Media Storm - Live show! 2023's biggest media storms - The Huw Edwards Scandal

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Hey listeners! We've launched a Patreon. If you want to support us for a small monthly fee, head to patreon.com/MediaStormPodcast This is part one of Media Storm's LIVE SHOW at London Podcast Festival! Join us as we look back at the biggest media storm's from 2023, including the Huw Edwards scandal and - in the next two weeks - the Titan submersible implosion and the ongoing sexism row in Spanish football. With special guests Times journalist Manveen Rana and comedian Athena Kugblenu. Follow: Manveen Rana @ManveenRana Athena Kugblenu @athenakugblenu Helena Wadia @helenawadia Mathilda Mallinson @mathildamall Samfire @soundofsamfire Get in touch: Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Media Storm was launched by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Media Stormers. This week, you'll be hearing part one of our live show that we recorded a couple of weeks back at London Podcast Festival. Thank you so much to everyone who came to see the show. It meant a lot to have your support and to meet everyone in person. It was super exciting. And to the people that came up to us and spoke to us after the show, it was honestly amazing, wasn't it? Yeah, we had a bunch of 16-year-olds come up and I thought, oh my God, if we're getting through to 16, if 16-year-olds are, and trust them, we're all fine, right? Honestly. They're in good hands. Come on, Gen Z's. We believe in you.

Yeah, fix everything that we fucked up. Woo-hoo! And it's going to be great. Also on the show, we had two fabulous guests, Times and Sunday Times journalist Manveen Rana, who is the host of the podcast Stories of Our Time, and the hilarious Athena Kugblanoo, who brought some comedy to current affairs.

Amazing. You'll hear both of them throughout this episode. Now, if you were there, you'll know that we looked back at three of the biggest news stories from 2023 and discussed if the media did a good job of covering them. And our first story, which you're going to hear in this episode, was about the short but fierce BBC scandal around their presenter Hugh Edwards.

If you don't remember the story, don't worry because we run through it. Coming up in the next two weeks, we'll release the rest of our live show, which covered two more massive stories from 2023, the Titan submarine implosion and the ongoing sexism row within Spanish. Spanish football after Louise Rubiala's kissed football player Jenny Hamoso without her consent.

For now, enjoy part one of our show and we hope to see you at London Podcast Festival next year. Hey everyone! Welcome to Media Storm live at King's Place! We are recording this, so audience contributions would be helpful. Thank you all so much for being here This is our second time at London Podcast Festival We're very excited about the show Who has heard Media Storm before? Who has never heard Media Storm before?

Who is our close personal friend or family member? Well, for anyone who doesn't know Media Storm, I'm Matilda Manson, this is Helen Awadier And Media Storm is a news podcast that starts With the people who are normally asked last And that means we call out mainstream media mishaps and we put lived experience at the center of the story. And if that still doesn't make sense to you, go and have a listen. Tonight we're going to be looking back at three of the biggest headlines from 2023 that made national and international headlines.

But it's not just us you're going to be hearing from. We'd also like to hear from you. So after each topic, there's going to be a roving mic coming out into the audience. So if you have something to say, if you have a thought, a question, a comment, we'd love to hear it. So, yeah, hold on to them and we'll tell you when it's time. But we can't do any of this without our guests today. So please welcome to the stage, Athena Kugblanu, and Manvi, Rana. Woo!

Yeah. Thank you. Manvine, Rana, why don't you tell any of the Philistines in the audience who you are? I present the stories of our Times podcast for the Times and the Sunday Times. I've been a journalist for far, far too long. Very long time. Athena, let us know who you are. Yes, I'm Athenicaven. I'm a stand-up comedian and comedy writer.

And most of the TV shows I write for have been cancelled. So thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. It's all me. It's all me. Well, as the comedian here, it's your job to keep it light for a Saturday night. So thanks for joining us. Yeah, definitely. And also, this is probably the first time I haven't felt like a minority in journalism.

So there's that. Okay, so let's kick off. So undoubtedly, one of the biggest stories of 2023 was when The Sun, the newspaper that comes under quite a lot of flack at Media Storm, made its front page a story about an unnamed BBC presenter. This unnamed BBC presenter was exchanging images and messages with, at the time, who the Sun called, a person who was 17. and about the presenter sending this person upwards of 35,000 pounds.

For reference, it is a crime to possess indecent images of anyone under the age of 18 in the UK. Now, after quite a few days of speculation, Hugh Edwards' wife named him as the presenter at the heart of this scandal, but she also said that he was suffering from serious mental health illness and that he was receiving inpatient hospital care. police officers actually concluded pretty swiftly that there was no evidence to suggest that Hugh Edwards possessed sexual images of the person when they were under 18 which had not only been alluded to in the Sun's article but alluded to a hell of a lot yeah it might be worth mentioning as well that the person at the time is now 20

but anyway the spotlight then turned from the BBC onto the Sun and people were asking should this story have ever been published the Sun released an ardent defence saying they were approached by desperate parents who thought Edwards's money was being used to fund a drug habit and they insisted that the story was in the public interest. However, the young person at the heart of the story who, as Matilda said, is now 20 years old, had released a statement via a lawyer saying nothing inappropriate or unlawful has taken place and the allegations reported in the Sun newspaper are rubbish. And here's the thing, that statement was reportedly sent to the Sun before they ever published their front page story.

The Sun didn't include a single statement from the young person in question and instead just relied on what their parents said. Manveen, maybe you can help us clear up a few strange editorial decisions here. Why do you think it was okay that Victoria Newton, editor of the Sun, didn't include any of the testimony of the young person at hand? Do we think that it was okay to publish this story at all anonymously? if they didn't have the watertight legal backing to publish it with his name on, you know, why publish it at all?

What's that going to lead to, if not this wild goose chase? Can you share your thoughts on the editorial okayness of this story? Yes. Now, I should say, firstly, this is a legal mindfield, so I'm really worried about everything I'm about to say. Also, for me personally, it's a bit of minefield because I worked for the BBC for years, and I worked with Hugh Edwards and with his wife at different times.

And I now work at the Times and the Sunday Times, which is obviously owned by the same media company that owns the Sun. We work in the same building. Murdoch Media Company. Murdoch Media Company. So this is difficult on many levels. But I think it's a really, I mean, it's a fascinating example of watching how one of these stories unfolds. You know, the Sun have been very keen to say now they have never accused him of committing a crime. even though as you say the story said he possessed

indecent images of somebody who was 17 which is by its very nature a crime and I think that's where it sort of gets really complicated because if the son are now saying he never committed a crime it starts to call into question the editorial process that allowed them to publish because for anybody in the media industry right now

there is this huge over the last few years there's been this huge sort of legal wrangle over where does privacy end and at what point are these things allowed to be made public, or what point are they in the public interest? And I think if you think a big figure in the media is committing a crime, it's absolutely in the public interest. That's why you would publish.

If you thought there was something, you know, there were lots of layers on this, you know, if they thought that this person was feeding a drug habit, you know, there were various reasons they sort of thought it was a good idea to publish. But what a lot of us in journalism, I think, were baffled by was the idea that they received a statement from somebody, you know, the victim in all of this and didn't even refer to it in the piece.

You know, I think nobody who's ever published a story like this would ignore a right of reply. You know, there may be questions around it. You know, is this person young, impressionable? Have they been coerced into putting out this statement? All of those questions could be raised, but you would have to publish the right of reply. So I think a lot of us were quite baffled by that particular decision.

I mean, the other thing that's really interesting in this, just from a legal perspective, very dull. For anyone who's not in the industry, I'd like, no. But whenever you're about to name somebody, like The Sundit, where it's a BBC presenter, and you've decided you don't actually have, like, the legal backing to be able to name them. You're not going to put it out there who this person is. You would go ahead with that if you thought that there were enough people to sort of cover you. So, like, you know, we'll sometimes put out a policeman from so-and-so police force has potentially committed

whatever, but you don't name them. And you think there are enough policemen there for nobody to be able to worry that they're going to be pointed out in the street. This was a really interesting case in that. So we even worry about things not called jigsaw identification. Have you given away too much information

about who this person is? Will people be able to put together different pieces of information you put out and work out who the person is that you're talking about? So everyone's very careful about that. With this, you suddenly had, because all of the other people

in that pool of people it might be are known and are famous. You suddenly had people pointing at everybody who was a BBC presenter and we've never had this before. You suddenly had BBC presenters coming out on Twitter saying it wasn't me. So suddenly that pool is shrinking.

Literally Jeremy Vine made headlines for 24 hours saying it wasn't me and he wanted the person to come out. Gary Linneker. Started accusing Ryland, National Treasure. I mean, where does it end? But you know, suddenly it was like the pool is suddenly becoming

smaller and smaller and now everyone's saying well who hasn't come out and said it wasn't me and then everyone's trying to identify them anyway so for us it was it was a first on many many levels and I think it's probably going to reshape the way newsrooms do a lot of this stuff in the future definitely Athena what do you make of all of this do you buy into the sun's very earnest claims that they were just helping desperate parents yeah there's suddenly what they was doing okay they knew what they were doing right and we all know what they did they made our WhatsApp chats very interesting on a Sunday night okay so instead of songs of praise, because I'm sure we're all watching normally.

We work, you know, and I think there is what newspapers do is they play with human nature and how we love a bit of salacious gossip. I would like to define myself as a high-brow comedian that talks about intellectual political issues, but when someone says there's a sleaze at the BBC and he reads the news

at 10, I'm like, is it now? The news at 10, not even the daytime one, that we're not that fuss about. The news the big one. You see a headline like this and you're like, well, this isn't a money maker for the son, there's a money maker for me. The one with the bongs, come on, that's the proper news point. That's the one we watched.

But in all seriousness, the son knew what they were doing, okay? But I do have a position on this which won't be popular. That is, if you read the news, you cannot be the news, okay? And a lot of people said, okay, fine, the law wasn't broken, okay? But doing something immoral can make you the news. Since when was appropriateness and inappropriateness defined by the law? You know, appropriateness and inappropriateness is actually defined by, you know, very flexible moral codes that we build. So, for example, having extramal affairs is considered inappropriate, okay?

Having affairs of people where there's a large age difference is often questioned because of questions about manipulation or vulnerability, things like that. And of course, the individual's own vulnerability due to his concerns, okay? You cannot be the news if you are the news. So was it in the public interest to put the news story out? Absolutely not. Was it in the public interest for the BBC once they knew something that happened to think about how they could withdraw Hugh Edwards

from the public domain until this got sorted out? That is actually the real question here. Okay, because this was probably, my understanding is that there was some understanding in the business that this had happened and they were like, oh, this is all sorted now. I'm like, well, actually, like, if it was me, and unfortunately, I don't run the BBC,

so it wasn't, it was not me and it will never be me. I would say you can't be the news if you are the news. So let's really go into this and make sure all parties are satisfied with the outcome. I do think that's a really interesting, in a way, that's a really interesting debate now, which I feel like has changed over the last decade or so. Like about a decade ago, everyone would have said, if you're famous and you're having an affair or any of these things, it should be printed.

And it would have been on the news of the world, it would have been front page all over the tableids. What was interesting at the end of the Hugh Edwards was a sort of scandal. was the way the public was just like you know my god leave the man alone you know he's now sort of seeking help for mental health issues do we need to know about his complicated private life

isn't that for him and his family to discuss and I do think that is where that's a big change for newsrooms now and I think I think it shifted the dial even further I think a lot of people will be like is this in the public interest do we need to know do we have a right to know is he allowed to just have a private life probably you know and I think

that that's one of the legacies of this story Can I just add, I think that we are far more accepting of queerness than we were 10, 15, maybe 10 years ago, even maybe 5 years ago. So I think the idea of somebody going through this with their family or whatever, people are sympathetic to it, because we understand the social reasons why someone might end up with in a heteronormative situation and kids, and then get into adulthood and think, actually, this isn't me. I'm not suggesting this is what happened, I'm just saying we're open to that interpretation of things. I think that sympatheticness we have, that's the word. I think the sympathy we had to that

contributed to people dialing it down once we got on over the WhatsApps and stuff we were like actually this is a story about someone's personal journey and their mental health struggles and actually I thought it was very interesting that you did bring up the BBC reporting itself because actually for the first day or so

this story wasn't actually making that many waves it was actually when the BBC started giving it blanket coverage that people were talking more and more about it and it blew up and there is this sort of BBC paranoia about them not reporting enough on themselves and I think the way that what they actually did is they pushed it further into the mainstream by saying we're not treating one of our own any different to how we would treat anybody else I mean there is a Murdoch Empire versus BBC situation going on and in a way do you think that the Sun just were playing

fast and loose with their editorial guidelines because it was a way to bash the BBC. I can't possibly I can't the official murder exposed person in the house. I couldn't possibly say no idea. Genuinely I mean I wasn't

there for the editorial decisions. I'd be surprised because with a case like this where it is so legally fraught you know there's a lot of considerations that go in before you publish. You know is there some animosity between various newspapers and the BBC, yes. But, you know, I mean, I think you'd be surprised at actually sort of, you know,

how much cooperation there also is. You know, I work for the Times and Sunday Times. We often sort of will have cooperation with Panorama, for example. And I know the lawyers all speak. So even during this, I think it was difficult for the lawyers because they're all fighting on the same side in a lot of these battles about privacy. And suddenly they were, you know, the BBC lawyers, we're on the different side to the Times lawyers, you know, to the Sun lawyers.

And all of that's quite difficult. But I don't think it was that alone. I do think the BBC, having worked there for a very long time, you know, is very sensitive about stories that are about the BBC. You know, when I worked there, I would often chase executives down the corridor saying, you must comment on this story about the BBC, and they'd be like, I can't comment.

I'm too busy watching you put your show out. You know, there's a weirdness about it. But I think it's because you sort of feel this great duty towards impartiality that you end up sometimes, and I think this was an example of overdoing it. Well done. You've survived this story without breaking any laws. I think there's a really interesting question I have for the audience based on what you raised in, what we were just talking about, about what is the public interest and does it need to be criminal to be in the public interest? Do we ever think that a public figure's sex life is in the public interest if it's not against the law?

I mean, whether it's an affair, whether it's an affair with someone who's much younger, but over a legal age. I would love to send the roving mic out into the question, and anyone who has contributions, please put your hand up. Thank you. I thought no one's going to be brave enough to be the first. Hi. What's your name? It's Alice. I worked at News International for more than six years.

It's very painful years. We can't have this conversation without talking about journalistic standards, and that's really at the heart of this story. This young person involved in the story was not the only person targeted by Hugh Edwards. How many newspapers or media sources mentioned that? Why didn't the Sun mention this? They concentrated sonely on the single individual,

which was completely wrong. I think that's the theme that you're going to know. notice comes up in some of the stories. Definitely the third story we'll talk about today is reporting on something as an isolated incident. Often a really controversial incident that's going to get loads of clickbait and loads of comment and not contextualizing it in a way that points to the real story that, you know, is maybe less, maybe gets less traffic for the news that's, new site that's publishing. And what you were referring to before is that, you know, whilst this scandal was going on, then other, I think it was members of staff said that Hugh Edwards had,

essentially sent them inappropriate messages. And that is what is the subject of the internal BBC investigation. But from my point of view, I have to wonder about the editor of the son, Victoria. It's such a poor decision that I find it mind-boggling. Do not mention the other people involved. Why on earth would you do that?

To be fair, I don't think they knew about the other people involved. So the good thing about putting out a story like this, when you think there is a potential of abuse, is that quite often it sort of acts as like a lightning rod. And you know, it's a gateway that allows other people to come forward, which is what happened with the accusations within the BBC, and the BBC first reported on them. And then actually the papers did pick up on the BBC's investigation, but then what happens in those cases? So I've actually, I've done stories like this before. I uncovered the big Me Too scandal that saved the children a few years

ago. The difficulty for all the newspapers that sort of pick up the story and cover it is that they haven't spoken to the sources themselves. So they can only ever do it as secondary reporting so they can say the BBC now reports that there are people who've come forward and there as a complaints process going through, but you know, that'll fill a few paragraphs. They don't have enough of the detail, I suppose, to be able to sort of do a massive splash on it necessarily. Can I just add to that? I think it's because a really

important point in the journalistic standards thing, because at what point is the newspaper interested in uncovering a story and uncovering a truth? And at what point is it interested in clickbait and selling copies, okay? And, you know, I'm not a journalist, but I would imagine, should something like this happen, the first thing you do is think,

did it happen to anyone else? Do you build a story and then wait a couple weeks or a month so you can put out something that has integrity and actually tell a better story about the individual that you were trying to expose and that's probably why we didn't hear about anything else until afterwards so it's kind of

like doing the right things in completely the wrong order you know the investigating happened after they put out the story which is just unacceptable do we have any any other burning thoughts for one more straight man in the blue who I have no idea who that is oh yeah who could that possibly be

who could it possibly be a relation of some kind. Now, the point you make about the whether or not to publish, I think it's an element of whether there's hypocrisy involved. If they are doing their role and it really has no connection to

sexuality or anything like that, then I'm not sure it is in the public interest. But if you sense a rather long time ago, John Major got into trouble because of this sort of thing, where he put out that somehow the conservatives were the moral high ground, and then it was

rather quickly revealed that they weren't. and I think that was perfectly reasonable but as I say there may be a second story behind this which is that he was prodigious at doing this sort of thing but if it was just a one-off I'd have said it was inappropriate yeah because yeah

he's not going out and saying oh I don't believe in any extramarital affairs and speaking of hypocrisy it raises a really interesting point about the Sun because shortly after Byline Times broke a story about Dan Wutton abusing his positions of power he'd been an associate editor of the Sun the Sun the Sun had been aware of

these allegations a month before they published their Hugh Edward's story and done nothing about it. So theocracy, quite a key theme here. But I think we need to move on to our next story. Thank you for listening. We will have more from our live show in the next two weeks. And for our final investigation of the season, we'll be speaking to international resistance fighters and exploring the line between terrorists and freedom fighters. That'll be out on the 26th of October. media storm wherever you get your podcast that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many

people as possible hear these voices. You can also follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helen Lawardia and follow the show via at MediaStormPod.