Media Storm - Everything you need to know about Media Storm

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

We're back for Series 4! It’s been a while, so here's your refresher episode which tells you everything you need to know about Media Storm - plus, we tell you all about our new format! Media Storm is dedicated to platforming the most important people in the story– the ones living it. Despite them, ironically, being the most absent from mainstream news. Every Thursday, we’ll be using our Media Storm lens to bring you the biggest news story of the week and dissect the headlines as usual - except on this current affairs show, you’ll hear from the people actually living the news stories…  Make sure you're subscribed to be the first in the know! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web?

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Isn't it weird that you can read 20 headlines about refugees and not one single quote from a refugee?

Or watch hours of talk shows about transgender rights and not see a single transgender person. So here's a question. Is that good journalism? If you're writing about abortion, talk to people who have had abortions. If you're writing about sexual assault, talk to people who have been sexually assaulted. And if you can't find them, you're not doing your fucking job well. Hear our stories.

We are the ones who have lived this. Our lived experience is leadership. We are the experts. Hey, Media Stormers. We're back. This is Matilda. And Helena. Your Media Storm hosts.

And we are so excited to be launching series four of the podcast. Series four. I've like forgotten how to speak in a podcast voice. Do you speak in the same voice on the podcast? Yes, I always speak like this. I definitely try to like soften. I feel like I normally try to soften my throat. Soffered your throat.

I can't remember how. That's a horrible phrase. Never use that again. I have definitely forgotten how to speak on a forecast. It's been a while, okay. That is why we think that that calls for a bit of a refresher episode. And very helpfully, in the quote you just heard, one of our previous guests captures pretty eloquently.

Media Storm's unique style, of journalism. Media Storm is dedicated to platforming the most important people in the story, the ones living it, despite them, ironically, being most absent from mainstream news. People like channel migrants.

I'm not idiot to cross the channel while I know it's dangerous. I know it's dangerous. But when I don't have any other ways, how can I do? Or taking the recent headlines about medically assisted dying, We think terminally ill patients are the most important speakers.

I don't want to die lying on a hospital bed, drugged out of my head. I want to fall asleep in my husband's arms. The fact is that's not allowed under our current system. When it comes to criminal justice, we speak to people who've been in prison. The government, they've got no idea how it is for us down here on the ground. And while they're living their lavish lifestyles, they don't have to worry about money, but people like me do. Others working in county lines gangs. Hey, you know what? Don't say, don't use that scary voice thing for me, just because that makes me seem like fucking tart faith.

Like some fucking evil alien thing, okay? Just use like a normal guy speaking. And the prison officers charged to guard them. Environmentally, I was working in a space that was just not fit for purpose. over-crieded, decrepid. We seek out the voices you don't even know are missing. The hardest part of pedophilia is not keeping yourself from offending. It's so much more this self-loathing and isolation. So welcome to our new listeners and a warm welcome back to our old ones.

This episode will show you what we do differently, why we do it, and what's coming up for a brand new series. Speaking to people at the heart of the story is basically the lifeblood of journalism. So our first question today is how or why isn't it happening? Okay, well there are some innocent enough explanations. It's no secret that much of the news industry has been taken to its knees in the digital era. And one of the techniques newsrooms are using is publishing as much content as possible as fast as possible. The more content out there, the more opportunity.

for ad revenue. At the same time, newsroom staff have been and are still being brutally cut in order to save costs, myself among them in the past. And so the journalists who were left are, are A, under intense time pressure, sometimes having to push out a dozen articles a day, and B, chained to their desks, recycling content from Ladd Bible rather than speaking to people on the ground. Why Lad Bible? I just remember actually having to like take. something off Ladd Bible, like when I was a digital reporter. We're not specifically targeting Ladbival. Yeah, no shade to Ladd Bible.

I mean, kudos to you. Yeah, they actually do quite good stuff. You're putting out original stuff and the rest of us are copying it and putting our names on it. Journalism. And yeah, you know, shortcuts get taken, namely sources who might be slightly harder to get in touch with, for example, because they're from a vulnerable community or because they're rightly suspicious of journalists, they can.

get left out. And leaving out these sources can lead to a massive imbalance in stories. Take, for example, stories about domestic abuse, which we've seen more and more of with global femicide on the rise. In our episode on domestic abuse from our last series, Janie Starling, who leads the feminist campaign group Level Up, warned us about newspapers trying to throw together a scoop without doing due diligence. Talking about newsroom, behavior. Yeah, the biggest trap that newsrooms fall into that comes up in every media storm episode. It's the impact of the fast-paced news cycle. So the demand for kind of instant news means that often reporters are just grabbing stories from newswires, changing a few words and

slapping it up on the website as quickly as possible. I wonder how that plays into this issue of domestic abuse reporting. There's such a trade-off between urgency and accuracy. So at the beginning when a woman's been found dead or a man has been charged. There are very scant details, but the problems come when journalists try to fill in the gaps in information quite recklessly because they want to be the first to break the news. And what we see then is journalists going to interview a neighbour down the road, journalists taking a picture of the house and putting it online. You know, we see these invasions into privacy and ultimately too many sound bites from neighbours who did not know the true character of that relationship.

I think the most important thing that journalists have to remember is that dead women don't get the right of reply. So ultimately, it's your job to provide balance. It's your job to ensure impartiality. Reporting a defence narrative is not impartial. In that episode with Janie, we actually did look at an article published by the Times that week on David Yates, a man who murdered his fiancée, Morrell Starrick. The Times went round interviewing friends of his who eulogise the murderer as, and I quote, the human equivalent of a golden retriever. It even published their speculation that he had acted while suffering from a psychotic episode without any evidence of this being the case.

And if you want to watch our reactions to going through that headline, you can check that in full on our YouTube channel. And as Janie points out, dead women don't get right of reply. And that is why we can't excuse this problem by saying that, oh, journalists simply don't have the time to speak to everyone involved. There's something very relevant about who's getting overlooked. Notice that it is almost always groups who are socially or economically or culturally marginalized.

And we have a name for this. It's discrimination. In 2020, the Times wrote over 300 articles about trans people. Do you three want to guess how many of them were written by trans people? Don't worry, I'll tell you. It was none of them. None of them were written by trans people. Not one.

This is Laura Blake, a trans woman and broadcaster who joined us along with Shiv Davay, a non-binary journalist, to share their experiences working in the media. It was the same for me in my book. previous employer, I pitched articles, videos, multimedia stuff, all sorts of things about trans people, non-binary people. I was actually told that I wasn't allowed to report on the issue because they obviously see trans people as one big issue. I was told that I wasn't allowed to report on it from an editorial point of view because I'm, you know, part of that community. And I was like, would you have, would you have a, it's like saying a black reporter can't report

on black husband. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's a fallacy in that the belief that to be detached from an issue makes you impartial. That detachment is privilege. That detachment is bias. To think that you are objective if you are not impacted by an issue that affects other communities makes you privileged. It is just a complete illusion and yet it is so dominant within schools of journalism. It's all about, oh, we have to be impartial. No, it's due impartiality, which means that we're not impartial about racism. We don't have somebody going, let's have somebody from the KKK, or let's have a Nazi on to talk about the other side.

We don't do that because it's due impartiality. Chavon, it feels mad to me. It feels absolutely mad to me that whoever your last employer was, and I don't know who you're talking about, but it mad to me that somebody would say that to you. I don't think I'm still quite over it. Like, I'm still processing that now. It was galaxy brain

So that was Laura and Shiv And they described problems like Due Impartiality or False Balance Which you'll hear a lot of on this show And which you'll start to see a lot of in the news If you listen to us regularly There's basically this very simplistic Very dated idea of balance

That still holds sway on certain topics in newsrooms The idea that impartiality means platforming someone who's for something and someone who's against it, whether or not their views are common in society or based in any factual understanding. And that it's more important to platform both opinions than any of the people whose lives and rights are actually being debated by these speakers. A really clear example of this is media reporting on abortion. To me it feels really simple.

Here's Renee Bracey Sherman, an abortion activist. from the U.S. You would never put someone who is a doctor on a heart surgery up in a debate with someone who's literally never opened a medical textbook. And yet that is what happens constantly. The majority of the episodes we've done on these minority groups, they all have some form of that both sides' narrative. The problem is, then medical voices, people have lived experience, they often get pushed aside.

I recently had a debate with a media outlets in the United States. They're a huge morning television show. They wanted to put someone who's had an abortion up against someone who had an abortion and regretted their abortion, which I want to be clear. I believe that people have abortions, whether they regret them or not, are able to, to share their stories, that's their experience. But I explained to them in the way they were planning to do it, it's just not accurate. It makes it look like it's 50-50.

And we actually have data, and it's 97 to 3. You're positioning it as 50-50, and that's actually just bad journalism. That clip was from our episode with Renee Bracey Sherman, and she runs a non-a. nonprofit called We Testify in the United States, enabling people to share their experiences of abortion, good and bad, so that people can understand the lived reality. By contrast, current affairs shows today often involve hyper-polarized debates in which the people most affected might not even get a voice. And despite the rifts, this is clearly creating in our society. It's unlikely to get better for one big reason. It's proper. It's

profitable. We've talked about the financial strain facing newsrooms in a digital world. Well, in this world, the simplest way to generate revenue is by putting ads on pages. The more clicks you get on a page, the more ad money you make. And this means that newsrooms are incentivised to make stories as attention-grabbing as possible. In other words, to write clickbait, not to write news, to feed people what they want to see rather than what they need to know. And every week on MediaStorm, we pick apart sensationalists, sometimes hilarious headlines, and try to find the facts behind the fearmongering. Because nothing sells like fear.

I mean, if you're afraid of something, you want to know what's going on. So we journalists pine for crises, and we paint villains. And sadly, the easiest people to demonise are the ones who can't defend themselves because they're deprived or vulnerable or underrepresented.

And a big topic we could talk about here is immigration. While people certainly have very valid concerns around immigration, as well as some not so very valid concerns, the media tends to blow these out of proportion, with daily reports on dinghies crossing the channel, despite these accounting for less than 10% of immigration, and we don't get near as many asylum applications as our European neighbours. Which you just wouldn't realise reading our news,

And one of our guests on this topic, who's a Syrian refugee, was also completely baffled by the headlines he was seeing about record arrivals, an erroneous claim, actually, and one we now see repeated almost monthly in our news. We do have a little caveat to add before this next clip. I don't know if you can tell from the change of my voice that we're adding this in later. That is the fact-checking magic of podcasting. But we do have a little caveat to add in, and that is because of a change in UK immigrant. law since we recorded this episode in late 2021. Back then, most instances in which news outlets

used the term illegal immigrant were, to be honest, just blatantly factually and legally incorrect, as we'll explain, but that situation has now changed. In April 22, the government passed the nationality and borders bill into law, criminalising the act of entering the UK without valid entry clearance via irregular routes, like small dingy, on the channel. Now, the legal status of immigration of this kind is still a contested issue due to a conflict between this law and international law, which enshrines the right to enter a country without papers in order to seek sanctuary. It's our job as journalists to keep you on top of the nuances in this debate, and the fact the government went to such lengths to

retrospectively justify their use of the term illegal immigrant, and indeed, their treatment of people who can be labelled as such, shows just how important language is and just how irresponsible it is when the media outlets you rely on misuse it. The UK is really, really obsessed with the idea of being invaded. There is something really strange about it. Politicians talk about, everyone wants a piece of us, everyone wants to come here. there is this arrogance and self-obsession that I have noticed and being in this country. Whereas when you look at statistics, the numbers of refugees that come to the UK is so small

in comparison to the number of refugees in Europe in general. Well, on that note, I have some statistics here that the number of people coming to the UK to claim asylum stands at less than half of what it was in the early 2000s. But in Turkey alone, they are over 3 million Syrian refugees. And in Lebanon, there are about 2 million. And in Jordan, there's about another million or something. I suppose the real question then is, is the media reporting on or creating the crisis? Plot twist.

I think it's very agenda-driven. One of the most pervasive and most effective ways and ignorant ways of uniting people is creating a common enemy. I think that's what our governments have been doing in Europe, the rise of the far right. It's all about creating this fear, those dangerous creatures that are invading us. And I think what's important to note is the language. The categories of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants are frequently used interchangeably by journalists, right? Yeah, I think let's have a little vocabulary 101. because I think it's really important for readers to know the meaning of the words being used

when they're reading about immigration in the news. So the term refugee literally means anyone who's fleeing conflict, persecution, natural disaster. But legally, it only refers to people who have been granted protection status by the country they've applied for asylum in. So if someone is referred to as a migrant, it doesn't mean that they're not a refugee. A term that editors are very relaxed about using is the term illegal immigrant. Legally speaking, there is absolutely zero statutory criminal offence against entering a country without papers if you are applying for asylum. And statistically, most of the people coming across the channel in dinghies do apply for asylum.

So when they're referred to as illegal immigrants, it's actually incorrect for most of them. The word illegal has very negative connotations and completely takes out any sense of empathy there certainly is an agenda behind that do you think it is an agenda and or a lack of knowledge from some journalists if we were going to give the benefit of the doubt I think you can only give it for a certain period of time but this has been going on for years now I raise this with the editor at a paper I previously worked at and he didn't ignore every point I raised but this point he explicitly said, yeah, we're going to ignore that point. Because of the term illegal immigrant is just normalized in our vocabulary.

And, you know, we have to speak to people in a language that they understand because we are completely exempt from our new responsibility of shaping the language that people... Or we want to speak to people in a language that we want them to understand. That was from our very first episode of Media Storm, actually, on refugees and immigration and how that's reported in the media. And the result of the media falling into these traps that we've spoken about means that the media ends up protecting those in power or sometimes just blindly repeating them,

which is the opposite of what many of us consider our job to be. We should be holding those in power to account. Instead, we make it easy for them to blame social problems on social outcasts and deflect responsibility from those with any actual power to change things. But people are like smarter than that and people are kind of. I'm not opening onto it. I remember Quayjo, Tuenaboa, who came on last season to talk about the housing crisis. It's an issue he campaigns on as someone who's had awful experiences himself in social housing.

But he told us about how actually meeting asylum seekers while touring around the UK opened his eyes to some of the most common myths that are being spread about migrants by our politicians and our press. Here's Quayjo-Twenaboa, social housing activist. I've learned so much about the flawed and ignorant statements that are made in regards to housing, especially social housing and migrants coming here and stealing our homes and they've had a red carpet rolled out for them. They get the keys to a social housing property and they're off living their lives happily ever after while we've got 1.4 million UK people on the waiting list waiting to get to social housing,

which is completely flawed, it's wrong, it's factually incorrect. You cannot get social housing, you cannot claim. many benefits when you're an asylum seeker and you're waiting for your asylum application to be processed. I know people who have been waiting 10 years for their asylum application to be processed. And often they're living on about £35 a week. They're living in poor accommodation. They're not allowed to work. They're not allowed to claim benefits. And that is their lives. That is their reality. The Home Office would have you believe that migrants are coming here and stealing right from under the nose of a British UK national waiting to get

social housing, which is completely flawed. And what they are. are doing is pitting two groups in society who both should have access to the same things who they have failed against each other. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress.

Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross-Draining Treadplus at OnePeloton.ca. Hi everyone, it's Helena and Matilda, and we're back with our reintroduction to MediaStorm. Okay, so we've looked at why the most obvious voices are often missing from the story. Journalists are time pressured, societies inherently unequal, but also news outlets are not as selfless as they often like to pretend. So now we want to ask why it's so important to go the extra mile and platform these voices, which is what Media Storm does for you. I'd say the first point is like the first pillar of journalism. It's accuracy. Getting the facts, finding the truth. We've

shown where that gets lost when you don't speak to the people involved. And also, Really valuable knowledge is getting lost here because even when members of these groups are included in news reports, they're often devalued as case studies, just sort of invited to relive their traumas in order to stir up some emotion around the piece. But what they're not invited to do is comment analytically on the problem to assess what might be going wrong and what could be done to fix it. But people with experience are experts, not just case stuff. They can tell us things bureaucrats analysing the problem from the comfort of their offices just can't. For example, why so many women leaving prison end up straight back inside again. As you learn in this interview with Claire Basto, an ex-prisoner herself. And so can you apply for regular benefits?

Yes, but yes, you can. But it takes at least six to eight weeks to come through. And you can't apply six to eight weeks before being released from prison? No. So you have six to eight weeks outside of prison where you have no benefits. Yes. And 42 pounds to survive on. Yes, that's right.

So when you were in the hostel with other women who'd come out of prisons and had no money to pay their service charge, how did they keep their place in that hostel? Well, a lot of them ended up working as prostitutes. That was Matilda talking to Claire. Now, the ironic thing about this story is that sex workers all but criminalised in the UK, meaning women are having to survive outside prison with methods that are likely to land them straight back in there. But the solution seems so simple if you just ask the people who see it up close.

And as usual, we find on Media Storm, the media is part of the problem. So actually, as we learned on a later episode on the podcast, Claire's story signals a wider problem about whether sex work should be criminalised in the first place, which leads us on to the second reason we do what we do. This is about fairness. When people do not get their own voice in the media and instead are spoken for, even if they're spoken for by sympathetic advocates like charity workers or academics, we, the public, and not given the tools to empathise with them, to see through their eyes. Instead, we see them as other, as stereotypes. And that leads to prejudice, discrimination, and abuse. So here's a clip of Nikki Adams from the English Collective of Prostitutes

in what I found to be one of our most eye-opening episodes. I think this is a really good time to talk about how sex workers and sex workers. work is described in the mainstream media. I do think the common myths and stereotypes we spoke about play a big part in the depiction of sex workers in the mainstream with common terms like troubled use a lot. What terms do you see in the mainstream media and what kind of messages do you think they send? Well, the troubled is definitely very common and the implication that the woman is somehow in a state, in a mess. Over the pandemic, we had to protest about some of the coverage of some of the women that were having to still work and they put their pictures in the newspaper and

they followed them home and it kind of unleashed a real witch hunt against some women. Even in pieces I've read that have been written by people with lived experience, I often see that the photo that's been used by the paper is either like nine inch stiletto or a pair of bright red lips or like a shadowy slinky figure. Like shadowy heels on the street. Yeah, mini skirt leaning into a car. Or your back against a wall, which I've tried that pose and it's extremely hard. I'd like to just say it's not helpful.

I mean, we are always trying to break down those stereotypes so that sex workers are seen for who we are, which is, you know, women like other women with all the complexities of others. Right, and when we have these images like these mini skirts leaning into car windows, it kind of gives off that impression that there is one type of hyper-sexualized sex worker. when actually sex workers, like you said, broad range, a broad range of people, obviously, not just women. So you heard there loads of clips from our back catalogue and do go back and listen to our previous three series.

We're so proud of these episodes and they're all there on your feed for you to enjoy. But now to look forward. Forward. Media Storm has weight. Is it forward or forwards? It's series forward. Okay.

Oh no. If you look in your eye, you really thought that was good. I thought that was good. So, okay, I'm going to put a poll on our Instagram stories and once this comes out and people can tell me if that was good. Series forward. So, anyway, media storm has always given you fresh and forward-thinking investigations. So I can still look and see the look in your eyes when you said that. A series forward-thinking investigations.

And current affairs analysis. with lived experience voices. That's not changing. We're still doing that, just slightly differently. We're going to take a bit longer with our investigations. Instead of dropping mini investigations in each episode, we're working on a big investigation that is going to drop as a limited series later this year.

Stay tuned. And every Thursday, we'll be using our Media Storm lens to bring you the biggest news story of the week and dissect the headlines as you. usual. Except on this current affairs show, you'll hear from the people who are actually living the stories. We've had an amazing range of studio guests over three series who have helped us make sense of how the mainstream media report on their minority groups and ripped the worst headlines apart. You're in for a lot more of that. And we've got a couple of examples of some

of our favourite headline autopsies. Let's start with this one from series one, our episode fat phobia healthcare by size with two amazing guests author of queer body power Essie Dennis and body image advocate Stephanie Yaboa and you know sometimes a headline is just so ridiculous all you can do is laugh

the second headline we'd like to look at is from The Telegraph this week how gardening helps to burn calories in winter I'll read out some quotes from the article Not only will your flower beds thank you, but your waistline will as well, with 300 calories burnt, or depending how you look at it, five pigs in blankets justified. It just really highlights the ever more creative way that the mainstream media markets weight loss.

Steph, I can see you swallowing back exasperated laughter. What's that about? Because I'm just like, so I am a huge, I'm very, what is it, green-fingered, I have about 80 plants in my apartment alone. I love plants. Why, I don't understand why people are trying to just suck the joy and the fun out of doing things that make us feel good about ourselves. It really does lend itself to this whole other conversation about the wellness industry because wellness for me is now kind of turning into the diet, the diet slash fitness industry. The whole point of doing these therapeutic practices is to practice self-care.

and constantly worrying and being anxious about how much you've lost or how much you've burned doing this therapeutic thing is not self-care. It's the very antithesis of it. Oh, yeah. They are not going to take gardening and that kind of stuff away from me. Like, even housework. Housework is mundane, but I love it because I don't think about anything. People are having to now think about arm movements that they can do

when, like, dusting the top of their drawer is. So have you guys not been doing Kegel crunches throughout this entire recording? Absolutely not. And it's just like, I guarantee you in the next six months. There's going to be like a feather duster that is going to be like according to weight. So you can get like it's a dumbbell. But it's also got a feather duster. Like I guarantee it. And it's sick. First they came for fats, then they came for carbs. Then they came for every moment of carefree enjoyment we have in our day to day life. Honestly, no more. I'm tired of it. Oh, bad. Honestly. When I listened to that again, I just sort of completely forgotten about that. And to bring it up again, I was like, I couldn't believe that was real. It's so ridiculous. And I'm sure we'll have plenty more of those ridiculous headlines to rip apart in series four.

But sometimes, of course, we use these headlines to demonstrate the responsibility of the media. The media can create and uphold stereotypes. And it's our job to make sure the voices that are missing from the conversation. The voices that usually these headlines and articles are written about get their say so we can begin to smash those stereotypes. So here's one final example of what you can expect from Media Storm, taken from our back catalogue. In our second ever episode, we sat down with Zing Zing and Hisein Kassvani to discuss anti-Asian abuse, which had been on the rise during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zing is a Singaporean journalist who is now editor-in-chief advice and Hussain is the author of Follow Miyaki, the online world of British Muslims. Here's our discussion about the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, a shooting spree that occurred at two spas and a massage parlour in Georgia and how news reports played into Asian fetishisation and racist double standards in terrorism reporting. And just to drill in the seriousness of the consequences on the other side,

the very real life responses to racism and to rhetoric and to culture that becomes normalized. I think we should talk about the Atlanta spa shootings that happened in March of this year. And for anyone who's not aware, that was in America when a white gunman went on a shooting spree targeting three spas in Atlanta, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women.

So let's start with how the shootings were reported, you wrote a really arresting article, and I just want to read the title. It was Asian women's bodies are not playgrounds for white people. You touch on how Asian women and East Asian women are represented in pop culture. Do you think that that has an important role in how the media reports on these things? When you're in East or Southeast Asian women, you get very quickly used to kind of constant sexualization of justification and fetishization. And it's very strange because you're simultaneously totally replaceable with another Asian woman because, you know, quote-unquote, we all look the same. When that's the only representation you see of Asian women in the media, that has a knock-on effect on how you report about real Asian women when things happen to us.

And I think you could definitely see that in the way that the shooting was reported and the way that the police even reported the shooting themselves. So there's this really infamous press conference in which an officer on the case kind of says, well, you know, the shooting. you know, he says he's got an addiction, it's a problem, and he was trying to fix the source of his addiction. It's just really dehumanizing language. And that's what happens when you just reduce an entire community down to stereotype. You dehumanize them and you therefore make it easier to erase them as real human beings. And you compare that to how little sympathy is given to the mental health of non-white terrorists because he was charged with domestic terrorism. Part of that really infamous press conference you were talking about was when, I think it was the county sheriff said that he'd had a bad day, the shooter.

Excuses for doing what he did were really plastered everywhere in the mainstream media that he had a bad day, that he had a sex addiction. The fact that we were even debating whether or not it was a racialized attack was awful to me. But even to say that I have a sex addiction and I associate these spies. with the biggest temptations, is that not in itself racist? Oh, yeah, 100%. How could you argue with the fact that shooting is not racially motivated? When you look at the breakdown of who was shot, who was targeted and who was killed, if that is not a racially motivated crime, I honestly don't know what would meet that criteria.

Hussein, do you have any thoughts about, for example, how South Asian or South Asian men are represented in the media? Yeah, with all these types of events, it always starts off with like, oh, this is another Muslim terrorist, the same kind of rhetoric about immigration. and this is what happens when you let refugees come into your country and so on. Then when more information comes out, you can see how people are not only trying to go back on their own stories, but they're still trying to weave their own narrative. The affordance of mental health is given to certain people, but for others, it's very much

like, no, you were motivated primarily by theology, you were motivated primarily by race and so on. And I think to answer your question about, like, South Asian men and in the aftermath of, like, terrorist attacks and also in other stories, like, you know, grooming gangs, for example, right immigrant men and particularly dark-skinned immigrant men who are like threats to your nation and like threats to your race and threats to the spiritual health of your country is always largely like fixated on this idea of the immigrant savage the foreigner who just by virtue of doing something morally apprehensible is not subjected to the individualistic moral failings that are afforded to like people who are white or people who are not come from immigrant backgrounds or like who are not Muslim

it's always sort of framed as culture wars and it's always framed as like clash of civilisations. I guess the point that I'm trying to say is that when it comes to people of colour, very often these people are commodified and they're sort of used to particular ends in order to kind of tell, their objects that are there to tell stories

rather than individuals who have agency over their own actions. I think British Asian people are seen as perpetual foreigners. That's how I feel anyway. You know, if we watch a I mean, not so much now, there's a lot of new and varied representation, I think, coming up in TV and film, but I mean, before it was what, cab driver, newsagent, terrorist, geek. I mean, what? I had bend it like Beck and then nothing for 20 years. That's how I feel. Zing and Hussein there in an episode, I felt so privileged to be sitting in that studio, actually, with you guys having that discussion. It was so eye-opening, and that's what we're aiming to give you guys.

We're going to be taking the week's biggest story and dissecting it with the voices missing from it, the people who are living it. Plus, along the way in each episode, we'll be fact-checking the week's news, giving you behind-the-scenes expertise on the mainstream media monster we're in a love-hate relationship with, and pulling ourselves and our listeners outside of the Western worldview,

looking at how these stories are reported on internet. Guaranteed to give you something to talk about. The first episode of series four will be dropping next Thursday, so make sure you've hit subscribe to stay up to date. And tell someone you like talking to to tune in too. And don't forget to follow us on all social media platforms. We're at MediaStormPod. Calling All Book Lovers.

The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd.

Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca.