Media Storm - Live show! 2023's biggest media storms - Titan submarine impolsion

Episode Date: October 12, 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 two 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 Titan submersible implosion - and next week, 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

Hi Media Stormers, it's Helena here. We're back with part two of our live show that we recorded last month at London Podcast Festival. Hey everyone! Welcome to Media Storm live at King's Place. 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. Last week, we released our live chat about the short but fierce scandals. surrounding Hugh Edwards, so if you haven't yet, jump back and have a listen to last week's

episode. This week, we're releasing our chat about another big story, the Titan submarine implosion. If you don't remember the story, don't worry because we run through it. We had two amazing guests join us on stage, Times and Sunday Times journalist Manvine Rana. I present the stories of our Times podcast for the Times and the Sunday Times, and I've been a journalist for far far too long. And we were also joined by the hilarious comedian, Athena Cookblanoo. 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. Thank you so much to Manveen and Athena for joining us and thank you to King's Place for hosting us. Coming up next week we'll have the third and final part

of our live show. But for now, enjoy part two and we hope to see you at London Podcast Festival next year. Our second big story from 2023 is the Titan submarine implosion. Now in June, a submersible operated by the American tourism company Ocean Gate imploded during an expedition down to see the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic Sea. There were five people on board, no survivors. The passengers were the Ocean Gate CEO, a French deep sea explorer and Titanic expert, a British private jet dealer. and then another businessman from one of Pakistan's wealthiest families and his 19-year-old son.

So this is really sad. Five people lost their lives. One of them was a teenager. But on social media, people were almost enjoying themselves following this story. They reveled in this kind of Chardonfreude, at the fate of these thrill-seeking billionaires. For reference, a seat on the Titan was $250,000. dollars. Stockton Rush, he was the CEO of Ocean Gate, who lost his life. He had previously ridiculed safety protocols and said that they were anti-innovation. And as far as we can tell,

the headlines weren't much less morbid. Behind newsreaders' serious expressions was a very poorly concealed editorial appetite for the grisly details about the claustrophobia on board, the freezing limbs, the mood swings that might be happening inside this steel tomb. I don't know about you but every hour I was getting breaking news notifications on my phone counting down to the anticipated death of all the passengers. Let's take a look at some of that coverage. Now within the past hour it's been confirmed that banging sounds have been heard from the area in the North Atlantic. It is frankly a horrific concept. Fewer than 40 hours of oxygen are left in a missing sub. The clock is ticking for crews working to rescue the Titan subversible. The search has entered a new stage of

urgency. As the US Coast Guard says, the vessel probably has enough oxygen to last until Thursday morning local time. That's just hours away. Trapped in a tiny submarine far beneath the ocean surface with time and oxygen running out. Athena, what do we think? Entertainment or news? Yeah, I mean, this is going to be a very boring thing to say because this conversation was had 20 years ago, but 24-hour news, kind of killed news. Okay. And it killed news because it made us thirsty for news and so we have to create news rather than wait for news to happen and go, this thing happened. Okay. So a story that would have been like, this has happened, it's really terrible. A story about malpractice,

a story about gross negligence, a story about arrogance turned into a TikTok, TikTok when they're going to die because of 24-hour news and we've got to put something out. And everyone said this was going to happen actually. People said, you know, that when this happened, 24-hour news started, it would turn into this kind of almost like fill up. We've got to fill everything and I think that in order for the news to survive because it is 24 hours when stories hit certain conventions

i.e. Interesting people, people of note. Billionaires will always be people of note. They're interesting because they're billionaires. You know, it's a lot of money. They don't get texts every morning and saying you have insufficient funds. They don't have it. You know, every 8.30 I get work. I don't set an alarm anymore. The cooperative wake me up, you know,

which is lovely of them. Thank you. bank you have to transfer money but they don't you know the billionaires are fascinating okay it's the bottom of the ocean I mean like that's fascinating endlessly fascinating um James Cameron got involved do you know I mean everyone and people who know I love James Cameron so I literally was like this has happened I got what does James Cameron think because I'm aware of his fascination and he did and he did and he did the best reporting of everyone of anyone to be fair um so it's all very sad and there's nothing we can do about it. And 24-hour news is great for lots of reasons. And this would be a reason why it's not great. And I just want to say that we have a real contrary position when it

comes to billionaire. Like the way people are talking about these, it doesn't matter. They've paid a quarter of a million to go under the sea. Like, okay, but if you're a billionaire, you would spend a quarter million on something, right? And you know, it's really weird. Like, Rihanna's a billionaire, yeah! You know, must have been a billionaire. Well, what an asshole? Like, what? It's, it's, it's, it's madness. So the conversation we have about wealth is endlessly interesting to me but generally I think this is just a sign that 24 hour news is going to give us

a lot of crap sometimes. Exactly because what we were going to say aside from the morbid nature of this reporting is the sheer abundance of it. I mean over four days many news organizations moved the story to their top story. It was on their home pages. Some outlets

were sort of deciding and they were flicking their stories back and forth. They didn't quite know whether it was going to be their top story or not and then as it gained momentum. It was back to their top story. And actually, here's the weird thing. So the Navy actually detected a sound consistent with an implosion a few hours after the Titan was reported missing. And we now know that that was the implosion. So all of this counting down how much oxygen they had left, you know, what was happening inside the speculation, it wasn't actually relevant at all. I mean, Manvian, do you think the coverage was proportionate?

I think it's, you know, when you're deciding whether it's proportion, it's always fed by, you know, how much are people interested and people were fascinated. So, you know, it was an unhealthy fascination, but, you know, the news was only feeding what people were asking for. Also, like, God, honestly, I agree, I think 24-hour news is often vacuous. It ends up concentrating on all the wrong details. You know, have some sympathy for the poor producers who happened to call up to saying, who would be an expert on what might be happening in a submersible, you know, at this point with very little oxygen. aren't many people, honestly.

So a lot of it was sort of like just almost, can you talk about this? Probably, nobody really knew. And a lot of it was conjecture. It wasn't doing what news should do, which I think is frustrating. I thought the story itself, though, was sort of disturbing on many levels.

I mean, our fascination for it did come from it being very rich people, you know, billionaires and, you know, the tie up with the Titanic. It's like, God, it's all happening again. You've got these very glamorous people going, you know, going to sea and it all ending badly. But, you know, about a week before, there'd been this absolute disaster with this Greek ship,

which was filled with people who had often been people, a lot of them had been people smuggled. So, you know, we at one point picked up that, you know, I think it was in Pakistan, a lot of the coverage, even though two of the people on the submersible were Pakistani, were saying, why are they getting so much attention when 300-something people died on that ship, and nobody talked about it. You know, the media coverage lasted for about an hour. in terms of apparently from all the evidence we saw the European authorities knew that this ship was going down

and nobody even sent help and yet millions were spent sort of trying to find trying to sort of save the people in the submersible and there was a real sort of disjoint but you know at the same time I thought a lot of the coverage was really unhealthy because so many people on social media were sort of celebrating that these you know

I think they were so tied up in the story in the countdown and there was a sense of Chardon Freud of these are very rich people. The CEO was clearly, you know, not a very popular man in his own profession. Lots of people within his own company had warned that this was a disaster waiting to happen. So there was this sort of sense of hubris for the man in charge of this,

which somehow got extended to everybody else who was on it. And, you know, there were moments where I just thought, God, there was a poor woman whose husband and son were on that submersible, who was having to watch everybody, you know, being endlessly fascinated by it, making jokes about it. I mean, at one point, I think Subway, you know, the sandwich chain came out and sort of said, at least our subs don't implode.

And you think, God, high bar. I know. I mean, I'm sure somebody in the PR office thought that was a good strategy for about five minutes, but oh my God. And it just sort of, it felt sort of really inhuman. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up that migrant boat disaster

and I would love just noise from the audience. Can you say yeah if you were aware of this Titan story? Yeah. And be honest, can you say yeah if you were aware of the Messenia disaster? Yes. Okay, we have quite, quite a good, tuned-in audience, pleased to see. But I think you raised that there was a disproportionality with the coverage for the Titan and the coverage for the Messenia boat disaster.

It peaked at 35,000 articles in one day for the Titan, five. thousand for the boat disaster. There were 450 to 700 passengers on board, a fraction of whom survived. I think the 300 deaths was maybe just the Pakistanis on board, Pakistanis fleeing economic and food crisis in the country. But it's not just the disproportionality in the news coverage, because that directly correlates to the disproportionality in the search and rescue efforts. For the Titan, we had somewhere approaching 10 million US and Canadian state dollars spent on a deep rescue operation that went over for four days. For the Messenia boat crisis, the survivors asked whether the bodies of their loved ones could be recovered and they were told it would be too

expensive and that the water was too deep. And so coverage directly affects the efforts we put into saving those lives. And for me, that is, if you want a public interest story out of this, it's not the story itself. It's what the story tells us about search and rescue policy agenda and about the news agenda itself. And yeah, there's a lot of analogies that could be drawn with the Titanic, but one of them is the Titanic was a ship that exposed the basest interests

and impulses of the uber wealthy who abandoned the sinking ship and left sequestered third-party third-class passengers to drown. And for me, we have a similar story here and that's what the real public interest story is. That's something you said, right at the beginning of your answer,

really is interesting to me that was it proportional because editors are asking the question what does the public want to know and we should give them the information they want to know and that raises a huge question about what is the purpose of journalism you know are we there to tell the public

the information that they need or are we there to cater to the information that they want for our audience for our audience members I'd ask you know what is it that you want out of your news do you want us to cater to your appetites and to what you want to see or do you want us to curate the information based on very objective journalistic standards of what is in the public interest Does anyone have any thoughts on this story or any questions for any of our panellists? Hands in the air. Should news be entertainment

or should it be information? I think social media has a massive role to play on whether a story becomes information or entertainment. With the titan, you know, it did become entertainment for a lot of reasons and people were making TikToks about what would it be like, you know, on this sub with the oxygen counting down. And I think when social media gets involved,

it often becomes quite entertainment-y. Yeah, I'd like to, that's an amazing question because the news should obviously not be entertainment. It wasn't designed to entertain. It was designed to inform and maybe spread a bit for propaganda. That's the nature of news through the decades or whatever. But one of the, excuse us. I mean, I hope not.

Present company excluded, of course. Of course. Okay. But generally speaking, we can be quite cynical about the news, but also understand how important it is and how important it is to consume it. And it annoys me if you say that I don't watch the news. Because if you don't watch the news, then what's wrong?

It can't just be The Simpsons. Don't I mean? What's something else? Although the Simpsons could be arguably called the news. Anyway, but the news is now more or less only valuable for its entertainment because what industry is dying and has been dying for the past few decades. The news because of social media. So I think if you look at the Daily Mail, I think they were probably the first publication to really understand the value of making the news entertaining

because they understood the value of drawing people to their website. I think they pick that up before any other website. And they actually make a profit. Of course they do. Not given in the industry. To this day, if you go to the mirror website, the independent website, oh, you know, it's a nightmare and I've got to do research on the sun. I'm like, do I have to?

It's a terrible website. The email is a brilliant website, and I hate that paper. So the news should not be entertainment, but it has to be entertainment to survive. And this is a real problem. I think so often in stories, journalists or editors are trying to take a story, that's entertainment and present company excluded and and desperately show why it's in the

public interest even if that's a stretch so with this story it was like oh you know was this corporate negligence you know were they breaking regulation but as the CEO pointed out these were international waters so regulation didn't apply and as he also pointed out everyone on board side a waiver and the waiver mentioned death three times on one page so I you know all of these public interest hooks, like maybe it's this, maybe it's that, were quite thin, especially for the level of coverage we saw. And does the news, you know, become entertainment when there is money involved to be made from advertising? I mean, we both used to work at the evening standard

and that's where we met. And during the pandemic, a lot of advertisers, they didn't want to run their adverts next two stories about COVID. Because they didn't want to run their adverts next two stories about, you know, death and illness and a pandemic. And so I was actually taken off of my role as a video journalist, as a news video journalist, and put on the showbiz team for three months, I think it was, because they needed people to generate more content that was advertiser-friendly. And luckily for me, I love reality TV, so I was having a blast. You actually took it, they were like, Matilda or Helena, one of you used to go on showbiz.

I was like, I don't know anyone in a show but Hernal was like, I volunteer his tribute. I was like, what, write about TV all day? Okay. But yeah, but I think that's when that's when news turns into the entertainment

sort of cycle, when there's money to be made. Yeah, I mean, I definitely worry about newsrooms that are led by the advertising department. I mean, that's when you're in a world of trouble. But, you know, going back to the question, I think it's at the heart of a lot of, what, we produced, to be honest. You know, I was at the BBC for a very long time, and we always had

the Reithian principles of sort of inform, educate, and entertain. So the entertainers in there, and it was while I was at the BBC that I understood why that was true. You know, I worked on a number of news programs, a lot of them at Radio 4, and we sort of realize that when you're just putting out, you know, sort of public interest, broadcasting that people should want to hear, they don't tune in. You know, they're not interested in. You know, they're not interested in. Here is what the select committee that you didn't even know existed have been doing today. It's like eating gruel. You've got to, you've basically got to throw in some sugar for it to be digestible.

So you need a mix, really, of things that will bring people to the news, that will be compelling. In a way, that's why going back since, you know, TV news began, you always had the end finally. It was like, please stay with us. Stay with us. There's something coming at the end that will make this bearable. And so there's always that sort of pressure to make. sure that you're telling a story in the most compelling way and you've got a balance of things that will make people want to listen so that they take they take away the stuff that

they need to know but also sort of feel like it was worth worth them spending their time with us basically we probably have time for one more thought question comment if anybody has one yes down the front here big up the front row um yeah kind of backing on that thing i just think as young person or you know a lot of my friends kind of say just just not not interested in the news or don't want to read those negative stories. And I think, you know, not for something, not to back, say, making entertainment or laughter out of death or something. I think that thing of even the BBC News app, and I don't check it regularly, but I check

it when there's the breaking news coming in. I think there's a thing for, you know, finding a hook and maybe rather than having the regular updates on a situation such as the... Titan, the Titan, thank you, rather than having that as a regular, pushing the focus towards the immigration boats as the regular kind of updates of news. I think someone who kind of is on their phone and waits for that notification to ping in. Actually, that regular news to me is interesting. It's just about what they choose. I will tune into it if it's

pinged to me, so it's editors and publishers choosing the right things to ping out because I think people are addicted to their phones so if things are pinging in they will read them and it is really important I mean there's a lot of value to be said for a journalism industry that successfully engages people in the news because we want people to be engaged in what's happening in the world and to be

civic participators and journalism has a valuable contribution to do that and maybe entertainment or a little bit of sugar is key. Can I just have one tiny point really quick like there's something that's happened not recently it's been a long time coming but the news as it happens

or something terrible happens, normally should result in a response, okay? 300 people drown on a boat for their economic migrants. So that should trigger a response. But actually, it didn't trigger anything, okay? So in many ways, people who make the news are saying, well, why would we report this anyway? This is just an endless cycle of political inertia. So why don't I just show you this, which is way more interesting. And to be honest, the more our politicians are disconnected with the tragedies of this world,

the less the news is going to say, well, we're going to report it. Because what would be better is if that happened, and then someone in the UK or someone in Germany or someone said, this is not going to happen anymore, we're going to start patrolling again. This is not going to happen anymore. We're going to invest in more lifeways. This is going to happen anymore. We're going to go to Libya and we'll start at least smuggling gas. It produces nothing.

So the news, which is supposed to hold people accountable, which politicians are supposed to respond to, are not getting that response to the politicians, which is resulting in the news being like, well, here, there's a cat here, it's in a bin. You know, it's... you know but that and so you know particularly within within a UK context this dog that's being banned

is getting but this is getting massive news coverage because Rishi soon has finally gotten out of bed and said oh shit I've got I can do something here let's pass a law and then that's interesting yeah he's gone he's done something that's what the news should do

this happened it's fucking excuse my language it's terrible but that is interesting because well I mean again the comparison's exactly what you're talking about is he you know gets out of bed and banned the American whatever dogs there are but you know can't ban conversion therapy right exactly that's been ongoing people have been campaigning for years and years and years and years can't do that can't ban that to be honest in the way it it's exactly what's wrong with the whole system because he does ban it but because it's a knee-jerk

thing and he's responding to headlines it turns out he's banned it but he doesn't really know what he's banned because it's really hard to define and actually it's not going to work and none of this is actually going to happen, but he said something, and we reported it, and suddenly everyone thinks it's solved. So it's, you know, it's unhelpful in all directions. I think the problem with, you know, you're absolutely right. It should be the media who are holding people to account forcing change. So with that boat, it should have been us reporting on it day after day

that led to European authorities explaining why they hadn't responded to a distress signal, why nothing had been done. The problem isn't, and you know, I feel like nobody's come up with a solution to this. I think Tortus sort of like vaguely tried when they first set up talking about slow news, is that a lot of this stuff just takes so long. So you kick up a fuss about it, and before you actually get a result, before you get anybody having to be held to account or come up with an answer, everyone just launches an investigation, it gets forgotten. This is honestly, this is one of my biggest fears with

modern democracy. The investigation will go on for years, and nobody ever goes back to check what's happened with it, or by the time it comes out, everyone's forgotten what the initial fuss was about. And that's the problem with a lot of our news, and we're sort of constantly having to fill because nobody's going back and looking at what happened to the thing that we reported on a month ago that still hasn't been solved but we're just looking for the next thing so it's like well we've still got to fill another hour you know the 24 hour news but fill another hour why don't we get a helicopter up to watch the car going you know it's pointless stuff but we never go back and do the actually in terms of what's going to help us

in terms of everything that's going wrong with the system we you know what happened what happened to that thing a month ago why happened that thing two months ago it's still not fixed is it Thank you for listening 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. Follow Media Storm wherever you get your podcasts 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 Helena Wadia and follow the show via at Media StormPod.