Media Storm - 'I don’t do politics': How to fight news fatigue

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Almost half of us in the UK now say we actively avoid the news. The main reason is it's just 'too depressing', and it 'doesn’t make a difference'. But it's not just the UK, and it’s not just the news. Globally, the average election turnout has fallen from 65% to 55% in 15 years. The thing is, you can’t tune out politics. Because EVERYTHING is politics. How safe you feel walking home at night, the price of a pint, hot summers, trying to book the dentist, the World Cup – all of this involves political choices made by someone, somewhere. This week: why so many people are switching off from politics altogether, who benefits from that, and what it would take to win them back. Mathilda and Helena are joined by Natasha Devon, whose upcoming book The Nuance Drought is an autopsy of today’s toxic political discourse - and Femi Oluwole, an outspoken critic of the people who lie and cheat in Westminster, and the system that lets them get away with it. A healthy democracy needs four basic pillars: Fair information. Fair influence. Fair votes. Fair play. Learn more about Open Britain’s Bigger Than Politics campaign. 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

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. Hello, Matilda. Hi, Helena. What are our intro ramblings today? Quick update. Last week, we talked about the fact that my sister had unfollowed us on social media and she promised it wasn't maliciously.

We were flooded with DMs from listeners, saying that they too were not following Media Storm anymore on Instagram. This is a scandal. I mean... Why were multiple followers of ours, non-consensually, removed from our page? Exactly. What is up?

What is up with that? I mean, I think it's a direct meta-ploy against Media Storm. But we're such a small little fish. Just let us fucking swim. I agree. Anyway, I guess this is just like a little shout out to say, please keep checking and keep following and keep engaging with our content because it really does make a huge difference. Right. On with the show. Matilda, what are we getting into today?

Today we're doing an episode about whether you'll even listen to this episode. Okay, very meta. Go on. So, quick confession to start. When did you last actively avoid? the news, not miss it, avoid it. Honestly, I mean, I don't know if this counts as news, but I have two Instagram profiles, my journalism one and my personal one. And often if I open Instagram, I will flick to my personal one if I'm just doom scrolling because my algorithm on my journalism one is full of news, the horrible news.

And if I'm just not in that place, I like to go to my personal one, which basically is just about like Bravo and reality TV and it's a lot more engaging. And I do that. I do that quite a lot because it's just overwhelming to open Instagram and be flooded with like loads of horrible things about, I don't know, women being killed by men mostly is what my algorithm is. And doom scrolling is just so depressing. Sometimes I just switch off from the news altogether. and I'm literally a reporter. Yeah, okay. And you're not alone either.

Globally, news avoidance is at its highest ever recorded. 40% of people are consciously tuning out of the news that's up from a third less than a decade ago. This data comes from the Reuters Institute. And the UK is worse than average. Nearly half of people in this country now say they actively avoid the news and the reasons they give are basically, it's relentless, it's bleak, And it makes me feel powerless.

I mean, they're not wrong. They're not wrong. And it doesn't stop at the news. People are fatigued with the entire political system. At the UK's last general election, voter turnout was 59.7%. That's the lowest since 2001. It's one of the lowest in a century. In one Manchester seat, it was 40%.

That means less than half of the population even voted at all, let alone voted for the person who got in. And as we'll hear in this episode, this is happening all over the world. Okay, so people are switching off. And look, I get the urge. Oh, me too. When I go on holiday,

I actively seek out no internet zones for this exact reason. But the thing is, I feel like the second I try to switch off from politics, I'm quickly reminded, it's not a choice. Everything is political. Say more.

Like this weekend, I saw one of my best friends in Brighton. He's been in this country for 10 years, after fleeing the Syrian War. He got refugee status in the UK. He's worked hard here every day since. And he just told me he's had his citizenship rejected for the third time because Labour decided punishing anyone who ever entered illegally,

even at the height of the Syrian War, might just help them win over the far right. When I see my happiest, most optimistic friend reduced to near hopelessness because he just wants to hug his mum, but he can't go see her because he's a prisoner in his sanctuary, well then I remember everything is political. Or like when I walk out the door and I'm slapped in the face by a definitely man-made heatwave. Or, you know, trying to make life work in my own country while being married to someone from another country.

That is just so hard, so much of the time, because of a political choice that someone made. So suddenly things that could sound like abstract politics actually feel like. very real life. What about you, Helena? What are the issues in your day-to-day that you might not think of as political, but actually their proof everything is political? God, I mean, where do I start? Literally being a woman, like our day-to-day safety or access to health care as a woman, or thinking about potentially starting a family, but statutory maternity leave being appallingly bad, statutory paternity leave being two weeks.

Two weeks. You're just unable to share raising children equally. The fact that I might have to move back in with my mum because building developers don't have to pay for the shitty cladding they stuffed our building with or like trying to get a GP appointment and being laughed out of the room. Like that is political. I think obviously one that really comes to my mind is having brown

skin and being in love with a man who has brown skin. We've seen the increasing weaponisation of all the world's ills being placed at the door of ethnic minorities, especially the false narrative that brown men are somehow more dangerous than all other men. And that makes me genuinely worried for my safety and the safety of my family. Even the stuff that feels purely personal, like whether I feel safe walking home at night or what I get like shouted out on the internet as a woman, someone, somewhere, decides how much that matters or doesn't matter. And I have to say it strikes me that very often the people who say to me, oh, I don't read the news, it's too depressing, or like I don't do politics,

are often people who hold a lot of privilege in life, whether that be money or skin color or gender. And I think that's important to note as we go into this episode. Right. And in this series of Media Storm, we've done a number of episodes that any news outlet would mark under the category politics about dark money in politics. He then dropped a bombshell.

He said, oh, well, you know, you're still doing some things with the Conservative headquarters. We can help with that. I know Russian companies that would like to contribute to the Conservatives. Or dodgy think tanks influencing politics. 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 Tuffton Street entity a load of Dosh. Or a broken electoral system. Because what is the voting system supposed to do? It's like a steering rule for the voters on how the country is run.

At the moment, they try and turn that steering wheel and nothing happens. And you can see why people get quite upset with it. The truth is, all these things are bigger than politics. Elections are bigger than politics. Party donations are bigger than politics. Think tank lobbying is bigger than politics. It's the price of a pack of tampons. It's how safe you feel walking home at night.

It's whether you keep the person you love in the same country as you. That's what's on the ballot. It's like a trap because the moment people start to feel like politics doesn't belong to them or there's no point in engaging or like it's better left to those who can be bothered, power shifts away from the people and towards whoever is willing to exploit the gap. Political fatigue isn't neutral. It serves authoritarian. It serves corruption.

The cynic argument would be an exhausted, checked out public is exactly what some people are counting on. Exactly. Which is also why we have to be really careful about how we frame this problem. Because the lazy version and the one that you see in a lot of coverage is people are apathetic. Young people have given up. They're lazy. They've got no attention spans. They're entitled.

They'd rather scroll than verily. And we'll pull that narrative apart properly with our guests because a lot of it is flat out wrong. But the deeper issue is blaming people for switching off lets the system off the hook. We're far more likely to fix this if we ask how the system is letting those people down, how it's crushing their hope and pushing them away. And also what changes would reverse that. And that's exactly the question Media Storm's partner, Open Britain, is. working towards. They have this campaign called Bigger Than Politics, and it asks the constructive

version of today's question, not just why are people walking away, but how does politics win them back? How does it? Their answer comes in four parts, fair information, that before you can vote well, you deserve honest facts you can actually trust instead of lies with no consequences. Fair influence, this is about money in politics. A billionaire shouldn't be able to buy a louder voice than the rest of us combined. Fair votes. That when you do vote, the result actually reflects what you choose.

And fair play. That the powerful should have to follow the same rules as everyone else with a real referee instead of marking their own homework. Fair information, fair influence, fair votes and fair play. I mean, no shade to open Britain, but that should be like the bare minimum in a democracy. Well, it kind of is. and I think the starting point here is realizing

we just haven't quite achieved true democracy at this stage of history. I feel as though people keep saying democracy is failing. It's a failed experiment as if we just happened to be born at the apex of political evolution and it turned out to be a failed experiment.

But the truth is, what we've got isn't democracy. It's just one step closer to democracy than yesterday. And it's hours to keep building or hours. to lose. And that's the bit the people exploiting it would love us to forget. Politics belongs to us. So today is about taking ownership of what's ours. If you're battling constant grief and resentment, I would encourage you to take a break from the news. To lie in England and Wales was the

driest on record. Violent scenes in the south of England where hundreds of protesters clashed with police. Sounds like British people don't want to vote for anyone. Not many people understand what politics does. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally arse last. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm. I don't do politics. How to fight news fatigue. Welcome to the Media Storm studio. Our first guest is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner who has spent the better part of two decades in schools and colleges across the UK and around the world, listening to what young people actually think. She was the government's mental health champion for schools,

has a show on LBC and her upcoming book, The Nluence Strout, is an autopsy of what happens to a society when it loses the ability to hold two ideas at once. A very warm welcome once again to Media Storm, Natasha Devon. Thank you. Hello. Our second guest is a British journalist and political activist and the co-founder of the Youth Campaign Group, Our Future, Our Choice. He's an outspoken analyst, a prolific news creator,

and he's written for outlets including the independent Guardian and Metro. Also, welcome back to Media Storm Femi Oluwale. Hi, everybody. We'll also be hearing later on in the episode from one of the challenges to Nigel Farage in the upcoming Clacton by-election, John Stevens of the pro-EU rejoined party. Right, we'll start talking about the problem, political fatigue and news avoidance. People are getting tired of politics. Voter turnout is at a near century low in the UK.

And we're not alone. The global trend is downward, with the global average for electoral turnout falling from 65% to 55% in 15 years. South Africa is one stark example I came across. It's fallen from almost 90% in 1999 to 57% in 2024. Now, there are exceptions and these trends are bumpy, and there are different causes in different places. But ultimately, this is not the direction we really want things to be going. Femi, do you have any insight into why this is happening? Why do you think politics is becoming less appealing? Well, everything about politics is specifically designed to try and make it less appealing to those who would actually shift the dial of politics. One of the reasons why you will never see me wearing a suit whenever I'm doing stuff on TV or in the

media is because the narrative that's been pushed on us, ever since we're kids, is that politics is just for old white men shouting at each other in London. And I, and I'm a lot of. And I'm a lot of I think that one of the things that I like when I speak to young people across the country is that they like seeing somebody who's a little bit more like them in politics, whereas politics, when you see on the news shows, they just like people who are in suits, et cetera. And it's very, very stale, not to mention deliberately trying to make politics less accessible to young people. I remember 2019 for the election. Was it Tobias Elwood, the Tory MP, when they were voting on whether or not to let 16-year-olds

vote in the election, literally said, well, the age. voting is something we should consider, to suddenly thrust it upon us on it now, and we know it will probably favour one particular party, now is not the right time to do it. So they will literally try and push people out of voting in order to get their own agenda. And especially given the number of politicians who have done horrible things, people are feeling a bit disillusioned with the ability of politics to actually make a difference. Yeah, absolutely. And we do want to start with diagnosing the problem correctly because the headline version is this.

Young people have given up on democracy. So much so they're now rooting for dictatorship, apparently. Headlines last year told us 52% of Gen Z want the UK to be a dictatorship. It launched a wave of commentary. One Guardian columnist called young people Maronic as a result. Natasha, when you walk into a school in 2026 and ask a room of teenagers about politics,

politics, what do you actually hear? And is this an accurate representation of the problem? So that 52% statistic, there are so many problems with the way that that was actually garnered. That was a poll that was done by Channel 4 and Kraft. I don't know if it's the same people that make the cheese slices, but it wasn't particularly well-known polling company. And there's a guy called Mark Pack, who is a Liberal Democrat, and he's an expert in polling, and he's got a great substack called Polling Unpacked. And he actually wrote a piece about that particular poll and said, I can't find anything about how they have collated this information or the methodology that they have used, which would normally be broadly available. But that headline, as you quite rightly said,

went absolutely everywhere. What wasn't reported was that King's College, London and some other rep support academic institutions did a much more scientifically robust study and they found that it's only about 6% of Gen Z that would actually want to live under a dictatorship, which I believe I think 6% sounds about right to me. So that was a very sensationalist headline and not representative, as is so much of what's written about young people, not representative of what I was seeing on the ground. I don't talk to. directly to young people about politics, but because everything's political, you know, sometimes it will come up in the discussions that we have. And I think that this whole idea

that young people are disillusioned or tapping out of democracy or even the way that young men are spoken about and they're all taken in by the far right, I think is completely exaggerated. Young people are just like everyone else in my experience. Just to add that, this idea that young people aren't involved in politics largely comes from people failing to recognize the difference between capital to be politics, so Westminster politics and Little Pea politics, so political ideas, because everything young people are discussing on TikTok these days is Littlepee politics. These are the same issues that we see discussed in Parliament, whether in terms of like

culture wars or identity politics, all these issues of equality and how we interact with human beings are discussed constantly on TikTok, but because it's not typical politicians saying it, we act as if young people aren't discussing the exact same issues that are discussed in Parliament. Absolutely. And listeners, just to drive this point home, over the last two weeks, we have been learning about bad data or media storm. And on this 52% of Gen Z want the UK to be a dictatorship headline, the question that they put to young people never actually once used the word dictatorship. It asked whether the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections. So this is just to really drive home

how bad this headline is and how much it is a very good example of bad data. But look, this doesn't mean that there isn't a problem at all. Proper polling by the John Smith Centre says two-thirds of young people think UK democracy is in trouble. And it's not just young people, general election turnout is less than two-thirds overall. This is not a young person issue per se, but it is an issue. Femmy, who actually benefits when we or young people switch off from politics? Whose interests are served by an exhausted, checked out, can't be bothered public? Well, that I can tell you from being on the ground in Clacton, where I just was and interviewing people.

because whenever I'd speak to people who are more towards the left, they were actually engaged, they actually had hope, they had ideas about how things could change and that there were standards in politics and that it was worth really like weighing things up. However, whenever I was speaking to somebody who was more inclined to vote for Nigel Farage or for the Restore Party, the narrative I keep hearing was they're all as bad as each other, they're all corrupt, they're all in it for themselves and we shouldn't expect anything about anything different. And so that disillusioned idea of politicians being not really in it to actually help people, that tends to basically lower the standards of what we expect from politicians.

And the people who benefit from that are objectively the people that don't meet those standards. And those tend to be people like Nigel Farage. So while it's not as bad as the clickbait implies, Natasha, it's not perfect, is it? And I'm sure when you've engaged with young people, you've seen there are pockets, young men in particular drifting towards this extreme disillusionment and in some cases the far right. So if we manage to hold two truths, young people may not be pro authoritarianism and yet they are genuinely losing faith in our current system. What conversations does that open the door to? I think there are very few people who would disagree with the idea that our democracy is not broken,

necessarily, but definitely flailing, that's a good starting point. Where we would tend to disagree or converge is on what the solution is to that. So I know that Femmi would agree with me that I don't think that our first past the post voting system is a particularly democratic way of people being able to have their say in politics. And what we end up doing is we end up voting for the least bad option. We vote for what we don't want as opposed to what we do want. And and then it becomes this race to the bottom. So that would be the first thing that I would say we need to do in order to fix our democracy. Other people would disagree and say, no, we need somebody like Farage because reform very

much present themselves as a burn it all down, don't trust the institutions party, even though in reality they represent an extreme continuation of what we've always had. They present themselves as the opposite. So I think that there is hope in so far. and I know this from having lots of conversations with people who are not politically aligned with me on LBC, where there's hope is that we agree on the diagnosis of the problem. We're only converging on the solution. But I think that there's a point of commonality and connection there

where we can start to have a really interesting discussion. And I think people often feel that politics is a faraway thing, something confined to the walls of Westminster, or boring or not worth taking their attention away from the immediate issues or the personal issues facing them in their day. Femmy, what's the issue with that narrative? What's the connection people often miss between the day-to-day and this thing we grandly call politics that many have stopped watching? Yeah, and you're entirely right. In fact, the worst politics gets, the worst people's living standards gets, and the less time they have to actually pay attention to politics,

and it's a vicious circle. And again, the people that benefit from that disengagement are people like Nigel Farage. As for the lack of connection between people's living standards and the lives that they're trying to live and politics, that's because often we get these sensationalist headlines that really focus on the politicians rather than the effect on people on the ground. I remember whenever I went into schools during the Brexit campaign years and I'd speak to kids and 16, 17-year-olds in their classrooms, and the first question I'd always ask is, who here cares about politics and then like one or two hands to go up. And the next question I'd ask is,

all right, who cares about the NHS? Who cares about how much stuff costs in the shops? Whether or not you can get a job when you leave school and every, the hands will go up all the time. And I'd say, well, that's politics. And I understand where young people are coming from because I was not politically engaged at that age. I was born in Darlington, moved to Middlesbrose, Swansea, Dundee. So for pretty much all of my childhood, politics was just basically old white men shouting at each other 100 miles away. I couldn't see the connection between politics and my life. And I think making that connection, pointing out the effect that politicians have already had on young people's lives, I think that's essential. And the issue here is not just low voter turnout. People

are switching off from the whole debate. Global trust in the news is at a record low. And the UK is below average. Almost half of us in this country now say that we actively avoid the news. Among people under 35, the single fastest growing reason isn't that they don't care. It just isn't worth their time or it isn't worth their peace of mind. Now, in Media Storm's opinion, a certain amount of distrust in media is not just healthy. It's deserved. But while we're dedicated to calling this out, our goal isn't to stop people engaging with mainstream or legacy news. It's just to encourage them to engage with it critically. Natasha, your latest book is an autopsy of the breakdown of public discourse. you say we're living through a nuanced drought.

What does this mean and how does it damage people to the point where switching off becomes an act of self-protection? There's a chapter on how the media works. And one of the things that we focus on is how actually, whether you're talking about social media or what's now called legacy media, it's all dictated by the attention economy. And that's because legacy media has a, complete obsession with the content second life online. So even now if you have a radio or television show, you're still thinking in these kind of one, two, three minute viral clips. As you quite rightly say,

the audiences of legacy media, the people who read the newspapers, is going down. And yet, the tone of the discourse is still very much dictated by the newspapers. Because even when people are talking on social media, they very often take their cue from head. headlines in the newspapers. So that kind of shrinks the discourse, but it also means that these headlines are competing to be heard, that they're making a lot of noise, which is why people are switching off, because you can't have measured reasonable headlines in the attention economy. It has to be shouting. This is the worst thing ever. We're living through the worst time ever. So that's why people get fatigued by it because they're like, I feel like I'm being shouted

at all the time. But it's because the algorithmic way that social media works is now dictating the way that legacy media works as well. So I was really fascinated by that because it's something that I actively try to kick back against on my radio show. But then I was thinking about how rarely I have a clip that goes totally viral. Like some of the clips from LBC get millions and millions of views. And it's hardly ever my clips that get those views. I'm just going to add that from the perspective of somebody who will occasionally go on to these news shows as a guest. The number of conversations that I have with producers, where some news stories is broken and they want my take on to see how I'd fit into a potential debate that they want to run on their show. If I give them a nuanced

dancer and say, all right, look, I can see this side point of view, but here's why I think would push this angle. I'll get a call back an hour later saying, actually, no, we're not going to go, we're not going to go with you. And the more extreme, the more sensationalist, my response, the more likely it is that I'm going to get picked out to go on the show because they want to see that clash of horns. They want to see that viral clip, et cetera. And so in order to get on those shows, I have to think, all right, what is my actual nuance

position? What is the most sensationalist way of putting that? so I can convince the producer to put me on the show so I can express my nuanced position. But yeah, it's broken. To add to that, when I was doing work experience at one of these kind of talk radio shows, part of my job was to answer the phones

and to get callers perspectives on things. And genuinely, if it was a nuanced, reasoned perspective, I was just basically told to put the phone down. Wow. And, you know, I could go into my experiences on Channel 4s, go back to where you came from, where I spent most of the series arguing with the producers because they wanted me to argue with my fellow travellers. And I didn't think that that was going to change anyone's mind. So look, the media system is very problematic.

And I see this as a cycle of damage between the press and the politicians, because politicians playing for media attention, well, they know that the media is not going to reward. for nuanced evidence-based policymaking, the media is going to reward them for slogans, not policies. Slogans like, stop the boats, which is a meaningless statement. It's not a policy and it has somehow created a headline culture in which the number of people crossing the channel each day is the single main metric of a party's political survival. It is absurd.

Femi, what is the impact of this rage-bate media culture on the political decision-making inside Westminster that materially affects our day-to-day lives. Yeah, on what you said about stopping the boats, I heard a journalist yesterday saying, Nigra Farage is bringing the issue of stopping the boats and channel crossings back onto the political agenda. When did it leave? When did it leave?

It is the political agenda. It's the only thing they talked about for 10 goddamn years. But yeah, so the sensationalist headline grabbing stuff, Yes, it's also, we just discussed, it does make people feel numb. They do get numbs to it and therefore wants to turn off. But also in terms of the decision making, it does make politicians more fearful to do the right thing because they know that whatever they do, the most sensationalist way of expressing it will be what will be seen on the headlines on the front pages.

Yeah. And I think that the fact we are seeing the return of extreme right wing, you know, pseudo-fascist ideas in the mainstream. And I am thinking even of like Stama's Island of Strangers speech. You know, even the so-called left is pandering to that. I think that this happening, less than a century after the Nazi Holocaust era, this is a damning indictment of a media that is so hyper-commercialized. It's willing to reward whichever politician gives it the most clickable headline.

Oh, yeah. For me, obviously, my background is Brexit, but Brexit is the most significant political discussion that we have had in the last 40 years. It's the thing that tore apart most families. It's the one that had the most impact on it on. It's economically, socially, in terms of the divide. And we have an answer as to whether or not it was a good idea, because we've had the answer from every single sector of the UK economy.

So, objectively, on the biggest discussion of our lifetimes, we know which politicians drove us in the wrong direction and which ones tried to say. steer us in the right direction. So any media platform that is still choosing the platform and the people that they knew got it historically and catastrophically wrong in a way that has damaged the lives of millions of people is not acting in the interests of the people of the UK. They are acting the name of Clayton Ratings. This discussion is making me think of, for another book I wrote, I did an interview with a guy called Imran Ahmed who runs the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. And he was talking about the techniques that

trolls use, far-right trolls. And what they do is they pick on left-wing and liberal social media users, hoping that they will clap back, particularly in the days when far more people were on Twitter, hoping to get quote retweeted because they knew that the vast majority of that person's audience would think that what they were saying was extreme and disgusting. But they might get 1% or half a percent of that audience who look at that and go, do you know what? Actually, they've got a point. And they were growing their audiences using that technique. And essentially, you've got these politicians who are professional provocateurs who are using exactly the same strategy. And that's how we've ended up in a place where something like remigration, which is just

ethnic cleansing by any other name. And 10 years ago wouldn't have even been countenanced in the political discussions that we have, that has become mainstreamed by those types of voices. Professional provocateur is such a good characterization of the 21st century politician. So to sum up this part, the story isn't that young and working class people have given up on democracy. The story is a system stopped feeling worth their time and a media stopped making sense to them. Then it blamed them for walking away. Next up, if the problem is the system, how do we fix it? Let's take a quick break.

Welcome back to Media Storm. Before we continue our studio discussion with Femmy and Natasha, we want to turn to Clacton and the upcoming by-election rapidly approaching. In many ways, it represents the farce of our politics. It's happening only because reform leader Nigel Farage pulled a PR stunt by resigning amid financial scandal and immediately running again. The election comes amid ongoing investigations into the questionable sort of. of donations made to his party. It has been boycotted by every other mainstream party and is now widely reported as a two-way race between Nigel Farage and his parody rival Count Binface. But one of his few challengers taking this by-election seriously told us that the media story is not the same story as the one on the ground. John Spencer of the Rejoin EU Party says he's seen gross alienation on the streets of Clacton and a media out of

touch, he also said the dirty politics is exactly why he's running. Well, the media have been portraying this as a fight between Binface and Farage, and that is simply not reflected on the ground. Binfaces is seen as a very much a London elite joke. Even by people who oppose Farage, it's not seen to be particularly complementary of Clacton. The intervention of Count Binface has actually shored up Nigel Farage's support. There are quite a few reform supporters who have doubts now about Farage and in particular his choice of calling this by-election.

But seeing BinFace and the way that feeds into what is essentially a cult's view of an establishment conspiracy against them, the content that the establishment has for them, and the notion that this is all the uni party ganging up, though it's too cowardly to take on Farage directly. All those tropes are confirmed. And I think in that sense, Farage will have a bigger turnout than he might otherwise have got. John, this election is happening because Nigel Farage resigns. amid financial scandal. He says he's handing power to the people to decide what they want,

and this is a people versus the establishment vote. Is that what's really going on here? What's the game plan? Well, Farage commands a very significant cult-like support here. There is no question about that. What he will not get, though, is the sort of North Korean style 90% or whatever, which is what he is seeking, because I don't believe that, Farage is going to fight any subsequent by-election.

The money behind reform and restore have decided for quite some while, actually, that Farage is not a prime ministerial candidate. He's been very useful up to now. He's secured Brexit. He has galvanised the reform movement. But they now are looking for a different leadership. And he is now a liability. Because these people are playing for power.

There are no question about that. This is not an exercise of some frivolous demonstration on the far right. The people behind reform and restore, Mr Harbourn who wants to turn the city of London into a cryptocurrency outfit, the whole MAGA dimension, these are very, very powerful forces with very large resources. And I think they have decided that they will seek a union between reform and restore and also a union with the Conservative Party. That is their goal, either for the next general election or a coalition directly after the next general election,

which current polling suggests would actually command a majority. That is the danger that we face. So one needs to be absolutely clear what is going on here. And the notion of, I'm afraid, some people in the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats who think that if Farage goes amid a flurry of scandal of one kind of another. And that will bring the whole edifice of reformed down. It won't.

We are up against a much more dangerous opponent here. Isn't there a case to be made that by running in this by-election at all, you're playing Farage's PR game? Not at all. I think it is Binfei's who is playing into Farage's PR game. And I have great concerns about treating any election in a democracy. as a joke. But I have particular concerns about doing this now, because what we face in reform is essentially the British branch of the MAGA movement in America. And that is a deeply

anti-democratic movement. They believe in a post-democratic world. And that movement, that combination of unprecedented combination of money and politics, of using politics as a way of enrichment, is what is coming to Britain, if reform, wherever, to form a government. And that is what these people are seeking to achieve, be in no doubt about that. In the face of what is an almost unprecedented threat to democracy here, to be frivolous about democracy, to suggest that a dustbin can become an MP and things, is actually a rather dangerous thing to do, in my view. Financial scandal underpins this by-election.

In the UK, there's no cap on political donation. A person can legally give a party millions, which is how one cryptocurrency tycoon gave reform nine million pounds in the largest ever single donation. Now, 82% of people in the UK think party funding isn't transparent enough. How central is this perception of corruption to voters turning away from politics? And what changes would you suggest to improve financial transparency and accountability in politics generally. Campaign finance is a serious issue. The rise of cryptocurrencies, the rise of tax evasion and the capacity to move enormous funds of money secretly around the planet is an enormous

issue. It's a challenge, actually, not just to our politics, but to our entire financial system. Our financial system is becoming increasingly poisoned by a parallel world of finance, of which crypto is the central feature, but it's not the only one. This has been building a long time through very large uses of cash, offshore tax havens. That's the big issue here. Once we can get on top of that in the financial system, then we will be able to clean up politics and a lot else besides. Welcome back to the Media Storm studio. Before the break, we made the case that political fatigue is a rational,

response to a broken system, not a flaw in the people switching off. So this half is about that system. Our guide here is Open Britain's bigger than politics campaign and it breaks the fix into four parts. Fair information, fair votes, fair influence, fair play. Now we've just heard from John Stevens on the importance of fair influence and that's about money in politics. Now let's dive into the others. The first is fair information. The idea. that before people even get to vote, they deserve honest information that they can trust. As discussed, the information environment is driving people away. Algorithmic outrage, clickbait, headlines written for engagement, not accuracy.

Natasha, if nuance is the missing issue, how do we restore it? How does the media survive in today's capitalist society without throwing nuance under the bus? I think legacy media can actually afford to be a bit less obsessed, with their content's second life online because they don't make any money out of that. They just use it to essentially boast to their shareholders about their reach when a channel doesn't get many actual viewers but is able to drive engagement through their social media content.

They add the views in the online space onto their reach and then use it to get those shows recommissioned. But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense because those online views aren't generating any revenue for those shareholders. And they're also contributing to the very thing which is facilitating their downfall. Social media is a direct threat to legacy media. And there's an opportunity here. If legacy media said, OK, here is where you come to get balanced, to get nuance. I think that for those people who are experiencing news fatigue,

they would actually gravitate towards that. If you said, you know, here is a place where you can trust the information that we're giving you. We're not going to scare you unnecessarily. We're not going to activate your amygdala, cause you to have all these cortisol spikes that are going to affect your mental health. We're just going to tell you the news in a neutral way. then I think that there is a thirst for that. Thank you, Natasha.

So nuance is on the out, and that's something we have to deal with. But there is also an issue coming in, and that is political dishonesty, political disinformation. Now, in my memory, in 2016, a big red bus strove around Britain, promising us that leaving the EU would free up 350 million pounds a week for the NHS. This was a bold lie and a total misuse of statistics. $350 million, by the way, was the gross figure the UK paid to the EU before you extracted the hundreds of millions that the EU paid back in return. So it was so dishonest and so consequential that one campaigner actually crowdfunded $200,000 to try to prosecute Boris Johnson over it.

That went nowhere. And the man who fronted that bus became Prime Minister. we have not seen that £350 million weekly injection into the NHS. This is just sort of the most stark example in my recent memory. Femi, is it fair to say that there is a rising culture of political dishonesty and what regulations or incentives would work to keep politicians truthful in their claims? So I think part of the reason why we didn't get enough traction in terms of holding Boris Johnson to account for that bus

is because I think that there was too much focus on the inaccuracy of the number. So was it the gross figure, wasn't the net figure, did we count the rebate, et cetera? And not enough focus on the fact that none of that money would be there because ultimately we'd end up poorer overall because of Brexit. So he said in the past that he knew that Brexit would make us poorer. And so the issue is somebody who knew that they were lying, telling a blatant lie that costs the country, 100 billion pounds a year. Now, the example that I always use is, if I lie to HMRC about my taxes,

and I cost the public purse a thousand pounds in a given year, then I go to jail. Boris Johnson tells a huge lie costing the public purse 100 billion pounds a year, and nothing happens to him. I think if we're ever going to get real accountability, then politicians should be held to the same standards that the rest of us do, And so if they cause the level of damage that somebody like Boris Johnson has to the public, they should be held criminally liable for what they've done, both in terms of the financial cost, but also in terms of the NHS, because the money he was promising to the NHS obviously didn't happen.

And in 2018, every single medical body in the UK was saying that Brexit would do damage to the NHS. In fact, the British Medical Association said that a no-deal Brexit, which was entertained by Boris Johnson and actively supported by Nigel Farage, would cause catastrophic damage to the NHS and, quote, make us more vulnerable to deadly pandemics. That was said in 2018. Now, think about what then happened just a year and a half later. There is a human cost in lives associated with the lies that Boris Johnson told.

And again, you should be held criminally responsible for that. Because until we make it the case, that politicians know that if they tell a lie that we can prove they had no reason for believing was true and it causes damage to the country that they will go to jail, we won't get honesty in politics. Thank you. And next up is fair votes. This is the simple idea that when you vote, the result should actually reflect what you voted for. Shocking. Millions of people live in safe seats where the outcome feels decided before the campaign even starts or vote tactically just to block something worse. We did a recent episode on this, but just quickly, Femmy, how much of the switching off we talked about in part one is down to our voting

system. The issue of you voting against something rather than for something, it means that because you're a primary aim when you walk into that voting booth is to not vote for the party that you want the most, but to vote tactically to prevent a party you really don't like, it means that before you've even left the voting booth, you're already disappointed in your vote. You're already disappointed in the outcome because you haven't voted for the thing that you actually wanted. And that means you're turned off before you can leave the voting booth. And that is horrendous for the belief that politics can make a difference, especially because you know that objectively, statistically across the country, your vote doesn't count. Because you know that if a party with a minority

of the vote, for example, Labor got 34% of the vote and ended up with 62% of the seats, that means that the remaining 66% of the votes have no effect on politics because they're outnumbered in Parliament. And that knowledge, it's almost lethal to public belief in politics. And finally, fair play. And this kind of touches on all of the others, whether it is political lying, whether it's dark money in politics. Natasha, this is the idea that politicians should play by the same rules as everybody else. Many people feel like this isn't the case. The perception of Tory sleighs throughout the conservative years shifted to the Labour government when the Epstein files exposed Peter Mandelson's disturbing ties with the sex offender. Open Britain points out, there is no independent regulator for political conduct. Politicians largely mark their own homework. So what kind of accountability would you like to see imposed on political elites that you currently think is lacking? There was recently a law passed in the Senate in Wales which made it illegal for politicians to lie in their manifestos or to lie in a way that would impact.

hacked the outcome of elections. Interestingly, there was only one politician in the, or one MP, I should say, in the Senate who voted against that law being passed and they were from the Reform Party, which I think tells you quite a lot. But I think it's a really good starting point in terms of accountability for politicians. In terms of the rest of it, I think that actually some of it does come back to us and our behaviour around politicians. This apathy and this belief that they're all the same, what the hard right and the far right in particular are trying to bring about is a situation where those who would vote for them are very politically fired up, not necessarily politically engaged, but very politically fired up based on social media

and sloganeering and wanting to stop the boats. And then those who would be less minded to vote for them just feel really apathetic, have a sense that all politicians are the same, that nothing that they could ever do would make a difference, and that there's no point in therefore even to trying to engage with the political system. That's what they want. And if you look at austerity, for example, the impact of austerity was measurably and statistically more harsh on young people than it was on pensioners. and that's because politicians don't think that young people vote and therefore they think, well, why would we even bother trying to cater to this group of people? So by tapping out of the political system and by not using your right to vote, for example,

you are ensuring that politicians will not even try to represent the interests of people like you. And just to wrap up this episode, I wonder if we can turn a bit more to personal solutions. So Femi, for people feeling fatigued by politics or like voting doesn't make a difference, what would you like them to understand about the political power that they do hold? Politicians won't act unless they fear their vultures more than they fear losing sponsorships, losing potential £5 million bungs or losing their seat in power. So we need to change the political. discourse and that means you have the power to have conversations with the people around you.

Like, I have the ability to reach people on social media, but I don't have the ability to reach the person that you go to school with, the person you said opposite at work, the person who's opposite you at the dining table, you have the power to reach people that I can't. You have the power to shift the dial of conversation in your area to people understand who is going to hurt them and who is going to help them. So please change the conversation by having those conversations and don't be scared, because ultimately the cost of not doing anything is going to be far worse for you over the long term.

And Natasha, for people fighting news fatigue, what is your mental health advice? How do we avoid being made apathetic by overexposure? I think limiting your intake, back in the day, there used to be the 6 o'clock news and the 10 o'clock news, and it was everything in a handy half-hour overview. And yes, of course, bias still existed, and there were questions to be asked about which stories were reported on and which weren't. But that is a mental health-wise, preferable way to imbibe the news instead of constantly all day long having headlines screaming at you.

So there are things that you can do. You can use the technology, for example, to say if you sign up to various news websites, that it will lock you out after 10 minutes or 15 minutes. But to stay informed, you can limit the amount of time that you spend each day, but do dedicate some time. Don't do it when you first wake up, try to give yourself some space for maybe the first hour of the day. And think critically about what the headline is trying to do, is trying to grab your attention. So there will be a level of exaggeration. You probably don't have to worry as much as the headline would imply, you know, stay vigilant, stay woke, but you don't have to be worrying about it constantly. The only thing that's going to do is harm you. Yeah, absolutely.

It's these simple things that can help. And as well as making these personal adjustments, we, of course, need to also call for systemic reform. For UK listeners, there is a bill going through Parliament. Many see as hope for such change. It's the representation of the people's Bill. And since our episode on electoral reform, its return to Parliament was delayed until the autumn, meaning you actually can have a say. To find out more, we've shared links to Open Britain's bigger than politics campaign in the show notes. And just before we leave you both, can you tell our listeners where they can follow you? And if you have anything to plug, Femi, let's start with you. I'm Femi underscore sorry on pretty much all the platforms,

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. And yeah, I'm just a guy that basically considers himself to be Nigel Farage's reverse flash. And Natasha, where can we follow your work? So I'm a middle-aged woman, so that means Instagram is where I hang out and I am underscore Natasha Devon on there. You can find out more about my work in schools

at Natasha Devon.com. And the nuanced drought, my new political book, is out on the 10th of September. Thank you for listening. Next week we'll be talking about the collapse of local journalism and why it matters. How did we get here? What does it mean for community and how does it affect democracy? If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month.

The link is in the show notes and a special shout-out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. 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 wadier and follow the show via at media storm pod media storm is an award winning podcast produced by helena wadier and matilda mallinson it was edited by christie calloway gale the music is by samfire