Media Storm - News Watch: Katy Perry blasted, the rollback of LGBT+ rights, and making sense of the ‘Jihadi jail attack’

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Join us for the Media Storm LIVE SHOW! Tuesday 20th May 7pm, @ the Business Design Centre in Islington. Tickets available HERE  Time for another weekly news debrief: we pick apart the most unhinged headlines and try to make sense of the mainstream media, helping you consume the news critically. This week, Katy Perry was blasted - into space, and in the media (4:50). As news broke that the Supreme Court ruled the legal definition of a woman is based on 'biological sex' (a ruling that didn't consult a single transgender person), we look at the rollbacks of queer rights around the world (10:20). Plus, how three front pages defined differently an attack on prison officers at HMP Frankland by the Manchester arena bomber's brother (22:32), a rebuttal against an ableist Daily Mail column on stammering (31:53), and why one article about asylum seekers living in 'luxury hotels' fails on facts (36:34). To keep Eyes on Palestine (41:02), we look at the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia university abducted by ICE in the US, and discuss a small but mighty change in a BBC headline. 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

Hi listeners, we are so excited to say that Media Storm is doing a live show and we really want to see you there. It's in London at 7pm on Tuesday the 20th of May at the Business Design Centre in Islington. We'll be kicking off the podcast show, but tickets are separate to the podcast show. There is a ticket link in the show notes. We can also announce our special guests, our first guest. Natasha Devon is a writer, speaker and broadcaster who you may know. from LBC and will also be joined by Milo Edwards, hilarious stand-up comedian and host of multiple podcasts including Trash Future.

Please buy a ticket and join us as we roast the three biggest media storms of 2025. See you there. Hi Media Stormers. It's Thursday and you know what that means. We're dissecting the world. week's main stories, finding the facts behind the fearmongering, calling out the most unhinged headlines, and helping you read the news critically. It's your essential guide to the mainstream media. This is Media Storm's News Watch. You look at some of the fake news on these platforms,

there's just so much out there right now. Some breaking news to bring you now. People want to be able to express opinions. I understand that. I have only one objective, which is to make sure the BBC is truly impartial. Well, I don't think that the mainstream media was lying. I think we missed the overarching story. Welcome to Media Storm's News Watch, helping you make sense of the mainstream media. I'm Matilda Malinson. And I'm Helen Awadier.

This week's Media Storms, Katie Perry blasted, gay rights rollback, and what to make of the jihadi jail attack. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hi. This is our final Newswatch of the series. I can't believe it. And tomorrow it's our final episode of the series.

Probably good because I am on my last legs. My throat is my voice will be gone by the end of this episode. I know. So we'll have three weeks of rest and research. And we'll be back straight after that. Just three weeks off. We have good news for all of our lovely listeners, which is that we have managed thanks in huge part to the testimonies you've sent in

to get funding for the year ahead. However, we also do have to take on a little bit of work, Helena and I. So we'll be going back to one episode a week every Thursday in time for your morning commute and we'll be bringing you a mix of newswatches and deep dives. So send us in your topic ideas. Yes, tomorrow's deep dive, for example, is a listener's suggestion. So keep sending them in because we love hearing from you. And the new series of Media Storm will be back on the 15th of May. Ooh, I have a story to kick us off.

And it's a piece of research that really just reminds us to keep checking our stereotypes. Okay. 1,000 white van male drivers were surveyed. And it turns out that 80% of the community think the white van man stereotype is offensive and outdated. More than half say that they actually enjoy minding. activities like yoga and one in five drink herbal tea you wouldn't think that the stereotype is outdated from how they still drive on the roads but anyway I don't know well maybe we should do an episode next week white van men next week's deep dive white van men to all the white van men who

we know are listening call in and uh tell us what you think that is our main media storm listenership, I'm sure. Okay, what is your first media storm? Okay, I think we've got to talk about Katie Perry going into space because literally everybody is talking about it. So for background, on Monday, Katie Perry blasted off into space, along with five other women in the first all-female space crew in over 60 years. They lifted off from West Texas in a blue origin rocket.

Flying alongside Katie Perry was Lauren Sanchez, who's an author and the fiancé of Blue Origin owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, TV presenter Gail King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bow and filmmaker Kerriam Flynn. Some more key details to give you. They were waved off by Oprah Winfrey and some Kardashians. As the crew were leaving space, Katie Perry began to sing, what a one-earned. wonderful world. Oh, and by the way, the whole thing lasted less than 11 minutes. Wow. 11 minutes that changed the fate of women everywhere. Honestly, every week I think the news can't get more unhinged and then something like this happens. I saw a lot of headlines right, like hammering home the all-female space crew thing, which I get. And I don't want to dismiss that outright, especially because Amanda Nguyen is an incredible woman.

And by doing this mission, she became the first Vietnamese woman in space. And people should definitely look up her story. She's a rape survivor and is a trailblazing activist in survivor justice. But obviously, you know, it wasn't her story that dominated headlines. And by the way, on that note, I don't know the names of any, you know, female astronauts or space scientists that were involved in this mission. They didn't dominate headlines either. And I just kind of feel like we're past the point where it's like women. doing anything equals feminism.

Like simply putting women in leadership roles, it's not going to free women. And what this space mission really is is a bunch of mostly incredibly wealthy women colluding with one of the richest men in the world. Right, just to like lay in blue origin, that is a Jeff Bezos spaceship. A man who has a history of not paying his taxes,

who hoards wealth, who exploits workers. And you're telling me it's feminist to promote and prioritize a billionaire's evil business. I mean, is this meant to inspire women? You're right. There's no intersectionality in that. Like this picture of putting women, by the way, in like very sexy blue catsuits in space. That being a symbol of pride for feminism, when everything you've just pointed out about Jeff Bezos, this is a very, very classed idea of feminism. Last time I was reading about women and women.

space. I was reading about how feminist astronauts and scientists who were working at NASA were having their bios and their names and their stories removed from the NASA website because of Trump's anti-diversity banned words list. And then this is meant to be equality, like when it costs millions of dollars to go into space during a time where people in America can't even afford eggs. Right. And you know, this isn't even yet to mention the issue of the climate impact of this flight. And this flight has been wildly ridiculed. It was blasted in the media, we're not the only ones doing it. I think it would have gotten off lighter if they hadn't tried to style it as some sort of historic feminist scientific pioneering mission, rather than just

the obscene commercial splurge that you have pointed out it actually was. You know, Katie Perry wanted to go to space. So she spent a shitload of money to do it on a commercial flight. That's the story, okay. But if you want to make it a story about grand achievement and representation, we haven't even gotten started on the backlash. Because the attitude in a lot of the global south, where the worst impacts of climate change are felt first, were also critical and focused on the massive damage done by Amazon as well as Blue Origin and commercial space flights specifically. Now, you know I'm not a massive pop culture, no at all. But I do happen to know that Katie Perry has previously spoken out about the dangers of climate change. And in 2015,

she made a video for UNICEF warning about the effects of extreme weather. So the natural thing to do, obviously, is hop on a rocket. Rocket engine exhausts contain gases and particles that, yes, can affect the Earth's climate and ozone layer. And although a rocket launch, and this is interesting, I thought, releases on average only a seventh of the carbon dioxide emitted by an aeroplane. It emits hundreds of times more carbon-soot particles than a plane. Carbon soot, also known as black carbon, has a warming effect in the upper atmosphere where rocket launches also intensify the CO2 balance. One Latinx user wrote,

Katie Perry kissing the ground and saying, We need to save Mother Earth after she went to space for 30 seconds to promote her shitty album, probably opened a hole in the ozone layer, and promoted one of the companies responsible for the destruction of the earth is a choice. A former ambassador to Syria and Bahrain called it the Ultimate Eagle. trip, Business Insider Africa, dubbed it more out of touch than out of this world. You get the gist. As we are sitting here, I've just got a BBC breaking news alert.

UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex under the Equality Act. We knew this was coming and I think that leads quite well on to our next media storm. Yeah, it does. And surprisingly, it's not just about an attack on trans rights. It's about an attack on the queer community as a whole. I'll begin this by saying, I'm not saying that Media Storm guests are, you know, the smartest and most to shoot people in the world or anything, but one has literally predicted the future. On Media Storm's episode in February called Why Does Asexuality Make the Media So Angry, our guest, Yasmin Benoit, said this. We're kind of seeing, I feel like, the beginnings of asexuality being caught within the same kind of media backlash that we're seeing from orientations. In fact, it's very much connected. Why was this predicting the future? Well, Yasmin is a British model, academic and activist who is asexual herself, and she co-founded International Asexuality Day.

On Media Storm, she spoke about the rise in acephobia, the way acephobia is represented in the media, and crucially, how we are now seeing the asexual community being attacked and demonised in the same way as other minorities, especially the transgender community. Then what happened last week? Well, J.K. Rowling, famous for once having written very successful children's novels about a wizard, now famous for smearing and attacking the trans community every single day on Twitter, posted a tweet about International Asexuality Day. She wrote,

Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who, who wants complete strangers to know they don't fancy a shag. This is not a new line of attack on the asexual community. Yasmin herself has had a lot of hit pieces in G.B. News and other right-wing outlets criticizing her sexiness, right? Because she's a model that sometimes poses in underwear and her asexuality. Here's some clips from some of those segments. There are reports that asexual people are less happy.

Well, you'd assume that. I would assume so because they're not getting any. What's an unfortunate pose for somebody who doesn't want any sexual attention? Piggybacking off the genuine victimisation of homosexual people. Do they need to be recognised as a group? You're just not oppressed. No one cares what you don't get up to in the bedroom. So, yeah, J.K. Rowling is now regurgitating these clickbait culture lines to her huge platform,

once again, demonising one of the smallest communities on this earth. And here we are, you know, she's moved seamlessly from punching down. at the trans community to punching down at the asexual community. And it's an easy move. Why? Because it's never been about protecting women. It's always just been about attacking minorities, punching down and getting attention.

So here's the full clip of what Yasmin said on Media Storm about how transphobia and acephobia are connected. And you know, if we're looking at the rise in queer phobia in general, with this demonization of trans people and gender and sexual minorities, how do those different versions of anti-queerness interacts and feed into each other, like transphobia feeding into acephobia, for example? I think it's a similar thing to what we've seen like throughout history where it's always like just because they start with one group.

Doesn't mean that it's just like, okay, well, we've done that now. Like we're just going to go back to normal. It's like, no, it does have a knock on effect. because what it's showing is that it's okay to target a minority group of people and demonize them publicly, take their rights away, and why would they then stop at one when you can kind of use the exact same rhetoric? Like, the same rhetoric that they're using towards trans people is the one they used to towards gay people. I get called a groomer all the time, and I'm like, it doesn't even make sense.

What? What would you be grooming them both? I'm a sexual deviant that doesn't even, like, what these are. documents don't even make sense, but they just regurgitate the exact same things. And you're like, okay, well, we can get away with saying these things in the media. We know that now. And, you know, how do we spice up the segments a little bit more or less pick a new group? And I think you've also just put your finger on the reason for this anger that we see, this faux anger.

As you have repeatedly pointed out, there is no consistency in the logic, right? If you're trying to protect women, then why are you attacking a woman who, you know, for not having sex. How are you a sexual deviant? You know, because you're asexual. Like you said, the logic isn't there. But I think you did just put your finger on what logic is there, which is that demonising, making villains out of easy and vulnerable and marginalized groups is rewarding at this point in time, really rewarding for certain media, for certain politicians who get the clicks, get the emotion, stirring, present themselves as sort of saviors against these perceived imagined threats. That's what it seems to come down to.

She did predict the future. I know. She can add clairvoyant to her. Is that somebody who predicts the future? Okay, yeah. She can add that to her. She can. Long list of accolades. But look, this is a much wider media storm than just acephobia and transphobia. Why? Because of what this signals. And what it signals is a much wider rollback of LGBTQ plus rights. Part of the reason why so many members of the LGBTIQ Plus community raised the alarm when this divide and the shift seemed to happen between the LGBB and the TQIA Plus is precisely because they knew if they come for one letter, they'll come for all the others. As Yasmin said, let's pick a new group.

Exactly. And don't think that they're only coming for the letters after the B. Let's look to some examples from around the world. In Hungary this week, MPs have voted to ban pride events and allow authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attendees and potentially find them. The Parliament passed an amendment to the Constitution to do this. The law was fast-tracked through Parliament

and bans public events held by LGBT-plus communities, including, you know, the mass popular pride event in Budapest that draws thousands of people annually. Hungary's government has been campaigning against LGBTQ plus communities in recent years and argues its controversial child protection policies which forbid the availability to minors of any material that mentions homosexuality

are needed to protect children from what it calls woke ideology and gender madness. We've heard that before. Mm-hmm. What else, by the way, does this new amendment to the Constitution do? It also states that the Constitution recognises two sexes only, male and female. We've also heard that very recently. I have also been reading about the rollback of queer rights and gay rights this week. In Russia,

an AIDS Foundation has been banned on the grounds of its support for transgender rights as well as gay rights, the Elton John Foundation, which has raised more than 600 million million dollars to provide HIV care in 95 countries has been banned from operating in Russia for promoting, quote, non-traditional sexual relationships, Western family models and gender reassignment. Right. This is further proof that anti-trans and anti-gay attitudes prop one another up. Okay, so we've had the UK, we've had Hungary, we've had Russia.

I've got another this month in Trinidad and Tobago. they have recriminalised gay sex, imposing a punishment of prison time. It unravels a landmark decision made by the High Court in 2018 to overturn an old colonial times law called the Bugary Law of 1925, which criminalised gay sex in the first place. And this is just really, really sad. I read that it means that the number of countries, where it's illegal to be gay, actually increased this month,

to 66. I just want to highlight to listeners what you pointed out there that this is an old colonial era law, like quick digression before we wrap this section. This is a little interesting historical point about the British Empire, which I want to say because you often hear like global South countries, former colonies described as backwards because of their laws and their attitudes towards sexual freedoms, for example. But did you know that a huge share of the countries that criminalize homosexuality do so on the basis of laws first imposed on them by, yours truly, the colonial motherland, Britain.

Another example I can give you is Somalia. Same-sex sexual activity is prohibited there under the Penal Code of 1962, which criminalises acts of carnal knowledge and of lust with a person of the same-sex. It carries a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment. And yeah, look, 35 of the countries criminalising homosexual relations are constantly. Commonwealth countries. So that is actually more than half of the 66, you said. And they do so with legal statutes originating in British colonial times. It's such a good point. It needs to be said because that is a line that is put out often against anybody who stands up for global South

countries. They're like, oh, but that country's so backward. Yeah, because we made it backwards. Like, hi, colonialism has a legacy. It's another example. Yeah. And just to then bring it back, really, I suppose the conclusion of all of this is to say, you know, don't get complacent. We are stronger together. We are stronger united. And no one is safe until everyone is safe. And we've seen that with today's Supreme Court ruling. Yeah, because look, I understand why a lot of women want to feel legally protected as an identity. But this is one of the biggest misconceptions with movements for equality. that in order to protect our group, women, we need to stand up for ourselves first. The issue

is, as soon as you exclude others from your movement for equality, you open the door to them being discriminated on the basis of their characteristics, and therefore you open the door to discrimination at large. No one is safe until everyone is safe. Equality is nothing unless everyone is equal. Check out the big stars, big series, and blockbuster movies. Streaming on Paramount Plus. Cue the music. Like NCIS, Tony and Ziva.

We'd like to make up our own rules. Tulsa King. We want to take out the competition. The substance. This balance is not working. And the naked gun. That was awesome. Now that's a mountain of entertainment.

With the RBC Avion Visa, you can book any airline, any flight, any time. So start ticking off your travel list. Grand Canyon? Grand. Great barrier reef? Great. Galapagos? Galapagos? Switch and get up to 55,000 avion points that never expire. Your idea of never missing out happens here. Conditions apply. Visit rbc.com slash avion. Welcome back. For my next media storm, I want to compare three front pages from the start of this week that show how the same story can be told in very different ways and with very different levels of newsworthiness.

I'm in. Now, newsworthiness is a term that as journalists, we are taught to assess whether a story is in the public interest, to decide whether a story is worth reporting. Now, this story is for sure in the public. interest. But while one paper, The Mirror, reports it as a public interest story, another, The Sun, plays it as a piece of entertainment, and a third paper, The Daily Mail, turns it into a piece of propaganda. So this story is about an attack on prison officers from inside a separation wing at a high security jail in County Durham called HMP Franklin. The attacker was one of the

conspirators of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 in which his brother Salman Abedi killed himself and 22 other people with a bomb. Hashim Abedi, the prison attacker here, used cooking oil and a knife he cut from a cooking tray to stab and severely injure three prison officers. Thankfully, they have survived. So there are definitely public interest questions to be asked here. Yeah, I mean, my first question would be, why did this guy have access to cooking? oil and cooking implements. Which is exactly what the mirror went with, their front page. It says, why on earth did he have boiling oil?

You know, you can make it grabby and catchy and still in the public interest. Their takeaway, right, is we need to protect prison officers better. They ask the wider social systemic questions that come from his attack. They also focused on the lived experience and expertise of prison officers on the front page, right? They quote, jail staff say rapid action is needed to protect them. A union said he should not have been allowed access to the items, adding the government needs to wake up before a prison officer is murdered. Okay, well done, the mirror.

Next up, the sun. They take a bit of a different tone. The headline is The Smiling Assassin. So firstly, they sensationalise the violent details of this story. A Betty grinned as he stabbed, they write. And also emphasise the unique, extraordinary, rather than the systemic details. They say, miracle three guards survived. Basically, they focus on this crazed baddie, you know, versus miracle goodies story,

rather than the potential systemic and institutional issue the attack points to. Yeah, the smiling assassin sounds like the name of an ITV true crime drama. And finally, the Daily Mail. Yes, they do make it about a systemic problem. But not one which has been flagged by the people actually affected, i.e. prison officers. Instead, one that hasn't even been mentioned by the officers, but instead props up the paper's own ideological agenda. Here's the headline.

Time to stop appeasing extremists in our jails. Cool. They do not opt for. any of the statements coming from prison officer, representatives and spokespeople, statements that they are really trying to push out on the back of this attack? Instead, their headline is based on the statement of who they call MPs and ministers, who's really just, you know, one MP minister. Helena, could you possibly guess which minister is making these claims about our justice system? Oh, God. Please don't tell me it's Robert Jemrick again. Bullseye.

Oh my God. Their entire line stems from Tory provocative. shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick. The news is basically now just a list of what Robert Jenrick says. Yeah, and it is because of what he says. He says unnuanced, unevidenced, polarising, provocative things that make great clickbait, even if they're not actually public interest stories. And look, I'm not saying we should not talk about the dangers of radicalisation and Islamism and gangs in general in jails when there's evidence to do so.

But this assertion that it's time to stop appeasing extremists in our jails is based on one anecdote and taking that as proof Islamists are, quote, ruling the roosts behind bars, is completely unfounded. The circumstances of this attack are actually very, very different to the picture of Islamists ruling UK prisons that Generic and those politically aligned with him have been trying to paint. For example, a spectator article from a week or two ago was titled Are Islamist Gangs in Control of Britain's Most Secure Prison? They talk about Muslim gangs taking over this actual prison and the risk of vulnerable inmates being radicalised when they're locked up with terrorists. This is a definite potential concern. However, a beddy, this attacker, who was radicalised before prison,

was in a separation facility of only 10 people And as far as we know, he acted alone. And by the way, this exact separation facility is described in the Spectator article as the place where non-Muslim prisoners who are refusing to join Islamist gangs have to be put for their own safety. So basically, this story does not fit their narrative at all. And finally on that, the prison service called the Spectator's claim about HMP Franklin being overrun by Islamists completely untrue.

So the Daily Mail paints this picture of prisons being literally overrun by Islamists. Is there any data on that? Yeah, I did look this up because I thought it was pretty crucial missing context. Only 157 people in prison, which by the way is 1% of all Muslims in prison, are currently there for Islamist extremist terrorism-related offences. This data is from the Prison Reform Trust. And that is out of a prison population of 85,000 people. So 157 people out of 85,000.

Correct. And that's ruling the roost. Yes, ruling the roost behind bars. So I'm not saying questions raised about the additional risks that extremists pose in prison shouldn't be asked and investigated, which they will be. But I find it's very telling when the story is bent to serve as proof of this problem on the testimony of a politician, while the explicit concerns raised by prison officers are sidelined. They don't feature on the mail's front page story at all. Now, at MediaStorm, in one of our episodes about prisons, we spoke to a couple of prison officers. One of them talked about the dangers of maintaining safety and order in facilities

that are overcrowded, under-resourced and completely unfit for purpose. Today, let's revisit his lived experience. I was a prison officer in H&P, Pentonville, from the summer of 2018 until the start of this year, so for about two and a half years. Ultimately, I became a prison officer because I wanted to work with people and try and help people get to a better place. Do you think that that attitude survives many years working as a prison officer? There are a significant minority where it does survive, and I was always in awe of those people.

That is something that I saw a lot, and I was there. People who came with good intentions, and through their experience of working there, really lost themselves in that job. Can you explain why that happens? You're fundamentally doing an inhumane job, but trying to do it in a humane way. You're caging people, effectively.

That's going to throw up a wide range of reactions, emotions. So on a daily basis, you know, I would have been verbally abused, threatened with violence, on occasion, been the victim of violence, seeing a lot of violence around me, seeing a lot of people inflict violence on themselves if you don't have a strong belief system you lose yourself in that role

and you become hardened and you become abusive yourself and do you think then that it is a necessity of the job or do you see it as something that should be improved on? I don't think you can totally escape the structure of prison but environmentally I was working in a space that was just not fit for purpose overcrided, decrepit Victorian prison

that was built in the 1840s to house 300 men And how many did it house? And it now houses 1,300. This is Pentonville, which was explicitly designed to remove people's identity. I studied history and I remember the Victorian design of Pentonville was thought out to basically maximize psychological torture. I mean, I don't think we've gone that far from that.

It is not fit for people to live in. I want to bring a media storm to Newswatch now that I think deserves some attention because of how little attention this topic gets in the media. This is something we have not covered ever on Media Storm before and it's about a particular disability stammering. So, a Daily Mail columnist did a write-up about the Climate Change Select Committee that met recently to discuss the next carbon budget. This is a committee made up of MPs, experts and

economists. The Daily Mail columnist, Quentin Lett, wrote of Pears Forster, the interim chair of the Climate Change Committee. Professor Forster had a marked stammer. We're not talking an occasional Ed Ball style hesitation on some words. It was a full fish-cooled one job. Naturally, won Dothwan's cap to a chap who battles on through such an impediment, but it quite unbalanced the meeting as an exercise in democratic scrutiny. Professor Forster was jolly difficult to understand. This being Britain, no one mentioned it. Miss Pinchbeck sitting beside her chairman drew rapt fascination to her tender chops. Mr. Richardson froze when Professor Forster was fighting with a particular consonant and then nodded in relief when it finally

popped out. The MPs gazed at the floor, the walls, their computers. Wow, he's just ticking every box, right? It's like patronising, degrading, insulting, vaguely sexist, ableist. Check, check, check. Yeah. So stammering is highly misunderstood and already gets such little media attention. So it's kind of an extra kick in the teeth when it gets negative attention. And we want to thank a media storm listener who has lived experience of a stammer and brought this to our attention. Claire Maye is the founder of STUC, Stuck, the stammerers through university consultancy.

It's an initiative which aims to support student and staff in higher education who's stammer. And Claire wrote a response to Quentin Lett's description of Professor Forster and she summarised it here for us on Media Storm. Here's what she had to say. This article that was written by Quentin Letts is just so problematic it's there isn't a single thing in there which I think is okay. The fact that he writes about disability in a way that it's an impact for those who don't

have disabilities. Like we are getting in their way. We are stopping the flow of a meeting. We are essentially blocking the ways in which people should communicate and that that is really disgusting you know i can't believe that in and 2025 we're still having to expose people for their behavior on this and my my problem isn't just with him it's of course with the editor who thought it was okay to publish this and i don't understand how people with such influence and people who can use their platform to really spread the word about these issues that are being discussed in these meetings that Professor Forster was in. He was discussing the climate issues. But the fact that instead,

Quentin Letts decided to write about his disability just sickens me to my stomach. It shows that he was concentrating on the wrong thing. He should have been listening to the topics being discussed, and being able to write an article about the climate crisis that's currently happening, as opposed to writing about how his disability was an inconvenience to him. It's really blood-boiling, and I can't believe that we're still having to point people out for this sort of behaviour. We'll be back after a quick break. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from winners?

Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote? Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes.

Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners, find fabulous for less. Tomorrow in our deep-dide, we'll be looking at one of the missing sides of media coverage of the UK asylum system. The fact that there are female asylum seekers whose stories also need telling. Yeah, and we'll be hacking up some big media migration myths. Like the misconception that all asylum seekers are men.

But there's one big myth. We won't quite get to, and I want to tackle it now because the Daily Mail has made it, oh, so tempting. This is the myth that asylum seekers are. all coming here to live in luxury hotels for free. The Daily Mail published an exclusive headline. It said, Fury after luxury Riverside Hotel is being used to house 150 male migrants as locals say decision was made overnight.

A classic headline. It's a pretty self-explanatory story about a situation in Peterborough. A quick glance and you'll notice the news article is riddled with entirely subjective terms like stylish and picturesque. Daily Mail reporters are famously objective, though. Famously. Then with a little bit of actual fact-checking, the exaggerations and outright inaccuracies begin to appear. For example, the article goes on to call the hotel a four-star luxury hotel.

A quick Google search reveals it's actually a three-star hotel. What? It sounds just like a straight-up lie. I guess three-star luxury hotel just doesn't have the same ring. It doesn't, no. And I want to go into that sentence a little more. The four-star luxury hotel was given over entirely to house male migrants with just 48 hours notice. As if it was handed to them as a gift.

Right, when in reality they are being contained in facilities and most, in my experience, would rather live in communities as, for example, Ukrainian refugees were allowed to. And I do not actually happen to think that our asylum seeker housing policies are good policies or humane or economically ones. And I mean that for local communities as well as asylum seekers. But rather than being designed to solve problems around immigration, for example, with integration, they are designed to do the opposite, to prevent long-term settlement on this failing logic of deterrence. Yeah, they're basically blaming asylum seekers for the broken system when they are the ones who suffer from the broken system the most, not the ones who cause it and definitely not

the ones who profit from it. Yeah, exactly. And there's something else I have to pick out in this Daily Mail article. Now, the headline you might remember claimed that there is fury at the housing of asylum seekers in the hotel. Well, I just want to read listeners some of the supposedly furious testimonies from locals that the male online bases this headline on. One local expressed concerns about young women being nervous to exercise around so many single men, stating, I've spoken to some of these asylum seekers and I genuinely feel sorry for them, but a lot of them come from cultures where they perhaps aren't used to.

to seeing a woman without her head covered. Another says, some of the asylum seekers have come into our cafe. They've been very polite and not caused any problems. I can understand why some people are concerned because this is a very busy spot with young males and females during the spring and summer. Wow, that sounds so furious.

Yes, this is not fury, right? This is measured, nuanced expression of concern by community members. And when the male presents it as fury, Not only do they stir up like actual unfounded fury in anti-migrant hate. It also implies to those of us who empathize with asylum seekers that these locals are uncaring and unreasonable and in no way politically compatible with us. It's such a perfect example of how the media needlessly polarizes our society for their commercial gain. It's literally deepening the divide. This is exactly what we found on our episode about.

polarization with your co-travellers from the Channel 4 documentary, go back to where you came from. And one of them actually came from a local community whose hotel is being used to house asylum seekers. And she felt that her story and her village's story was completely misrepresented in the media. So you can go back and listen to that if you haven't already. But, you know, for some more lived experience on this topic, make sure you tune in to tomorrow's deep dive. Time for Eyes on Palestine. The first thing to say, to remind people, is that on March the 18th, Israel shattered the two-month-old so-called ceasefire in Gaza by launching the deadliest attack since November of 2023 and killing over 400 Palestinians, nearly half of whom were children.

Since then, the violence has been unrelenting. The UN has estimated that at least 100 children have been killed or injured in Gaza every single. day. This is why we need to keep eyes on Palestine. What I wanted to bring to this segment today is that a Palestinian student at Columbia University has been essentially abducted by ICE in the US, similar to cases that we've seen of Mahmoud Khalil and Rameza Ozturk that we discussed on last week's episode on free speech. Mosen Madhawi showed up for what he thought was an interview for him to obtain his US citizenship. It's unclear. as to whether this appointment was legitimate or essentially a trap, Madawi walked into the

immigration office and instead of being interviewed by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services was immediately placed in handcuffs by plainclothed, armed individuals whose faces were covered. When asked, those arresting Madawi refused to identify themselves or share any information about where he was being taken. As is to be expected now, Madawi was active on Columbia's campus in organizing and raising awareness for Gaza and Palestine. Some people have been praising his arrest because they say that he poses a threat and that he's anti-Semitic. So I want to play this. In November 23, Madhawi co-organized a rally for Palestine at Colombia. Someone who was not affiliated with Colombia's Palestinian Students' Union said something anti-Semitic at the

rally. Here's how Mosa Madawi reacted when being interviewed about it. on CBS's 60 Minutes. A person who's not affiliated with Colombia, we've never seen him. We don't know who is this guy, comes down the stairs yelling death to Jews. I was shocked and they walked directly to the person and they told him, you don't represent us because this is not something that we agree with. And directly what I've done, I took the megaphone and they gave a speech and they said, we here are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong.

And what this guy has said is wrong. What this guy has said is clearly anti-semitic. To be anti-sematic is unjust. and the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against anti-Semitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I want to bring eyes on Palestine this. Thanks to the author Assal Rad for posting it. Asal has been fixing headlines from news reports about Israel and Palestine. basically switching simple words that expose their bias and the complicity of the language they choose to use. The BBC changed their recent headline in this case and it's a good example of the difference a headline makes

in telling the same story. The first headline, Gaza Hospital hit by Israeli Strike, Hamas-run Health Ministry, says. Versus the headline they changed it to, Israeli Air Strike destroys part of last functioning hospital in Gaza City. Now this hospital, the Al-Ahli Hospital, a Baptist hospital, which by the way was bombed on Palm Sunday, was the last fully functioning hospital in Gaza City. The reason for that is that hospitals and health clinics have been consistently bombed throughout this campaign. At least

36 facilities and the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza has been completely hollowed out, leaving medics unable to save children and other mass casualty victims who could easily have been saved was the infrastructure in place. This is a targeted strategy undermining civilian life in the region and it should be described as what it is. Thank you for listening. Tune in to tomorrow's episode where we'll be covering the myths and misunderstandings about female asylum seekers, pregnant in unsafe housing and apparently without access to free healthcare. If you want to support MediaStorm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee per month.

The link is in the show notes, and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community. We appreciate you so much. And 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. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helen LaWoddya and follow the show via at MediaStormPod.

MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfire.