Media Storm - News Watch: Diddy's domestic abuse, disability-blaming, welfare 'U-turns', Gaza aid traps

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

This week, we look at the outcome of the case against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in the US - and how evidence of domestic abuse, coercive control, and power dynamics were ignored and misunderstood with the help of our media. We also discuss those viral videos of fans queuing to see Chris Brown, a convicted abuser, on the same week he stands trial for Grievous Bodily Harm. After the break, welfare is taking a bashing on both sides of the Atlantic. But did you know the UK and US already fall far down the rankings when it comes to state benefits? Labour has been ridiculed for yet another ‘U-turn’, as benefit cuts are reversed and Rachel Reeves’ crying face is plastered on every front page. Is it the ableism of the U-turn coverage, or the sexism or the Reeves coverage, that’ll win this week’s media storm prize? We end with Eyes on Palestine - has the world had the wool pulled over its eyes by Netanyahu's "new aid plan"? The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Td Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Please note this episode contains discussion. about domestic and sexual abuse. Hello Media Stormers. Hello Helena. Hi, Matilda.

They're looking nice and sweaty. Thank you so much. It's really warm. More importantly, happy birthday. Thank you. And I'm so sorry I wasn't there to celebrate with you this weekend. That's really sad. I know it was really sad, but it was all made up for in the fact

that my grandma turned up in an all-purple outfit in my honour. What a legend. I know in case people didn't know I'm kind of obsessed with the colour purple. It's the best colour in the world. Yeah, also as a birthday present, you got quite a lot of transphobic hate on social media. Oh, yeah, this was interesting.

So last week's episode was about what is a woman, the question that's distracted politicians and plagued the media for years now. And we posted about it on Instagram. Thank you Munro Bergdorf for liking our real. Huge. We didn't post on X, but somebody else posted. and what followed was a barrage of hate.

And usually, right, Matilda, you are the one to clap back in the comments and I'm the one who usually leaves it. But this time you also decided to leave it. Why is that? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I thought about it and then I decided, I just don't care and turned off notifications. Whereas I do normally dive right down the rabbit hole

of debating on social media. But normally when I'm doing that, it's about immigration. I think that's because as an immigration journalist, I feel very loaded with facts. And what I'm typically seeing is misinformation being regurgitated. And so I try to engage with it in a reasoned and heavily evidence-based way. Whereas what I briefly saw of the sort of transphobic comments being made just felt grounded in dogma. Yeah, the response that came to my brain was just that, like, I have confidence in. my position because as a woman, I intuitively do not in any way feel that trans women are a threat

to me. I actually, when I'm with a trans woman, don't feel any remarkable difference between them and me. And that is just intuition. But it's not really something I can engage in like a reasoned evidence-based debate. I sort of just see that spiraling. Yeah, it's like they say don't play chess with the pigeon because the pigeon will just end up shitting all over the board. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Well, there you go. Just say that. And what's notable about it is it was kind of unprovoked. I mean, yes, we published an article and people have every right to comment on an article that's out there.

But we did not share it. There was a campaign that was ready and waiting. And as soon as they had the material, it just exploded. Absolutely. And it really got me thinking about X as a concept, right? Like, my profile is still on X, but it's completely inactive in the way that I don't post. Same a Media Storm's account. Like, it's up, but we don't post.

We haven't posted in a long time. And yeah, you know, I'm just interested in what our listeners think about X, formerly Twitter. Do you think that it's right that people still have profiles on there? Do you think that we should deactivate it? I'm interested in people's thoughts because I am very, very close to deactivating my account. Yeah, I am a completely passive user on X now, and it can be useful as a journalist to have a passive account because you can browse the news or you can browse user accounts and find individuals. However, maybe it is counterproductive having a passive account when it can be used as fodder

and you're not responding and maybe that is setting yourself up for problems. Yeah. Side note, the comments and the hate or whatever that we're getting is an iota tiny sliver of what trans women actually face on a daily basis online. And also, as much as a lot of the abuse that we got on there for publishing this article in Bilein Times was transphobic. It was also misogynistic, which is the entire point of our episode. Like, somebody called us silly little girls. Oh, that's you defending women, is it? Nice. Anyway, let us know your thoughts.

Post on Patreon. We love our patron community. We have chats there. So if you're not signed up, what are you doing? What are you doing? Right. Let's get on with Newswatch. I'll start with the outcome of the case against Sean Diddy Coombs in the U.S. and how evidence of domestic abuse, coercive control and power dynamics were ignored, misunderstood, and fed by our media.

And after the break, I'll be looking at welfare cuts, which have hit the U.S. and the UK, because the media massively missed the point on Labor's famous U-Turl. We may have a verdict in the Sean Diddy Combs trial, but I'll tell you what, this case, not old. The government released a panicked rewrite to its welfare reform bill at half past mid-term. This is a big U-turn, right? It's the third major U-turn for the Prime Minister. Palestinians take cover as pulses of automatic gunfire crackle overhead. One big, beautiful bill.

Welcome to Media Storm's News Watch, helping you get your head around the headlines. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helen Awodya. This week's News Watch, Diddy's dodged bullet, disability-blaming, welfare cuts and U-turns. Last week saw the high-react. profile trial in New York of Sean Coombs, otherwise known as the rapper Diddy.

Coombs was accused of transportation for prostitution, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Now, racketeering means engaging in a pattern of illegal activities for financial gain. He was accused of sex trafficking three alleged victims, including his former long-term partner, singer and model Cassie Ventura. jurors decided that not all the allegations were proven, so he received a mix of guilty and not guilty verdicts. He's been convicted on the lesser charge of transporting people across the US, including Cassie and another former girlfriend who's being called Jane,

and paying male escorts to engage in sexual encounters. But he was found not guilty on other far more serious charges, racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, so he has avoided a maximum possible sentence of life behind bars, though he will still face some jail time. Am I going crazy or are ditties crimes not pretty well documented? I feel like I've literally seen a video of him abusing his ex-girlfriend Cassie. Yeah, you're not going crazy, you did see that video.

It went viral, it was hard not to. But you said he was on trial for transportation for prostitution and sex trafficking, you didn't say domestic abuse. Yeah. Okay. Why am I even surprised? Yeah, I feel you and I'll come to that. But first, for any listeners who didn't see the video

or don't know the full extent of this case, I'll explain. So in November 2023, Cassie filed a lawsuit against Coombs, alleging that he had raped and sex trafficked her over the course of an abusive 10 years. She said she was stuck in a decade-long cycle of abuse, violence, and sex trafficking, that included rape in 2018 after she tried to leave him and multiple instances of domestic violence. Now, Coombs initially denied the allegations, calling them offensive and outrageous. But then, a video from 2016 was released by CNN in March 24. The surveillance

video from a hotel showed Coombs grabbing, shoving and kicking Cassie. I mean, it is horrendous. It is vile, vile abuse caught on camera. After Cassie's lawsuit, other allegations from other women and one man followed. Allegations of abuse, sex trafficking, gang rape, rape of a minor, coercion. Not all, but many of these allegations stem from Coombs allegedly manipulating women into what he called his freak-offs, which allegedly involved flying in women and sex workers to these parties. Sometimes they were big parties,

but often they were isolated hotel rooms and homes where he would facilitate sex, or, as has been alleged, sexual assault, between long-term girlfriends and typically a single male escort. There are claims that Coombs forced participation in these events by providing narcotics, drugs, and threatening participants' livelihoods. When the authorities raided Coombs' homes in Miami and L.A.,

they found supplies allegedly used for these freak-offs, including a thousand bottles of baby oil. Now, when Cassie took to the stand at Coombs' trial, she said that the video that had been released of her being physically abused by him was taken when she attempted to escape during a freak-off session with a male escort. She said, at that point, all I could think about was getting out of there safely. She also testified that Coombs controlled a lot of my life and forced her to have sex and perform degrading acts with other men,

which he recorded and described as blackmail materials. By the way, a not insignificant point which I failed to see reported in many media outlets, is that Coombs was, yes, Cassie's boyfriend at the time, but also her boss. He managed her singing career. I think the reason that this is a media storm story is because it shows us how coercion and consent are fundamentally misunderstood in the mainstream and how the media props up these misunderstandings. In Coombs' case, the video evidence of him assaulting Cassie

was so damning that his defence admitted up front that he'd been violent. To quote his defence team, they said yes, Coombs enacted horrible dehumanising violence and that he was a bad boyfriend. But, and to quote, that domestic violence is not sex trafficking. But it is a crime. Given the enormity of the charges against him, the sex trafficking, the racketeering, domestic violence was brought up

and then flicked away as if it was nothing. That's horrifying. I have goosebumps. Yeah. So Coombs' defence team gave Cassie's story a whole different context, playing on the deepest entrenched myths about intimate partner violence. Coombs' lawyers maintained there was no evidence that he coerced Cassie into committing sexual acts,

against her will, and the jurors clearly agreed that there was not enough evidence that Cassie was not a consenting participant in the freak-offs. Coombs' team portrayed Cassie and other women, not as victims of sex trafficking, but as women that, and I quote, enjoyed sex. Ugh. That's a quote from Coombs' defence lawyer's closing statement. It was unconventional sex, sure, they said. They likened it to a swinging lifestyle, but consistently they said Cassie.

had consented. Coombs' defence team had text messages from Cassie to Coombs read out in court, where she seemed enthusiastic about these sex parties. In some of these messages, Cassie says, I'm always ready to freak off and I just want it to be uncontrollable. Cassie's word that she was coerced into telling Coombs what he wanted to hear was not enough. as Coom's not guilty verdict on sex trafficking shows. But here's the fundamental misunderstanding.

Firstly, that consent can be given in one instant and taken away in another. And secondly, coercion is complicated. It's not unusual for someone who is being coerced to not immediately sever a relationship with their abuser. Because they are being abused and brainwashed. Right, it's a classic phrase we see in cases of domestic abuse constantly. Why didn't she leave? Exactly.

Now, people who understand the psychology of abuse have an answer for that question, why didn't she leave? But jurors don't necessarily. There are so many reasons why somebody might stay with their abuser or not seek help. Children, housing, financial circumstances. Again, remember that detail I said earlier that he was her boss.

Also, a fear of an escalation of violence should they leave, which is exactly what Cassie said happened to her in 2018 when she tried to leave Coombe. for good and then he raped her. I personally don't see how you can watch a woman being beat up and physically being dragged back into a room and believe that she had any power in that situation. But the way that our court system is set up

places the burden of proof so high that jurors thought even after seeing that video, Cassie might have consented. So yes, I'm sure that so many of these factors, these rape myths are playing in to the verdict. here but other factors are kind of jumping to my mind like, I don't know, this guy is incredibly famous and he's incredibly rich. Oh yeah, absolutely. Fame and money play huge parts in this. Coombs had assembled a roster of nine highly regarded lawyers to construct his

defence. Nine. Coombs also has an estimated 10-figure net worth. He had the resources to deploy private investigators to poke holes in narratives advanced by the prosecution's witnesses. It's absurd. There is no equality before the law. Another element to do with money? When the allegations first started pouring in after Cassie's lawsuit, Coombs consistently dismissed them as false allegations made by money grabbers and gold diggers. Yeah, the false allegation myth stands firm. And we've seen this in the case of another famous abuser this week, Chris Brown.

Yeah, I saw he's touring. I also saw that he's on trial on Friday, which is it? Yeah, it's a wild sentence, isn't it? He's touring and he's on trial. It's both, okay? The singer kicked off his UK tour just days before he was due in court in London, charged with violently assaulting a producer. He still sold out arenas across the country

with some fans paying hundreds of pounds for a ticket. And by the way, the latest allegations are not the first for Chris Brown. One ex-girlfriend was granted a restraining order after alleging that he punched and threatened to kill her. He's faced allegations of rape, assault and domestic abuse. And in 2009, most famously, he pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend, Rihanna. I wondered if you, like me, thought, who the hell would go see and perform? Yeah, and I'm slightly wary of the answer.

Well, to shout out what I thought was a good piece of social media journalism, the observer asked fans queuing whether any of Chris Brown's dark past and proverbs, hasn't mattered to them. Have a listen. I think people are only suing him because he's got money. So if that was like a regular guy on the street, it wouldn't even be thought about it. Just because he's famous and he's got money. He's made a big deal about it. Things happen in life. No, it's one of those things.

Rihanna, that's the old thing. I think they should stop with that now already. I don't blame him or I don't judge him based on what has happened in his past. That's his personal life. But as a fan, I'm here to enjoy his music. That is so interesting. It's a debate I've had with friends lots of times. Can you separate the art from the artist? And I believe in some situations you might be able to.

However, this is clearly a situation where you cannot because the money that you were paying for that ticket is going directly to the artist's hands. And we've seen how that money can be and has been used to evade justice and perpetuate a culture. that then affects women again and again and again. Yeah, I completely agree.

And also one line from that really stuck out to me, which is the man saying, things happen in life. And I just thought, well, that is how normalized domestic abuse and male violence against women and girls has become. It's been boiled down to things happen in life. These responses reminded me of an old episode of Media Storm. We spoke about the vital. role of pop culture, the lack of repercussions for powerful men, and the myth of false allegations

in Media Storm's series one episode, Rape Justice, What Happens to the 98%. Here's us in discussion with Gina Martin, workshop facilitator and activist, and Dr. Leila Hussein, psychotherapist and women's rights campaigner. Any time I think about the question of pop cultured, I go back to blurred lines, the 2013 song by Robin Thick, which includes the lyrics, I know you want it, and I hate these blurred lines, and the way you grab me, you must want to get nasty.

I remember at the time, whenever I spoke about how I felt about it, I would get told that I was being too sensitive and it was just a song and get over it. And it was like actually impossible at that time for me to have any meaningful conversation about the song without somebody accusing me of being like an angry feminist who wants to, like, cancel Robin Thick or whatever. At the time, like, there was a backlash to this song.

Many women who had been raped said, my attacker said, I know you want it. It's literal defence that is used in court. The law on consent is such that you don't just have to convince a jury the victim didn't consent. You have to convince a jury that the defendant couldn't viably have believed the victim consented. The system's not broken. The system is there to protect certain men. Maybe if we started from that, we can actually start dismantling this properly.

Because the moment we think, well, something went wrong, it's not something went wrong. It was designed this way. How many powerful men in the public eye have zero repercussions for the kinds of things they've done? You know, Chris Brown's still making music. DeBaby with this whole HIV-AIDS thing, homophobic and just so toxic. And, you know, then Kanye West brought him and Marilyn Manson out on stage to babies in the top charts. When there's no accountability for these men who set narratives and encourage narratives, why are we wondering why young men who look up to them and see them as the way they want to live

and the way they want to be taking on this language too? And seeing these kind of behaviours as not a problem. Of course they don't because my hero's doing it and nothing happens to him. Do you think that false allegations, which are statistically relatively rare, give maybe a warped sense about women supposedly lying all the time about their assaults? Yeah, because we talk about them at a disproportionate level to how much they happen.

They're 2 to 4%. They're around the same level statistically as almost every other crime. But, you know, we rarely talk about someone gets mugged. We rarely say, yeah, but like, were you telling the truth about being mugged? Were you lying about being mugged? That was rape justice. What happens to the 98%.

Scroll back to hear the full episode. To bring it back to the Sean Coombs case, this is so detail-heavy. This is so legally complicated. Do you feel like the media has helped the public understand the details of the case itself? Sadly, not at all. As often happens with court cases,

especially court cases that involve famous men, the focus has been hugely on the verdict and what happened after the not guilty verdict in particular. So many outlets who had failed to point out any sort of nuance about coercive control instead spent time describing how Coombs and his supporters reacted after the verdicts. Details like spectators were cheering the defence team,

shouting dream team, dream team. CNN reported that several spectators could be seen pouring baby oil on themselves. If you remember baby oil was part of the supplies used for the freak-offs or another word for it, possibly the assaults. And supporters were wearing t-shirts reading, A Freco is not a RICO. RICO is a reference to the racketeering charges.

It's all a big joke. We've also seen numerous examples of sympathetic and positive reporting about Coombs and his legacy, A Washington Post piece described Coombs as a music producer turned modern-day Gatsby. By the way, the writer Sarah Kensior has noted that allusions to Fitzgerald's Gatsby have been used to soften the image of high-level sexual predators like Geoffrey Epstein for decades. And probably the worst headline. This is from the BBC written by their entertainment reporter Ian Young's.

Diddy's reputation is tarnished, but could he find a way? back. Tarnished. I just don't understand what happened to the domestic abuse, essentially the confession of domestic abuse by his defence team. Are there no legal repercussions for domestic abuse? At the very least, are there no popular repercussions for the domestic abuse? Well, this is where articles like this could hold Diddy to account in the Court of Public

Opinion, but instead this article, it labelled Coombs as a star and contained phrases like, His reputation will forever be tarnished by months of ugly allegations and revelations, hyphen, and the two convictions. Oh, yeah, those. I'm just thinking about this poor woman, or these poor women, multiple, particularly Cassie, who went through this and has to see this. This article lends five paragraphs to Coombs' career as one of the driving forces in hip-hop and R&B in the 1990.

followed by a few paragraphs telling us how many awards Coombs has won. The words coercion, control, assault, rape, domestic abuse. There's nowhere to be found in this article. I am so tired of perpetrators being excused and often celebrated in our media. We've got Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt on the front cover of magazines. We've had people paying hundreds of pounds to see a Chris Brown concert when he's literally going from the court accused of violence straight to the stage.

I'm sick of the court saying there's not enough evidence and then people hearing he's innocent. It seems that the only people whose lives are ruined by sexual assault allegations are the victims. They are failed over and over again by the justice system and by the media until we have a complete overhaul of how we understand abuse, coercive control, power dynamics in intimate relationships, it will continue to be the female victims that are put on trial, not the abusive men. The Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit

podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch, Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like? With Ancestry's global historical records, you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked, and for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records, for free. Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records or discovering your ancestor's name in the UK and

Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. a massive beating, and the primary target and scapegoat are those in need of health welfare. This is my media storm today, because it is underpinned by a persistent narrative linking benefits and laziness, and it stems in large part from a failure to understand disability. More than that, a lack of any real effort to understand disability. Here in the UK, Labour is seeking to save billions in welfare spending, primarily by cutting two health-related benefits. One, PIP, or personal independent payment,

which is claimed by 3.7 million people, and is designed to help them cover the extra day-to-day costs that come with illness or disability. These include costs that help people access work, For example, getting accessible transport to your workplace. Labor's new policy will tighten the eligibility criteria and it's forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility to deprive 1.5 million people of a benefit that has been repeatedly slashed over previous years.

The second benefit affected is universal credit. Labor plans to, quote, rebalance this budget by raising the standard universal credit rate by seven pounds a week, but slashing the health-related rate by almost half or 49 pounds per week. Labour has said this is, quote, to promote work and address perverse incentives. Like really playing into the narrative that disabled people are not working because benefits makes it too easy for them to work. Well spotted. It's so illogical. However, Labour's policy, which is called the Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill, is having a difficult time making its way through Parliament.

Ahead of its second reading last week, 39 Labour MPs signed an amendment rejecting it. Now, as a result, Labour has had to make several so-called U-turns, which were defended by Kirstama while his Chancellor Rachel Reeves conspicuously cried on the bench behind him. This is something that appears to have been the most interested. part of the story for many media. Now, one example of a U-turn is the concession that existing PIP claimants will still be assessed by the original testing criteria. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but like, why is Labor laser-focused

on cutting disability benefits? Like, they're supposed to be left-wing. This will obviously just piss off its own ranks. Yeah, this rebellion is so predictable. But the policy is grounded in legitimate questions arising from. a steady uptick in two things, health-related benefit spending and health-related non-employment. Labor are targeting sickness and disability benefits because these have ballooned in recent years and they're forecast to keep on rising. The thing is, instead of getting spending under control

by addressing the root problems causing demand to increase, they're simply getting spending under control by stopping spending. So the demand may still increase. It just won't be met. Right. And if that's the case, it's not necessarily going to drive more people into work so much as it's going to drive more people onto the streets. You see, the primary reason that this welfare bill is ballooning is because we have an aging population.

There is also the fact that we've just experienced a pandemic, and it's a pandemic that left a lot of people chronically ill. However, the UK is struggling more than other. countries to return to pre-COVID employment levels. Another cause is a sharp rise in mental health-related caseloads, as well as levels of obesity and diabetes. Now, these two things are something you see many media, particularly right-wing media, latch onto to cheer on cuts to health welfare with this idea that if you stop giving people

the option not to work, i.e. benefits, they'll pull themselves together and get a job. This logic fundamentally sees conditions like mental health and obesity as a choice or a failure. As you said at the start, that reflects such ignorance about mental health, disability, body image. Evidence actually shows these social attitudes often perpetuate the root problems. You know, that's something that I only really learned from the media storm episodes that we've done on mental health and on fat phobia because these ideas are so instilled in us growing up. Also, what this logic ignores is that in the years this welfare bill has increased, we've also seen the care sector being repeatedly cast aside from policy agendas, migrant workers blanket banned no matter how vital they are to social services,

as well as cuts made time and again to benefits that are designed to help people access work. Right, like Pip. So cutting Pip to get people into work, that really doesn't line up with the experience. experiences of disabled and chronically ill people that we at Media Storm have spoken to. People the government apparently has not spoken to, which we'll come back to. But first, Media Storm's Series 1 investigation into ableism looked at the immense difficulties facing disabled people seeking work. Already back then in early 2022, we were hearing how cuts to PIP were making it almost impossible

to get by. A segment you're about to hear starts with a woman called Alana Richards, a marketing director and at the time, a new mum. It makes you feel like you don't have a place there and you don't belong and employment isn't for you and you need to find another way to survive

but the reality is that there aren't many other ways to survive in this society so I ended up doing Airbnb from my house even though I wasn't supposed to just to make a basic living age. I was in survival mode times a thousand. I wasn't eating. I didn't have enough money for food. Like, the different situations I've been in looking back that all stem from ableism and the barriers to entry for working as a disabled and a chronically ill person. It blows my mind.

And that's what these employers do understand. There are real consequences for not making space for accessibility and not prioritising it. There is welfare designed to financially support disabled people. PIP or personal independence payment is an allowance designed to help people with the added day-to-day costs of having a disability, like needing taxis or buying medical supplies. But in contravention of their manifesto promise, the government appears to be cutting the PIP budget and scrapping plans to reform its assessment process, which has been widely criticized by people affected.

Among those people is Maria Kalinovska, a photographer and creative director who was chronically ill with endometriosis. So I applied for PIP a few years ago and was rejected and I appealed and that was also rejected and I appealed again and that was rejected. I kind of feel like I'm deemed too sick to work a normal job because I need to have flexible hours. I need to have the option to work from home. Okay, so yes or no question, do you feel like our working culture and our economy is, from your experience, accessible for people with chronic illness and or disability? Absolutely not. Another yes or no question, again, from your personal experience, do you feel like our welfare system is adequately set up to compensate for that? No, I don't think so.

You know, I think there's this mentality of like disabled and chronically ill people. They just want to live off the state. They don't want to work. They just want to get the money. Nothing would make me happier than to be able to work in the same way as a healthy person does. That would be the dream. But as it stands, people who are disabled and chronically ill, they just fall through the gaps. I know a lot of people, and myself included, who have done jobs and worked until it made us so ill

that we then couldn't do anything else for like months. but in that moment, it felt important to do that because how else you're going to get the money? That was Media Storm's episode, Abelism Enabled, the loopholes in Equality Law. Now, before you played that clip, you piqued my interest with something very Media Storm, when you said that the government hasn't really spoken to people like those we just heard from. What do you mean? Well, this brings us onto one of the main issues with this story, The Missing Voices

I can respect the difficulty every government faces in balancing the national budget but there was no government impact assessment before the bill was published there was no publication of the PIP review and most importantly the government did not hold a formal consultation

with disabled people about the reforms for goodness sake right I cannot respect that I cannot respect policy making that doesn't engage with the people affected any more than I can respect media that doesn't engage with the people affected. Which brings me on to some of the issues with the media coverage. When the government had to U-turn on some welfare cuts, most media failed to highlight why they had to,

not because of a backbencher rebellion, but the reasons that there was a backbencher rebellion, which is the fact that the government had failed to consult the people being affected, disabled people before designing this bill. Now, anytime the media sniffs a government U-turn, they pounce like bloodhounds, and generally the attack, for what I personally find to be, the wrong reasons. It's not embarrassing to acknowledge that a mistake has been made and reverse that mistake. Right, thanks to these U-turns, the Office for Budget Responsibility reduced its assessment of how many people will be pushed into policy by this bill from 250,000 people to 150,000 people.

Yay, only 150,000 people pushed it to poverty. And this is where I have one example of positive reporting, which was the front page of the eye paper. It said 50,000 children will be lifted out of poverty due to rebellion on welfare reforms. This is a headline that incentivises reactive policymaking. However, most headlines condemned screeching U-turns. They called Starma Desperate, described him as running. getting scared and in peril after being forced into a climb down. But see, it's not the U-turn itself that's embarrassing.

What's embarrassing is the fact that they had to U-turn because of information they could have easily had if they had just asked the obviously relevant people. But none of the headlines pointed to this issue, right? Even The Guardian, it did a listicle on Kier-Starmer's biggest U-turn since Labor came to power, pointing to a lack of political direction and not a lack of engagement. None of these headlines pointed out

what I actually believe is the main point of criticism that Labor designed a bill without speaking to the people it was supposed to affect, meaning they designed a bill with no idea what it would actually achieve. And the result of this oversight by the media is that even after Labor's U-turns,

their concessions still don't include formally consulting disabled people. And so what happens? Another backbencher amendment has been signed, rejecting the bill because 138 disability groups say disabled people are yet to have any agency in this process. It is just embarrassing how little people care about lived experience. And it's so predictable that this will fail again. Okay, there's one other aspect of this media storm I want to highlight. And that's to do with

class. A lot of headlines are now asking, how are we going to pay for this U-turn? And they go with the implication that in order to pay for them, other benefits will inevitably have to be cut. So, for example, the Daily Mail wrote, Plans to Scrap the Two-Child Benefit Cap are dead in the water after welfare U-turn. And yes, it's likely Labor now won't reverse the two-child benefit cap, but that is a choice, not a necessity. Yeah, they could also say tax extreme wealth like they said they would on their manifesto. Exactly. Take this headline. The Independent wrote,

Which tax rises could Rachel Reeves introduce to pay for the £5 billion welfare U-turn? Well, Labour wouldn't need to pay for the welfare U-turn if they hadn't chosen to slash welfare in the first place. The Independent could just as well ask, which tax rises could Rachel Reeves introduce? to pay for corporate bailouts or tax evasion. Right. Because if we zoom out, we very quickly see it is not universally true that the problem with our budget is welfare spending. What do you mean to zoom out?

The UK spends so much less on welfare than almost every EU country. If we compare welfare spending as a share of GDP, the UK ranks 25th out of 28 European countries. We're right at the bottom of the pile. We spend less than half what France, Scandinavia, Italy and Austria do. We spend half what Germany and Belgium do. And we rank just below Croatia, Romania and Hungary in the listings. I had no idea about that. I'm going to put that out there. I had no idea. The impression that I get from reading the media about welfare cuts is that we're like a benefit state. Exactly. Like it's out of control. Yeah. I was completely unaware until I married a German and quickly realized that he should never have

moved here for me. Because the fact is class in the UK is so much more exaggerated than it is in so many other countries. And we have no awareness of that. And I really think our media could do a better job at giving us a bit of self-awareness as a nation when we have conversations like this. Yeah. Okay. So to sum up, there's a massive class issue in fiscal reporting, as well as a fundamental failure to understand disability. Yes. I don't really think we have time to go into it, but I do just want to point out that labour slashing of health benefits here is quite in keeping with what's happening across the Atlantic where Trump's so-called big beautiful bill is introducing huge tax cuts

for the wealthy while slashing Medicaid for 12 to 16 million Americans. And a lot of the same lessons apply here. Could we though, while we're just on it, talk about the fact that the picture of Rachel Reeves crying, making every front page was maybe just a little bit sexist? Did you see what was written in the Daily Mail? Oh no. Okay, this is a direct quote. It looked like a hormonal collapse from another femme failure who can't cope when the going gets tough. A woman who wils like a stick of damp rhubarb at the first sign of trough. Are you making that up? I wish.

I now want to read you the response to that from hacked off director Jackie Haynes because I think it toes the line really well between like due sympathy and due criticism for Rachel Reeves in this moment. The male online's misogynistic attitude to women in public life knows no bounds. But let us be clear who is ultimately responsible here? Politicians who have catastrophically failed to protect the public. from abuse and discrimination in the press. Women and others at risk of discrimination are being let down by the government's inaction

on press reform every day. The mail publishes this stuff because it knows that until the Prime Minister develops sufficient courage to take action, it can get away with anything. Great statement. Great quote. I mean, yeah, we really need to get over the fact

that women cry at work. Statistically, yes, women cry more than men. and statistically, more and more women are getting into politics. The media obsessed about Theresa May crying. Remember that? Yeah. They also obsessed about Angela Merkel crying. They obsessed over Nicholas Sturgeon crying.

Yeah. Like, stress makes some of us cry. Me on a daily basis. Get the fuck over it. Yeah, you don't get front pages funny enough when, like, male MPs don't deal with stress well and do things like stab the benches of the commons with their pens, which is apparently what Gordon Brown like to do.

everything we have seen this year from Trump and Elon Musk is 10,000 times more emotional than Rachel Reeves crying in the commons. The fact actually that tears make headlines to this extent, it just shows how unused we are to women in power. Yeah. Personally, like, I'd be way more worried about leaders who repress all their emotion rather than leaders who actually feel the weight of the nation's economy.

Here, here. Time for eyes on Palestine, how Israel pulled the wool over the world's eyes with Netanyahu's new aid plan. Now listeners, you may remember on the 2nd of March, Israel commenced a siege on Gaza, blocking all aid and trade from entering the strip. This was shortly before they resumed full-scale military attacks. 11 weeks of mounting starvation began to lead to real outrage, unprecedented criticism from U.S. allies. And on the 19th of May, amid immense pressure from the U.S., Netanyahu announced a new aid plan for Gaza. Netanyahu's new aid plan would allow a trickle of U.N. supplies to enter Gaza.

But distributions would primarily be handled by a new aid plan. new privately run organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF. But in his Hebrew language announcement, the Prime Minister of Israel revealed something he didn't in his English statements, that it was important to avoid famine in Gaza, specifically to keep foreign allies on side. This scheme has eased international pressure on Israel. But it hasn't relieved the suffering of Palestinians, with nearly half a million now facing catastrophic food insecurity and 10,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme and UN. The GHF began operations on the 27th of May, and it concentrated all aid distributions in four

sites in the far south of Gaza near the border. The UN immediately raised alarm. They refused to comply with this new aid plan, and they called these distribution sites bait. They said Israel was using aid as bait to force people in Gaza south in order to clear the territory for occupation. But even more sinister, each one of those sites was under full control of Israeli forces. They were enclosed with barbed wire and mounds of earth and manned internally by U.S. private security contractors. in other words, U.S. mercenaries.

In the sixth week since it launched, almost every day at these distributions, Palestinians seeking aid have been open-fired on. Over 700 Palestinians have been killed to date and 4,000 wounded while seeking aid under this new plan. Whistleblowers from the U.S. contractors confessed last week that American employees had been given free license to open fire on Palestinians without provocation.

And in terms of the UN's original concerns about Israel using aid as bait, that aspect of the plan now appears to be intensifying. On Monday, defense minister Israel Katz announced plans to establish what he called a humanitarian city in the south of the strip. He said he had instructed the army to build a camp on the ruins of Rafa in which all of Gaza's population could be housed. They will be screened on entry and barred from leaving once inside. And so my question today is,

why has this new aid plan, as it's called, but clearly is not in reality? Why has it succeeded in silencing the criticism from US allies and international leaders, the criticism that mounted in the. face of the aid blockade. Palestinians are still starving, and those with any access to aid put themselves in the firing line.

Have our leaders been deceived, or were they looking for an excuse to stand back? Thank you for listening. dive into war reporting, the complexities and challenges of reporting on war and conflict and the ethical considerations that journalists need to navigate. If you want to support MediaStorm, 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. 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 a podcast, so please do tell your friends. And obviously, leave us a five-star rating and

a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helen Awaddiya and follow the show via at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Malinson. The music is by Samfire. Calling all book lovers, the Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Kuturo Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at Festival of Authors.ca.