Media Storm - Capitalism and clickbait: Who owns the news?

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Like this episode? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! The Telegraph is for sale. Why? A couple of billionaire brothers ran it into debt, and now a few more billionaires are lining up to buy it. Spoiler alert: most of them already own the mainstream media! But just because our news is owned by billionaires, that doesn’t make it biased towards them… right?! On Media Storm podcast, we break down hidden biases behind the week’s headlines - everything from immigration to geopolitical conflict to healthcare. And we find lots of common problems: clickbait, missing voices, polarisation. But there’s one problem to rule them all, and it helps to explain where all the others are coming from: MONEY. All roads lead to Capitalism. And so for today’s deep-dive episode, economics reporter Jessica Burbank (@kaburbank) and critical theory scholar Louisa Munch (@louisamunchtheory) join Mathilda and Helena to talk about how profit perverts journalism. We look at the week’s headlines in the USA and UK, and ask if the wealthy are weaving the story their way. Economics is hard and boring, we get it. But both our guests are experts in making economics accessible, and as they tell us, until the public understands how the economy works, we can never make it work for us. The good news is, it’s not nearly as complicated as most media make it out to be - so get listening! The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Hi Helena. Hi, Middilda. Question, if you had to pick out, say, three key themes that come up again and again in every media storm topic. What would they be? Okay, I would definitely say minorities in terms of the way they are scapegoated. I would say clickbait and I would probably say who's in power, like power structures. Great. This is good. Now tell me one theme that underpins all of those, like the root cause

explaining each of those poisonous problems. Um, what's the common thread? Money? Money is correct. All roads lead to capitalism. I find this again and again on Media Storm. And so today's episode is going to be about capitalism. Yeah, what actually is capitalism? Here we go. We will surely get some better explanation. from our guests, but capitalism is an economic and political system established on the principles of private ownership, profit and growth. It's driven by market competition and it resists government state intervention. What's this got to do with the news? Luckily, this week we actually have a great case study to help us understand how capitalism intersects with our news media.

Because our media may not be state owned, but it is owned by someone. And right now, the Telegraph, a right-wing newspaper that's about 180 years old here in the UK, is for sale. Hasn't it been for years now? What is actually going on? Yeah, you're not wrong. The Telegraph sale seemed all done and dusted until a 500 million pound takeover fell through at the start of this week. Frankly, I've been looking at it and it's one big mess of unpaid debts and flawed valuations and billionaire family dramas and conflicts of interests. tax evasion, and the list goes on. Sounds like capitalism. The last I knew it was owned by the billionaire Barclay Brothers, right? Yes, so the last owners were the Barclay family. You're right in that. But the paper's been in ownership limbo since 2003 when Lloyd's Banking Group effectively

repossessed the business from the family because the Barclays had racked up massive debts. then US private equity firm Redbird won the bid to buy the paper by agreeing to pay off £1.2 billion of the Berkeley family debts. And they also agreed to buy the paper for a price far higher than its actual market value. Okay, I mean, that sounds like a great deal for the Telegraph, so why is it falling through? Well, that's a curious question, because while it seems like a great deal financially, telegraph journalists at a senior level, they haven't been very happy about it. And they're part of the reason the deal has fallen through. They have been basically publishing quite a lot of negative press. For example, linking Redbird to the Chinese government.

Not the communists. Exactly. That doesn't sit too well with the right wing paper. But look, they're not the only ones who are reasonably worried about foreign influence over British media. Redbird is actually majority owned by the United Arab Emirates. And so since the deal went through, our government has passed a new law banning foreign states from owning more than 15% of UK papers and that is really why the deal became untenable. Okay so where does that leave the telegraph now? Who are the likely new buyers? A few names are being passed around. There's Sir Paul Marshall. No. He's a G.B. News investor and a spectator owner and he also owns unheard, the conservative news and opinion site. There's also

Chelsea Football Club co-owner Todd Bowley, who reportedly might be teaming up with Lord Rothermer. He owns DMG Media, that's the group that owns the Daily Mail. Then there's News Corp. Rupert Murdoch's Enterprise. Now that also already owns the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times here in the UK. There's also the New York Sun owner. You're starting to spot a theme? Yeah, I think the theme might be a billionaire media.

oligarchy, who I can't help noticing all just happen to be white men. Yeah, so before the Barclay Brothers bought the telegraph for 665 million pounds back in 2004, drove it into debt. And drove it into debt. The newspaper was owned by a man called Lord Conrad Black. He went to jail in the US for fraud before being pardoned by none other than President Donald Trump. This is like the worst episode of EastEnders ever. Um, yeah, so look, that tells you quite a lot about the state of ownership of global news media.

Okay, now tell me how did the Barclays brothers drive the paper into debt? Oof, well, basically, the Barclays family owned a massive web of companies and offshore accounts, and all of them were loaning money to each other, which meant they were all sort of vulnerable to each other's failures. Now, at one point, the family delivery company, which was called Yodel, was losing more. more than a million pounds a week. Another family company got caught up in a massive compensation scandal that cost more than half a billion pounds.

Other issues include an expensive divorce settlement for one of the 87 year old Berkeley brothers. And now during all of this, mounting debt, the family were criticized for extracting over 100 million pounds from their holding companies in personal wealth, just as their businesses' debt were spiraling and bankers were beginning to circle. Basically, it all sounds super incorrupt and totally ethical.

The only thing missing here is tax evasion. Oh, yes, thank you for reminding me. One example, the Barclays owned the Ritz Hotel. That was exposed by BBC Panorama in 2012 for paying zero corporation tax, despite being pretty profitable. To this, the Barclays responded that they'd had nothing to do with management since they'd actually retired to Monaco, a famous tax haven, 20 years before. Well, I personally see no potential issues that this poses for the integrity and impartiality and independence of our news media. So there's no need to do this episode. No, let's just go home.

What are we talking about today? Today we are asking, who actually profits from clickbait, culture war and crock of shit news? How clear are lines of succession in the media empire. And how blurry is the line between ownership and ownership and. influence. The leaders of the unions, they're not socialist, they are selfish. If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? The American middle class, the British middle class is dying, their wealth is being sucked away and is being owned by an international super rich elite who pay no tax. The number of media companies controlling the bulk of US media has shrunk from 50 to just five. Welcome to Media Storm's

News Watch helping you get your head around the headlines. I'm Matilda Malinson and I'm Helena warrior this week's media storm capitalism clickbait and culture wars you need to know who owns your news welcome to media storm our first guest is joining us from iowa she's an economist and investigative journalist who you may know from drop site news and she makes hilarious videos about economics on social media welcome to media storm jessica berbank thank you for having me i'm excited to come on it's true from Iowa. Our second guest is not in Iowa. She is in Warwick. She's a critical theorist doing her PhD and teaching at the University of Warwick and she also makes hilarious videos about scary academic topics on social media. So very welcome to Media Storm Louisa Munch. Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

So at its root capitalism is about ownership. The question here is who owns our news. Listeners may have gotten a sense of this from our intro. In the UK, 90% of media is owned and controlled by just three companies, companies that in turn are largely owned by highly influential billionaires. The first of these companies is DMG Media, which owns the Daily Mail, the Metro, INews, and it accounts for nearly 40% of weekly newspaper circulation in the country. It's majority owned by one of our noblemen, yes, we still have noblemen, the Viscount Rothermear, aka Jonathan Harmsworth. News UK, one of Rupert Murdoch's babies. It owns the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times, to name a few. And the third is Reach PLC, which accounts for the mirrors, the stars, and the expresses. That's the UK. But Jessica, could you paint us a quick picture of media ownership in the US? Yeah, none of our men are noble. We don't have that here. But congratulations. We share, unfortunately,

Murdoch getting his fingers in our media. He's pretty big with Fox. corporation owning the Wall Street Journal. A lot of people don't know this, but TMZ actually is in Fox Corp. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Bloomberg owns Bloomberg. But it's a big thing that billionaires buy up these media companies and merge them together. So it's extremely consolidated. Like five companies own the majority of the market share. So we've really got a monopoly problem in our media in the US. And why is this a problem? Like just straight off the bat, what problem do we with the fact that there are these monopolies, the fact that our press is owned by a handful of billionaires. What's wrong with that? They're using the media as an arm for whatever their

political agenda is. We've seen just flat out misinformation be pushed through a lot of different ways, right? It could be just misleading representation of statistics. And suddenly, you've got audiences across America who watched Fox News that evening, questioning whether affirmative action is a beneficial policy to have in the United States. All the while, the billionaires are pushing policies that make more people unemployed, transfer wealth to the elites who already have the most of it. And so the more we see media consolidate into the hands of the few, the less we see information and arguments that are critical of power.

And so it's created an environment that just sustains their endless accumulation of more capital. And, you know, it's not just owners. editors and journalists are not exactly the most representative. A recent UK study found only 12% of journalists come from a working class background. This is even lower when you exclude local papers and look at national outlets like The Guardian, the Daily Mail or the Financial Times. As journalists, we're four times more likely to be privately educated than the general population. And admittedly, this checks out for both Matilda and I.

It's really not hard to see why this happens in our industry. we know that it's like riddled with unpaid internships. It's centralised generally in the most expensive cities to live in. You've got to do expensive post-grad degrees. Louisa, when you look at our media, what do you think most journalists don't understand about class? Like you said, I think most journalists don't understand class because most journalists aren't working class.

I mean, if we look at the way that strikes are presented in the media saying that working class people are holding the country to ransom, even like the way that they present benefits, there is no sort of understanding that. It's very much a narrative created by the very wealthy. And that's a huge problem because when somebody owns the media, they also own the kind of thinking of the masses, don't they?

They own the consciousness of the people. That's where we get our information. So when it's biased and when it is owned by very extremely wealthy people, then that is a huge issue for what, what a theorist called Gramsci would call cultural hegemony. It does create this blame culture as well as working class people. You touch on kind of a core issue. News outlets idealise and often claim to espouse objectivity and impartiality.

But how can you be objective if the people who own and operate the media have never known what it's like to be working class, have never known economic hardship? We want to look at some recent headline examples and ask whether the media, media's narrow ownership and representation results in systemic bias towards wealth, power, or the status quo. Yeah, did you guys have any specific headlines you wanted to bring in? I have a couple we can go through. So I got this email pushed from Bloomberg, and it's a real story that Bloomberg has published. And it's, where should you invest $1 million? Just the $1 million you have hanging around in your house, we're all wondering, what do we do with this old stack of $1 million?

but they've created an openly exclusive club by saying the people who should consume the economic news we report should have $1 million hanging around. So that was insane. But then also I checked out how the New York Times has been reporting on our Federal Reserve, our central bank cutting interest rates. And they're speaking to the audience from the perspective of them being consumers. What are you going to pay when you take out a loan for a car? What are you going to pay for a mortgage? What's going to happen to the market? Most people engage with the economy as workers. In America, 62% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. They don't have savings accounts. They're not investors. And actually, adjusting interest rates has major macroeconomic effects on

the labor market. It increases competition for jobs, which typically reduces wages and benefits and harms workers' ability to collectively organize because companies can easily replace them. You'll never hear the New York Times talk about that. But they will speak to people as if they're just drones that spend money into the economy, and they shouldn't actually think about themselves very differently either. Totally. I'm like honestly often really shocked when I get, I get the telegraph newsletter. Helena and I talked about the telegraph in the introduction to this episode because it's for sale. And it's an incredibly pro-wealth paper. And you can see how that resides across its politics, because the newsletter will come through and it'll say, you know, these Gen Z, climate

snowflake nuisances. And then it'll say, you know, these doctors striking because they don't care about patients and then it'll say how do you invest one million pounds you know that the majority of their economic content is about wealth management and Louisa you were talking about how often our media seems to be like wired against strikers or wired against benefits this week the telegraph has done a massive output of coverage of both strikes and benefits because the doctors are striking right now in the UK and also we have a budget coming up I just want to read you a selection of their benefits headlines benefits Britain is out of the madness must end. Hardworking families are being destroyed to pay for the benefits class,

how millions ended up on benefits with no need to seek work. And the thing is it really like fuels public misconception because in both the US and the UK polling shows that the public wildly overestimate benefits fraud and how many people are like fraudulently claiming benefits. In the US, nearly 60% of adults polled by UGov called it very common or somewhat common when the actual estimate of the benefit fraud in question was about 1.5% of applications. Similarly in the UK, people estimated benefits fraud to cost 10 times what it actually does to the government. You know, that gap in reality and public perception that is fuelled by a media that is skewing the public to mistrust benefits claimants.

And I bet that none of those articles that you mentioned in the Telegraph there actually spoke to anybody who was on benefits. No, no, they didn't. Yeah, I think it's just ridiculous. There is no coverage there of tax fraud either and the tax dodging that's going on. That's costing the country way more money than people on benefits. And it's all about punching down. It's just constantly punching down. Yeah, I, you know, it was actually probably only until on Media Storm we did an episode about strikes that I realized that strikes are the best examples of workers coming together to demand more.

You know, we hear a lot of like, oh, that tube driver makes 60K and he just sits on his ass and I do this job and I only make this much. And I'm like, well, okay, you should also be demanding more. But it's shocking how we look down and blame, for example, Union. rather than looking up and blaming, for example, wealth inequality. Jess, do you think that we're just manipulated to distrust economic justice? Absolutely, yes. I mean, billionaires are collectively bargaining. In the United States, we've seen the vast majority of our productive capacity in the first two

quarters of this year go only to developing data centers. So when the billionaires have an agenda and they would like to develop AI, they put the entirety of our nation's productive capacity towards that one thing. That's where the new jobs are. You want a job in America. You work at a data center. Shouldn't the people who do the work have some sort of say about what their labor goes on to build and produce? And for some reason, we really understand democracy in America when it comes to politics to an extent. We don't apply that same thinking to the economy whatsoever. Snap benefits are delayed because the government is shut down. And the entirety of social media is posts complaining that they can get

sweet treats at the gas station with their SNAP benefits. And the conversation should really be why are full-time employees at Walmart and McDonald's on SNAP? Why are Walmart and McDonald's with multi-billion dollar profits annually, essentially relying on the government to subsidize their workers' wages? Those questions just aren't asked in the media. And it's it's because they rely on them as advertisers and their shareholders are the same people who are shareholders in McDonald's and Walmart. So they're fine. I guess the question actually here is, you know, we have given examples of quite right-wing media that outwardly reach to wealthy audiences and are not ashamed to brand themselves in that way. Is this a right-wing

problem in the media or is it broader than that? Yeah, I can speak to this being a problem in the United States. It's definitely an issue. The Democratic Party, used to be seen as, you know, the party of workers, the party of unions. And because the people leading the party are almost always from the investor class, I won't say ruling class, but from people who make a decent chunk of their money off of their assets and off of investments. And they don't really know what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. That's been a real crisis because the agenda of the party that supposedly the party of working people no longer matches the needs of working people. And so left-wing media outlets really, really reflect this. And it's frustrating

to see people focus so much on is this media source a right-wing media source or is a left-wing media source? Left-wing media source, people call the New York Times a left-wing media source when it's always been an arm of American imperialism and capitalism. And so it's really frustrating to have everything branded as a right or left divide and have people holistically have no concept of class in the United States in a meaningful way. I think there's an anxiety among the educated class that still has to work for a living that if we set things right and recognize working people as just as valuable to society as us, that that means they will lose power. And those are the people who run the political parties in the United States. So that's a real crisis.

Maybe one of the big problems is that people just don't understand economics. And that's fair enough, it's hard. Both of you specialize in simplifying complex economic theory for social media audiences. Jess, can you tell us, first of all, just how big an issue is public inability to understand basic economics and data? It's not, I don't think it's like one of these topics. They make it seem economics, the field as a whole. Like, it is this insanely complex field that only the smartest people are capable of comprehending at the most basic level. And there are very smart people at our Ivy League institutions that have worked the numbers all out.

And that's why the working class in America can't have nice things. And the masses of our country just say, okay, yeah, that sounds about right. Because it's been made intentionally difficult to understand. They use entirely different words that are in the typical lexicon of the average person. Economics could be taught, I think, in K through 12 education without much math, just conceptually, basic addition and subtraction. And so right now we have the mainstream media not made for the masses. They're defunding our public education.

There's no consideration that they should ever teach economics. So they're simultaneously making information inaccessible. they're divesting from the already bad education that's available to people in the United States, then you can't criticize them unless you understand them. And so I think there's a great frustration in the U.S. that people aren't coming on board, but the reaction has been, well, these people are stupid because they don't understand it. And I think that's really divided and hurt our country instead of saying, this is someone who doesn't understand the economic system yet, or that they're being abused by the elites and the capitalists in our country and being taken advantage of,

and it's an opportunity to educate them rather than shame them for not knowing what you've been lucky to have a chance to get to understand. And that's what both of you do so well is educate people about subjects that otherwise people are generally pretty scared of. Louisa, what have you found works for you in trying to get audiences that are not necessarily digesting this information to actually digest this information. So I work in Warwick and I teach, you know, I'm an academic, I guess. And I go home to Rochdale and nobody in my family has a university degree. My Nana, she votes, well, she voted for reform last time. And I can't move between these two worlds without having a language in which to communicate. I drive three hours to

and from work, that distance feels like a different universe, two different worlds. And I think that's one of the biggest problems that we have in the UK. It's not just a wealth divide. It's an educational divide. And education is freedom. Education is power always, you know. Being able to understand is your ability to liberate yourself from an oppressive system. If you can't name the oppression, you're never going to overcome it. And funnily enough, like I come from a town that has the lowest social mobility in the country. Outside, like, there's a million flags, you know, there's St George's flags up everywhere on roundabouts. That is manufactured ignorance. It's completely manufactured by the state. The university degrees are so expensive now.

It's seen as a personal investment when it absolutely is not. It's a public good. It's a civic good and it should be treated as such. And when you ensure that it's exclusive and it's exclusionary, that's an oppressive system. So the sort of tools that I use, it speaks people in their own language. I remember I saw a quote by Einstein once that says everything should be made as simple as possible. And I thought, well, if he can say that, well, you know, he's a pretty spying. So it's true. There's a famous, like, Nietzsche quote that's like, if you muddy the waters, it's because it's not that deep. And I think that sums it up, really. You need to be able to speak in a language that everybody can understand. And if you're not, well, I sometimes doubt that

even you understand yourself. Like, when I teach my classes, I'll make it relatable to something in the lives they might have seen. Like, I taught orientalism today. So, saying, like, have you ever picked up a chicken karma from Tesco and checked out the font? You know, that's orientalism. The problem every day, take away the mystification, you know, and the absurdity of it all, it's not. It's quite simple. The problem is in plain sight. We just need a language in which we can communicate about it. What a good example of why representation is also so important. Yeah. Jess, what's your secret? It's actually the same. I don't have anything to add. It's crazy. I grew up in Stanford, Connecticut, which is this, it's kind of like a suburb of New York with a

huge immigrant and a huge working class population. But very nearby, within 20 minutes, are huge, homes of bankers who work on Wall Street. Neither of my parents have college degrees. My sister did not get a college degree. You know, I'm the first of my family to end up getting one. I see what's being discussed on the news, and I think I can't imagine anyone relating to what's being said. The people doing public policy research in the United States don't even know what questions to ask because they don't know what the regular struggles are of people. They don't know how or why systems. are broken. So how can they expect to fix them? Social media provided an opportunity for people like Louisa and I to speak to people in terms they can understand. And the main worry I have now is

watching the tech billionaires consolidate their power and what are they going to do with this platform that we've been given that they didn't realize they were giving us. And on that slightly ominous note, we'll take an ad break because we are slaves to the capitalist system. Welcome back. Now we're going to talk about how the media makes money. Most news media are run for profit and many are struggling with the decline of print circulation and now the rise of AI diverting money from digital news. Side note, listen to our recent episode on AI and journalism. But news outlets have to find ways to pay for good journalism, please.

One option is by making audiences pay to access the news. But then you have the problem that accurate information isn't equally free for all. Louisa, what are your thoughts on using paywalls to fund journalism? It's the same as how I feel about education. Information should be freely available. It's a very, very dangerous game when you make information inaccessible or you tie it to wealth. Because again, it just broadens and creates this class divide, doesn't it? Then Jessica, as a journalist who needs to be paid somehow, what do you?

think of paywalls or what do you think are the best ways to fund journalism? Paywalls are interesting because I try to do everything that I think is of public consequence that I'm reporting on or discussing. I try to make it accessible for free. It's something that's difficult to do because how do you make money? And so I think it's good to maybe have a paywall for your niche content. There really isn't room to do media without making yourself friendly enough for advertisers or charging money to do it. And that's really scary. Yeah, it's so scary. And it is really hard. And ever since we started media storm, we've been really, really honest with the constant difficulties we have, trying to break even. And this is where we remind listeners that we have a

Patreon, because we think that the best model for journalism is if you can pay, pay so that others don't have to, voluntary sort of donations-based journalism. And the thing we want to talk here now mostly is that the most common funding model for journalism, which is advertising, because on pretty much every episode on MediaStom, we talk about how ad-funded journalism models incentivise clickbait and incentivise sensationalism, right? News outlets need as much click-through and scrolling as possible to maximize ad traffic. And so they publish stories that people want to see, rather than the news that people need to see, and accuracy suffers. We especially want to talk in. We especially want to talk here about how the most successful clickbait is rage bait, and this leads to the systemic

demonisation of minorities by the mainstream media. This week in the UK, for example, we woke up to almost universal front pages celebrating Labour's new punitive policies towards asylum seekers, a term we often forget that refers to people seeking sanctuary from persecution, war and disaster. By now, this is a weekly occurrence. Here's a selection of BBC News, Illegal Migration, tearing UK apart, Mahmood says. Daily Mail, illegal migrants facing deportation are given art classes and IT lessons at cost to the taxpayer. GB News, migrant crisis, nine and ten councils will be housing asylum seekers by December. Also, they've put asylum seekers in inverted commas for some reason, as if they don't exist. Our media blames migrants for everything, from the housing

crisis to the healthcare crisis to the education crisis. Louisa, you've touched on it, why is this not accurate? It's the oldest trick in the fascist playbook, to be honest. Scapegoat in, you know, is a distraction. And yes, it's clickbaited, yes, it's rage bait. But this is extremely dangerous to be rallying the masses against an image of the other. Because it completely distracts from the actual problems. It gives you a nice safe place to contain all the problems you feel,

a place where you can blame the cost of living. crisis. And it's interesting because hope not hate, they recently did this survey where they asked like 11,000 people who would vote reform tomorrow, their main reasons for doing so. The number one issue for the white working class was cost of living. So they just legitimately think that if you get rid of these people, then their life will improve and their economic status will improve when that is completely untrue, that is completely fabricated by the media. It's just a complete fantasy. It's, you know, we actually call it the racist fantasy in psychoanalysis. And why won't deporting all these migrants solve people's problems? You know, what are the

root economic and social issues being glossed over when the media resorts to scapegoating minorities instead? Jessica. I worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020. I was knocking doors in southwestern Iowa, talking to people about his campaign. And I remember this man answered the door. And he said, I can see that your shirt says Bernie Sanders. I'm just going to tell you right now, we're not going to see eye to eye on anything. He said, I think every immigrant should be shot as soon as they crossed the border. And I wouldn't blame anyone who walked away, didn't talk to him. But through a lot of trading on how to engage with people like this, I felt like I should. And I said, listen, no one's running on that. It's actually very illegal. And

I don't agree with every politician on every issue. But I understand that a lot of people are struggling to get by. And if you work hard, you want to be able to do well, which is really, of course, the root cause of people who are upset about immigrants crossing the southern border in the U.S. And I said, my parents are going to retire soon, and I'm worried that social security isn't going to be enough for them to live on. Bernie is running on increasing social security. What's something that's actually on the table, this election that you care about? And the man nearly broke down crying. And he touched the side of his house. The shingles were falling off. And he said, I almost lost my home. My wife had to move away to work on a farm in order to pay

the bills because Social Security isn't enough for us to live on. And then he filled out a form and committed to caucus for Bernie Sanders. And so when there is someone who interrupts this excuse narrative and says, actually, you worked hard your whole life. You deserve a stable retirement and it's corporations that are trying to steal this from you because they're incredibly greedy. People have someone else to be mad at because at the end of the day, they're rightfully angry that they're struggling and they're being told to be mad at the wrong people. And the media is not really creating an environment where there's any alternatives. Why is this not working? Why are the politicians and the parties that are actually proposing

policies that might help people who are economically struggling, losing the votes of those communities. I think it's a lot to do, again, with the language. We have Mandani, don't we? That's giving me a lot of hope. And we have Zach Polanski in the Green Party. But the language needs to change because it's not just the economic elite. It's the cultural elite, I think they call it, you know, the educational elite. And when you start to use language that alienates the white working class, they're going to think they're voting once again for an elitist class. Like, look at the populists, like Nigel Farage, like Donald Trump. The language that they're speaking is the language of the white working class.

It is understandable. It comes down again to this idea that the economy is something that we can't fully understand, that everything has become something we can't fully understand. When everything's obfuscated, when somebody says to you, well, actually, no, don't worry, it's just this migrant over there that's the problem. It appeals to people. And also, this whole narrative about scarcity. There isn't scarcity.

There is more than enough houses. There are empty houses. You know, the problem is not scarcity. It's inequality. And that narrative is not pushed through the media because it doesn't, it's not click-baity. You know, wealth inequality isn't very click-baity. And that's the problem. Often what happens if anybody dares to bring up like multi-millionaires or billionaires or wealth inequality,

this kind of question is thrown back in their face, which is like, Why should multi-millionaires and billionaires give up their money when they've worked hard for it? Can you tell me what the answer is to that question? I would just say the rate of return on capital is far greater than the rate of return on labor. So you just can't amaz a fortune of multi-millions of dollars or billions of dollars through hard work. It's just not possible. And I don't think enough people understand that. And it really tears apart this idea of meritocracy.

Right, right. And I guess it's also about how we, as society, have been trained to view success. And also how we view laziness, this idea that if you are not becoming a millionaire, then you should at least die trying. The entrepreneur is the sacred being in our society at this point. But funnily enough, multimillionaires and billionaires make their money from passive income. You know, passive. It laziness.

They do nothing. And all of that, all of that is what we are not talking about. when we are pointing at displaced people fleeing war and persecution and saying they are responsible for your problems. Now for the final part of this episode, we want to turn away from domestic politics and economics and look at global coverage of geopolitical conflicts, humanitarian crises, and how capitalism shapes that. Now this ties to the discussion we've just been having because while on the one hand capitalism seems predisposed to demonise minorities as scapegoats for the issues of the people who are struggling, At the same time, capitalist accumulation has always depended on the exploitation of colonial territories and racial minorities to get to where it has gone. Louisa, could you put your critical theory teacher hat on and just outline for us the theory linking racism and capitalism?

Well, capitalism has always been tied to racism and relies on racism. The idea of success is that somebody has to be a loser. and the people who are sacrificed for wealth, for growth, I deemed what Judith Butler calls, you know, ungriefable. Like the climate crisis, you know, the Paris Agreement is like 1.5 degrees is the limit, but 1.5 degrees will mean Bangladesh doesn't exist anymore. So there are certain ideas about capitalism that allow certain groups of people to be sacrificed for the greater good of profit.

it. And we've always seen this throughout history, whether it's slavery and we have this new sort of wage slavery. The global South now, we completely rely on their wage slavery. You can't separate racism from capitalism at all. Racism has always facilitated it. And I think when we have migrants show up on the shore and they can speak English because we have colonised their country so we can, you know, add them into the wage labour system. They're sort of a haunting manifestation of colonialism that we don't want to face. Right, so this is not just, you know, historical phenomenon. Modern capitalism continues to depend disproportionately on the exploitation of migrant labor and cheap labor overseas.

Now what I want to do is talk about Western coverage of geopolitical conflicts abroad. The two biggest humanitarian crises in the world right now are in. in Sudan and in Gaza. Now, both of these we cover quite regularly on media storm. And what we've consistently seen is, in the case of Gaza, a Western media whose default position is to disguise or complicate what is under international law, quite simply an illegal colonization of Palestinian land and people. Now, in the case of Sudan, what we've rather seen is the systemic underreporting

and under explaining of a conflict that is actually quite deeply connected to the West through the flow of people, the flow of weapons and the flow of gold. And yes, with that, the flow of money. So our question to you both is, why is this? And really, what has it got to do with capitalism? I think if you were to talk about the problem and what's going on in Sudan, then you would inevitably have to talk about why it's a problem. And that's what the Western media want to avoid doing it because it would mean that we would have to actually start paying fair wages. It would expose the inequality of the system and that this racist capitalism that we rely on is very similar to fast fashion as well. The underreporting of the conditions of people

that work in Bangladesh, the lives that are lost. We rely on the fact that it's disguised. So we don't have to think about them. And Jessica. Whenever you engage with anyone in the United States in a political commentary discussion of Gaza, the moment you start talking about history is the moment the host starts shutting down. It's just not a part of the conversation because it means admitting that the way the United States does foreign policy is wrong. And the reason it's wrong is because it's always served to the arm of capital and U.S.-based multinational corporations. Yes, many of our members of Congress are making the same money that our defense contractors are making off of these constant wars and so that's who owns a lot of the media that's

who's invested in the media that's who the media serves in the united states well this has been sufficiently terrifying so to end we want to bring some positivity and some hope and we want to promote other independent news platforms aside from media storm that are trying to cut through the list clickbait. Are there any news providers that you rely on? In the US, we have Ziteo News, which is great. We have DropSite. 404 media is also really good. The Intercept has been kind of a staple as one of those investigative journalism sites that was operating when no one else was. Surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times has become something I always find myself reading. They get investigative stories that no one else does. So there are still glimmers of hope. And then a lot of

content content creators that are that are doing their own news media and commentary like Jordan Yule, the internet today, good morning bad news, those are all, you know, people that have gotten to know pretty well that have a lot of integrity. Yeah, listen to Media Storm and also I think support local, local newspapers as well. We have a great one in Rochdale, obviously, I don't think they make a lot of money, but they are working so hard to set the story straight about what's going on in Rochdale specifically and these far-right groups that are coming out. I would say that definitely support local news. Thank you both for joining us before we wrap up. Let us know if you have anything to plug. So you can follow me at Louisa Munch Theory on TikTok and Instagram. Just watch

my videos, I guess. I talk about theory. I talk about philosophy. I talk about social issues and taxing wealthy people. So yeah. All of my accounts are at K.A. Burbank on TikTok. Instagram, YouTube. It's not all scary doom and gloom there either. I try to make it fun. You wear fun costumes and do role play and stuff. It's true. Thank you for listening.

Next week, we will be releasing part two of our Patreon-led Q&A. We have so many questions to answer from Patreon that weren't answered last time, so we will get to all of those. But if you want to ask us a new question, then all you have to do is subscribe to our Patreon and comment or DM us there. 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 obviously leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Waddea, and follow the show via

at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfair.