money is. And yet it's quite appalling.

that they can still, I think, hopefully, your work will expose this. Call themselves an institute, right? And by the way, listeners, Matthew Goodwin, that academic you mentioned, he was the reform candidate who lost the Gordon and Denton by election to the Green Party's Hannah Spencer.

And on reform, 55 Tufton Street is owned by Richard Smith, who also happens to fund which political party is it? Tell us, what a spy. Reform. His group donated, what, like 100, K to reform within Farage's immediate return as leader?

And Goodwin's a good example of this strange shift, which I think, in a way, Tufton Street is part of, it's a driver, but it's also, if you're like, a victim of it, which is he was a middle of the road. He's no longer academic, by the way, I don't think he has any official post. But a middle of the road, kind of, you know, mixed everybody, do research and society, especially left behind communities, all the stuff that was quite a big factor, not as big some people say in Brexit. And slowly, thanks to his substact, thanks to maybe some of the grief he gets, he's shifting his academic integrity to be more polarising, to be more extreme, to be more exciting to drive outrage because the, which you know better than anybody,

is that's that attention grabbing, attention harvesting, this kind of polarized, confected, fact-free debate is where the money is. Absolutely. It's really sad. And, you know, this is just another example of what has happened in politics, funneling vast amounts of money, usually by billionaires who want to avoid any scrutiny or legislation or regulation. And it's the free rider problem. And once that kind of rule breaking, law breaking gets tolerated, you get free riders who get a head start.

You know, if you jump the gun, if you start running five seconds before everybody else, yes, you're going to win. But over time, nobody's going to play with you anymore. You actually bankrupt the whole notion of the game, of the race. And I think we're coming to the kind of apogee of that. You see it in stark and monstrous clarity in the US, the kind of endless corruption and lawbreaking of Donald Trump. And I think, I hope, you're beginning to see this here.

Obviously, the PPE scandal of the ongoing criminal investigations. Parliament is now looking at these hidden donations, the weird way you can donate without living here or a company that's nearly bankrupt, that we're beginning to realize we had these loopholes and wherever there's a loophole, the bad guys will find a way through it. Immigration, a very popular topic in Tufton Street,

and another hot topic, if you'll pardon the pun, is climate change. The Tuffington Street Network includes the Global Warming Policy Foundation, or GWPF, policy exchange, Affairs, or IEA. These are some of the UK's biggest climate sceptics. They are hugely influential. When Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, he revealed that a policy exchange brief helped his government legally draft the protest crackdown that saw 138 climate activists imprisoned. And as we'll discuss

in part two of this episode, they also have a huge amount of influence over our media, providing it with critical research on net zero. But, in order to assess the value of these think tanks climate research, what do we need to understand first about who funds them? It basically works this way. Somebody will turn up some money and they will commission research which serves their cause. So this is, you know, there's no objectivity here.

Who pays the piper plays the tune. And this does affect labour. There are labour members in policy exchange, labour connections. And as you say, these reports seem to have the imprimatur of authority. they are quoted. There is no air let into these plans because of the hermetically sealed world of money,

rich clients with an interest, you know, politicians with interest keeping in with that think tank because they could get money afterwards. Knowledge should be about, which is knowing what you don't know. That kind of scrutiny, that kind of challenging these ideas doesn't happen.

They fester in this bubble. Now, as you've mentioned, that the funding is very opaque, but Byline Times has done amazing investigative work, trying to shine a light on it. Other outlets include Open Democracy, D-Smog, so these figures are credited to them. But just to make that money flow really, really clear, the GWPF, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, received nearly a quarter of a million dollars from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which holds $30 million in shares across 22 energy companies,

including $9 million in Exxon and 5.7. million dollars in Chevron. Also, a byline Times article by Max Colbert revealed that the hedge funder Paul Marshall, whose fund holds billions in fossil fuel shares, donated £890,000 to policy exchange the group that advised Rishi Sunak's bill. So in other words, a think tank partfunded by fossil fuel interests help write the law used to jail hundreds of people protesting fossil fuels. This is our reality today. That's a lot of information for everyone. I think we'll take a quick break.

Next up, how dodgy data gets laundered by our media. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This Thursday, we're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing.

That's my responsibility. Talk to banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day, in theaters Thursday. When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, in-line skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s,

one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Welcome back to Media Storms. So far, we've looked at several bad think tanks and where they get their money. But it's one thing for these groups to peddle dodgy data. It's another issue altogether when it's reprinted in the media. By its own statistics, the Institute of Economic Affairs had over 5,000 media hits in a single year. That's an average of 14 appearances per day. Peter, you've spoken of this term media laundering.

Tell us what you mean by that. Well, it's partly a product of the crisis in journalism. We all know advertising was siphoned off to Google and Facebook, and so papers are strapped. And there's nothing better for journalists, you know, to have a ready-made story. It's called journalism. I think the Tufton Street think tank spotted that. They groomed.

I don't mean that in any dodgy way, but they get journalists over for one of their meetings and their panels. And then they have a cozy relationship. Here, I've got a story for you. These papers short of money, they will accept these kind of, not favors. You know, it is a commercial relationship, but it always skews one way. And soon this becomes a carousel, a carousel of bad ideas, and they feed back to each other, radicalizing the readership, radicalizing the country to extreme policies that don't work.

I mean, Boris Johnson obviously came to power. It took a while on the back of Brexit, which was credited on the fear of, refugees and migrants. Then, of course, the biggest migrant wave, migrant workers, was under Boris Johnson, a million new social security numbers. We documented that, you know, hold on, you've left Europe, you have a care crisis, you have crops not being picked in the field, no longer free movement labour of Europe, millions of Europeans have gone home and what do you do from other places they'll arrive.

No paper picked it up at the time. They're now banging on about it because it's Farage's Boris Wave thing. So this is a problem. You're not having a mirror on society. What you're having is something which is part of the distortion mechanism. It's a twisted. It's a lens which deliberately omits some things and focuses on others to manipulate public opinion. And that's when they're boasting about their media hits.

They're telling you they're operational, aren't they? The unforgivable thing. And my friend Carol Cadwalder challenged the then-director-General about this. is these people appear regularly on the public service broadcaster, BBC, saying from Tafton, you know, from Adam Smith Institute or IEA or any of these outfits without explaining the interests of these people who funds them. Right. And let me just pick up on that because, as you mentioned, Byline Times and CalCabolida ran this campaign,

which saw the BBC change its guidelines on booking these think tank representatives as expert speakers. So instead of presenting them as neutral experts, the BBC is supposed to disclose relevant funding info. Did that solve the problem in any way? No, it lasted about a month. I don't know what happened and we got busy with other things. But this happens at a kind of level below management oversight. It's a kind of ethos. And whatever happened, they're on all the time.

I mean, you know, they have this sort of false. of balance, that classic thing, you know, midway between a truth and lies, not the truth. We've got to have a tiny minority view, 3% of scientists, climate scientists think it's not happening, it's not human-made contributions to global warming. But they feel they have to have the 3% on. I mean, they don't, every time they had it at Edinburgh on television, they didn't have a creationist. I mean, I know God made the animals 4,000 years ago.

Their duty is to inform, right? And it's called due impartiality. So, you know, you don't need impartiality over craziness, whether the world's flat or, you know, over climate science. But the pressures on them, right? This is where, in a way, the overton window has been shifted for the BBC. It's called an information operation. You basically change somebody's reality,

and you shift them without them realizing, though in another world, they think the world's like this. Everybody hates migrants, everybody hates immigrants, everybody hates refugees, everybody hates Europe. And that combination of research, their research is basically a form of information warfare. Let's be clear. That combined with online operations, that combined with financial incentives, moves the reality of these people. But the reassuring thing, it doesn't actually remove reality.

Look, you know, fires this summer, you know, climate change is real, unprecedented temperatures. There are arguments how to mitigate it. The arguments about the feedback mechanisms built into nature, which may be, you know, make it worse or mitigate it. But, you know, to deny even Thatcher for all her things you could blame, her belief in the free market and getting rid of regulation and state industry, state controlled industries. She believed in science. She believed that, you know, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere would have, clearly as a scientist, have impacts on the greenhouse effect. So I think the solution to this is, you know, exposure. They hate daylight.

The impression that I'm left with from all of this is there's this sort of triangle between the think tanks, the media and Westminster. And there's an information flow, right? A self-reinforcing information flow. We want this truth to be out there. You find some data, manipulate some data to prove it. We'll publish it. and then we will garner votes off it. And it's not just this information flow.

There's also like a flow of people. There's a sort of revolving door with the centre of migration control. I noticed, okay, they're being published in the telegraph, like suspiciously regularly and suspiciously quickly. Turns out byline times had done a piece on it. And the first ever telegraph piece written on the CMC's data about migrants was by a journalist called Stephen Edginton. Or his bio says he's an investigative journalist. but he was also previously chief digital strategist for the Brexit Party and the Leave Means Leave campaigns. Incidentally, he was the first person to follow the Centre for Migration Control on X,

the very first follower before they were even registered as an organisation. Earlier we mentioned fossil fuel shareholder Paul Marshall, who gave a huge amount of money to policy exchange. Paul Marshall is the co-owner of GB News. And the spectator, and most importantly, because that's where Michael Gove is the editor. and unheard. Right. He made a bid for the telegraph. So yes, exactly.

They understand this triangulated media system. Absolutely. Edgington is very interesting case because he was Isabel Oakshot's researcher. That's how he began as a young journalist and a mother questionably got hold of some tapes and records from the British ambassador, Darok, which caused his resignation.

Isabel Oakshot published. So, yeah, if you're a young journalist, it is tempted because you will be looked after. Like, it's difficult getting a job in journalism. He's had a couple of scoops in the mail, thanks to her. Don't worry, here's another job. Be the comms officer. Don't, you know, and you can see the whole path laid ahead for you of financial security, status, and meaningful us in this ecosystem. And, you know, that's what, it captures people that way.

It's just, it's so incestuous. You missed the trick there. You could have done, no. I don't think it's worth it. I mean, you've got to live with yourself. You're dependent on benefactors. You're captured by then. You're going to have to crawl up to them.

And it doesn't do wonders for your reputation because as you're proving, as other journalists have proved, this will come out. But this is what civil cyber journalism is all about. You know, what did you really do? Who are you really? Accountability. But it is, it's a good way and a rare way.

to actually make money as a journalist. Well, exactly. Look, you know, and that is part of the ultimate problem. You're doing a great job. We survive and we managed to pay a lot of journalists, not that much, you know. But we all know how difficult it is when people expect news to be free to make a living out of this a vocation. It's a kind of public good.

And, you know, it's turning it into a propaganda arm is very wiring. But it all comes out of the evisceration. of the news industry, the lack of advertising revenue, what's happening in big tech. I think it's beginning, your show does it, it's beginning to come around because ultimately the laundered information through the telegraph and the mail is falling on increasingly deaf, elderly and fewer ears. Peter, you know, we've identified the problems, we've delved into it, we've seen how the media is an integral part of this.

and now I need some solutions. I need some positivity and some hope. So how do we protect ourselves from being manipulated by bad data? Because this is also on us as readers or consumers of the news. So if we hear or see a think tank quoted on the news tomorrow, what questions should we ask ourselves? Well, who's promoting it? And unfortunately, you know, that includes the laziness or.

coercion of public service broadcasters, like the BBC on the Today program or Newsnight or on question time. As the decline in trust happens across media, you know, it's much more difficult to launder these facts unchallenged. And the good side of social media, even AI, you can just look it up, you know, what? They're saying that and immediately find an alternative explanation of the source of their facts. I think regulation is in order. I think what's happened with the lobbying out, there's talks and making that much clearer because really these are not think tanks,

they're lobbying outfits. I think as party donations are cleaned up, less money will be funneled through. I think, to be honest, the sense that we are beholden to America, that America comes over here with all this money and plays its games, I think that transatlantic funnel

is diminishing, that we do not look up to America in the same way. Trump, you know, and that will help The integrity of information, of objectivity of journalism is hugely compromised when outlets are dependent upon the super wealthy. So I suppose that you'd agree, one way we can fight this is to fund outlets, to fund independent journalism, to fund the kind of information that can combat those think tanks and dodgy media that they're associated with. Yeah, and, you know, you've mentioned DeSmog, Open Democracy, other substack. Carol has, Carl Cadwall had a brilliant sub-substack, and I think independent journalism is definitely

one way. I think journalistic standards are next. When I worked, I first started journalists in my 50s, and I first started writing for the Daily Beast, Tina Brown was the editor then. And when her wonderful husband sadly departed, Harry Evans, he used to have to declare. And my wife is the editor here, so don't trust what I say. effectively declare your interests, that should be taught in journalism school,

double-sourcing everything. And I think, you know, just as a word of encouragement, basically what happened is the yellow press was at the end of the 19th century. It was the worst press in the world. That's the era of early citizen, Kane, Hearst. And then something happened,

especially around Time magazine and the New York Times, the suddenly, from a race to the bottom, the standards went up, and everything started. improving and fact-checking, you know, declaring interests, a sense of proportion, a sense of fairness, a sense of bad, you know, proper due impartiality. So it can change very suddenly. America had the reputation of the worst press in the world.

By about 1910, 1920, it was, you know, had reputation one of the best sort of newspaper ecosystems in the world. Do you know, like, what do you think triggered that? So I did research this. It was a series of scandals, especially around Stadad. and these big figures. It was kind of Elon Musk moment. We've got one of those. We've got an Elon Musk moment. And we've got the Paul Marshall moment. He's a hedge funder, made a lot of money during Brexit.

You know, I think there's laws to be passed or clarified about market. It's not just inside of information. It's market manipulation, abusive market. That should be strengthened. And finally, Peter, just for your part, can you tell us where listeners can follow you and if you have anything personally to plug? Well, I'm always plugging Byline Times. It completely has no funders except its subscribers. And it's at BylineTimes.com. Most of our news investigations is free, but we have a paid-for magazine, either digital or in the stores, which has a lot of extra content, beautifully laid out, a lot of cultural stuff.

And so the best way you can support our investigations journalism is if you're reading a great free news story, subscribe to that. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you for listening. If you want to support MediaStorm, you could 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. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone.

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