Media Storm - News Watch: Trump’s ‘war on women’s sports’, hostage handovers, and is Labour Reform-ing?

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

! JOIN US AT SAMFIRE’S EP LAUNCH PARTY TONIGHT ! This week’s political news reads like a playbook in fascist propaganda - and rule number 1 is throwing minorities under the bus. Whether it’s Trump’s America, Merz’s Germany or Starmer’s Great Britain, leadership apparently now means bowing to the myths of the masses - myths the media has miserably failed to correct. Is there really a ‘migrant crime wave’? We review worldwide data to equip listeners with the facts missing from the mainstream media. What about ‘the war on women’s sports’? How many transgender athletes does it take for the Trump administration to ceremoniously sign a national ban? (Apparently, just 10 - we wonder what Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ makes of that use of federal funds.) And guess who predicted Hamas’ hesitation over hostage releases, following Trump’s plans to “take over” Gaza? The families of those hostages. So why did their concerns barely make the press? We finish News Watch with Eyes On Palestine: new frontiers of war emerge in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia) The music is by Samfire (@samfire) Follow us @mediastormpod Support us on Patreon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi Media Stormers. It's Thursday and you know what that means. We're dissecting the 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 Storms Newswatch, helping you make sense of the mainstream media. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storms. Trump's War on Women's Sports, Hostage Handovers and Is Labour Reforming? Performing. Hey. Hey, Tilda.

How's your laptop? Guys, we had a spilly-tilly incident. This was not funny. This is when spilly-tilly. Stop being a joke. Yeah, this was not a joke anymore because Matilda, she essentially poured... It was a pint.

A pint glass of water. It was a pint of water. On to her laptop. You know what, though? Of all the times that I have spilt on my laptop. I love that there's multiple, multiple times. Of all the times, this is the most liquid I have ever spilled and the least my laptop has ever died.

So it's still working. It's alive. That's so good. So far. Because, guys, I can't tell you the level of water on this laptop. Yeah, but we were so impressive in our response. It was within three. seconds we had two bags of rice and a tray and a drainage board and several towels yeah it was um i'd never

jumped into action that fast you've known me too long yeah uh also i'm seeing you tonight right yes guys sam fire is performing in london tonight she wrote all the music for media storm she also my sister side note she's not just going to pee and they'll be performing it in stoke noonton i think there's still some tickets so i'll post the link in the show notes And we'll see you there. Yay. What else? What's happened in the news?

Oh, I was quite entertained. I don't know if you saw this poll last week published in the front page of the Times saying that Gen Z, or like the majority of Gen Z basically want a dictatorship. Did you see that? Oh, I did see this, yes. 52% of Gen Zs would prefer a strong leader

who isn't voted in. A military rule. But then the Times front page two days ago was like scandal. The majority of Gen Zs think the UK is racist and only 10% of them would actually fight for our country. So which is it, do Genesees want military

rule or are they all anti-military? Either it says Gen Z are as fickle as they're controversial or it says polls bullshit. Yeah. Probably that. What else has happened? You know I really hate talking about or thinking about Donald Trump

but what I want to acknowledge about the story I'm bringing up mostly is just the sheer stupidity of it. I am so ready. So Trump has signed an executive order to ensure that all government agencies enforce a ban on transgender girls from participating in female school sports. If schools fail to adhere to the policy, they could lose federal funding.

It also is calling for the government to deny visas for trans women seeking to compete professionally in the United States, and bear in mind the 28 Olympics is going to be held in L.A. And it will instruct the State Department to pressure the International Olympic Committee to change its policy, a policy which, by the way, already has guidance in place, preventing any athlete from gaining an unfair advantage. The first thing I want to ask you is, did you see the footage of Trump signing this order?

Was this the picture where he's surrounded by all these little girls? Yeah, okay. It was creepy as fuck. I'm sorry. He did like a signing ceremony with about 100 women and girls standing behind him, all these kids surrounding his desk. being used as propaganda

because there's no way that these children know what they're there for, right? Also, the absolute irony of a man who has been found in a civil case to have committed sexual assault and let alone all the other sexual assault allegations against him, let alone literally being caught on tape bragging about sexual assault.

The absolute irony of a sexual predator sitting at a table signing an order that is supposedly going to protect women. If we wanted to protect women, we wouldn't have let Trump into the White House. Yeah, like I cannot understand why people think that we need to go to these measures to protect from such a, such a small and marginalized population.

But let's look at the reasons people, some people do think that. I suppose the first issue is, you know, are cis women being disadvantaged in sport because of trans women? Okay, so it is a complicated question and I don't claim to be any sort of scientist and I certainly don't claim to be an expert in sport.

But the main consensus is that it should be down to the experts and that sporting bodies have got sets of rules that they have made with the available science that they have today. But, you know, what we're seeing here is nothing to do with the expertise. This is about emotion. And we've seen real-life examples of severe hostility that is arising from that. We've seen examples of cis women

who are deemed to not look feminine enough being accused of men masquerading as women. This is not in a good place. Exactly. And it is precisely this toxicity that Trump is using to win over more and more people. When signing this bill, he said, my administration will not stand by

and watch men beat and batter female athletes. So literally leaning into the nastiest tropes about trans women. But also, can I just say that if women's sport was being overrun with trans women winning, surely we would have noticed? It's a great point. How many trans athletes do you think this bill that Trump made such a great show and dance about are likely to be affected? Children or athletes? From collegiate level.

I guess, I don't know, a thousand. Try 10. Out of 510,000 athletes competing at the collegiate level in the US, there are fewer than 10 who publicly identify as transgender. Oh my God, politics is embarrassing. And here's where we come back to Media Storm. That crucial context of how many transgender athletes there are and how small the trans population is was either entirely missed out in most articles on this topic or was popped in as a paragraph

right at the end of the article. And of course, of course, I did not see a single piece of coverage that included any lived experience of any transgender person. So, we'll do that here. Here's Leuern Cox, actress, and activist. Everything he's doing is illegal, by the way, everything. So hopefully it'll be challenging the courts. But I think there, I mean, at the end of the day,

trans people are less than 1% of the population. And trans people are not the reason you can't afford eggs. We're not the reason that you can't afford health care. We're not the reason that you can't buy a house or your rents too high. I think they're focused on the wrong 1%. I think the other 1% is the reason for all those things. You hear LeVern there mentioned that she hopes Trump's order will be challenged in the courts.

And I also think that that's some crucial context that has been missed out of this reporting, which is that prior to Trump's executive order, over 20 states already have laws, regulations, or policies restricting transgender students from participating in sports. However, these laws have frequently been challenged in federal courts and generally the courts have ruled that trans athletes should be allowed to compete.

So there are some signs here that this order is nothing more than just stoking a culture war. Can I just say Trump brought in Musk on this whole facade of stripping back red tape and cutting unnecessary costs? I want to know how much money was spent on this signing ceremony and all of the legislative manpower that has gone into this bill that is just on so many levels not changing or affecting anyone's life.

Absolutely. And ultimately Trump won this election by throwing trans people under the bus. I saw a clip from Natasha Devon's show on LBC and Natasha the presenter spoke to a man called Aaron and Aaron said that he admired Trump and that men are more

disadvantaged than women. Is this the Aaron that's been trolling us on Instagram? His name was Aaron. Oh my God. Oh yeah. Okay, so Aaron said So Aaron said that he admired Trump And when Natasha ran through some of Trump's worst policies

Ie illegal mining of private data Healthcare costs, etc Aaron admitted Oh, he didn't love all of Trump's policies, just some And then that's when Natasha asked him What specifically he admires about Trump's policies And guess what Aaron said He liked that Trump says there are only two genders

That's the only example that this man could think of of a good thing that Trump had done. And look, I just want to sum this up by reading what Natasha said in a post about this. She said, it always comes down to trans people. The politicisation of their existence is the gateway via which whole populations

have been radicalised into voting against their own interests and for dangerous authoritarian regimes. They're cheering on the persecution of less than 1% of the population whilst punching themselves in the face. You know what Trump said when he signed this order? He said, the war on women's sports is over.

Well, it's really easy to end a made-up war that you started. I want to look now at another group whose real lives have been pawned in this week of politics. That is the families of Israeli hostages. Devastating news broke this week that Hamas was halting hostage releases until further notice. This situation is constantly changing. And it could change between us recording and us publishing. When this news happened, it was devastating, but it was also predictable. To the hostage families, whose warnings last week of exactly this being likely to happen

largely got lost in the noise. Yeah, I have to say I didn't read or hear any of the lived experience from the hostages families. And I think it's also worth mentioning that while Hamas halted the hostage release, they blamed Israel for breaching the ceasefire first and none of the alleged breaches by Israel have made our press like Hamas did. It's true. The thing is, though, like whatever the evidence says in terms of whether Israel or Hamas moved to breach the ceasefire first,

there is one very, very blatant breach that's just incontestable. Which is... Trump's. Right. Matilda, we're doing a terrible job of not making the news the Trump show. I'm sorry. I'm going to make it work. OK.

Okay. One of Hamas' given reasons for halting hostage releases was that Israel allegedly delayed the return of displaced people to northern Gaza. This is one of the primary conditions of the first stage of the ceasefire, right? Gazans return to Gaza. Israeli officials denied Hamas's allegations,

but is either really the point when Trump has repeatedly said that the US has no intention of seeing Gazans return home? He's also since doubled down this and confirmed that his plans to turn the territory into the Riviera of the Middle East would not see Ghazans

returning to Gaza even in the long term. And at the time of his first whole mad Riviera announcement, what was largely buried among all of the geopolitical analysis was the analysis of hostage families. But speaking to news outlet Middle East Eye, Yehuda Cohen, the father of a detained

Israeli soldier, said he and other family members held genuine concerns that the president's plan would force Hamas to abandon the deal. And to see, this is me diving behind the Trump show. At the first opportunity, media, other politicians, we let this news story become a geopolitical chess game, an experiment in international relations, and the human stories get sidelined. And the consequences is that we end up giving these world leaders who are playing with their lives a sense of impunity. We give them the attention.

Even if some of the commentators are right, even if Trump is playing the world's riskiest bluff, he is gambling people's lives. And if those were your families, you would not be okay with it. Okay, next week, no more Trump. Deal. Unless he signs another order,

turning all paper straws into plastic straws. Did you see this? The war on paper straws is over. You're making that up, though. No, yeah. No, no, that was real. Oh, world. So Labour has dressed up as the Reform Party this week,

not just with new branding, but videos of door raids and deportations of illegal migrants. This pattern echoes a shift internationally, right, of centrist politics making concessions to extremism. Maybe most shocking recently occurred in Germany a couple of weeks ago when Friedrich Mertz, who is the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, that's Angela Merkel's party, he broke what is a fundamental taboo in German politics

by partnering with the far-right AFD party in order to pass a hardline immigration policy. my husband's German, right? He was really shocked listening to the newsagents podcast. I mean, I was really shocked that he listens to any other podcasts. How dare he?

But he was really shocked because I was a Labour MP on there this week. His name is Jake Richards. And he basically was saying, look, he was explaining Labor's decision to dress up like reform, saying, look, I just came back from Germany and I've been observing

what's happening there with the rise of the AFD and the takeaway is that Labor should be doing what Mouts is doing. Labour should be looking at the example of these parties and why they're being successful. But that is the opposite takeaway of many German MPs who carry heavily the national memory of fascism and of turning the population against minorities. Tuesday saw the government in Germany's final session before they closed for election

and the resignation speech of a leading centre-left MP who shocked many by stepping down and he left his colleagues with a heavy message. He said, to translate, politics today is all about opportunity, not integrity. He said, yes, you know, it is important to listen to what people are feeling. It's so important. But leadership is not just looking for their votes.

It's looking for their solutions. He's saying a chancellor who only regurgitates what his own. ear has been told is just a walking echo chamber and we have more than enough echo chambers already. Unlike Labor this week, he is recognizing a vital truth here

that perception, public perception, is not necessarily the same as reality. And for nowhere is this more true than migration. One of the most dishonest areas of politics and of coverage, right, is migrant crime.

Okay, look, I know we said we wouldn't talk about Trump, but wasn't one of the core phrases of Trump's campaign, a so-called migrant crime wave, which is exactly the perception most people would get from a bulk of our media. And you know what? It is not true. Over the past 30 years, as a whole, violent crime, by the way, is down. In the UK, it's down. And this is despite record net migration. And in the US, the data shows migrants consistently have lower crime rates than Americans, actually like significantly lower. This, by the way, is also true in Australia and New Zealand. Wow. So, yeah, I just want to, as succinctly as possible, lay out for people where the data

is on migrant crime. And I want you guys to share this with people, share the facts when you hear it come up, because the conversation right now bears no relation to reality. So globally, the data either finds no causal link between immigration and crime or mixed results. There's two types of ways to measure this, right? And they often have slightly different findings. The first is incarceration rates. Quite a lot of countries show that migrant populations or some migrant populations are overrepresented in prison. The other way of measuring it is crime rates, right? So we look at the rates of migration and we look at the rates of crime to see if they change in a pattern with each other. And actually here we see no causal link. Okay, why if more migrants come into your

country. Do the crime levels not change? They stay the same. But within your prisons, there are more migrants than native populations. One of the possible explanations for that is actually just bias, racial profiling in the police, in the judicial system. The UK is actually not even showing high migrant incarceration rates. I ran the data on this a few weeks ago after there were all these headlines saying migrants were disproportionately arrested in the UK. Well, within our prisons, they're actually not disproportionately represented. So they're being arrested, but they're not put in prison. That's maybe discrepancy in policing,

or maybe the crimes they're being arrested for aren't severe. Now, there is one exception, which is often referenced, and that's Denmark. Denmark is a rare example, which points to higher, quote, ethnic minority crime rates. And this is particularly shown with younger male and less educated migrants. But again, the overall data is much milder than the single study often used to show this. Okay, and this is so different to the messaging coming from the media and now even left or centrist MPs. How many front pages have there been literally just this week

linking crime and migration? Crime happens every day in amounts that can be barely reported. Most never make the headlines. But as soon as there's a migrant suspect, we talk about it for weeks. And compare that to say the mass shooting in Sweden last week. This was the biggest mass shooting in Swedish history. We stopped talking about it almost immediately. So I guess the shooter was Swedish and white.

Yeah, he was white, although of course white is never mentioned because race isn't relevant unless it's not white. And it's not like there weren't really relevant takeaways that we could have discussed with this massive incident of violence. This guy may not have been a migrant, but he had mental health problems. He had multiple shooting guns. He'd been repeatedly refused military service. These are causative problems that we always say.

in violent crime, but we don't mention them when ethnic minority or migrants are involved. At the first opportunity, we'll distract from systemic problems to fixate on and blame any sign of otherness. And this is really reminded me of Hussein Kassavani on our first ever series of Media Storm. And he spoke about doubled standards in reports about mass shootings. And it just, yeah, feels really relevant right now. Let's play a clip. With all these types of events, it always starts off with like, oh, this is another Muslim terrorists, the same kind of rhetoric about immigration and this is what happens when you let refugees come into your country and so on. Then when like more information comes out, you can see

how people are not only trying to go back on their own stories, but they're still trying to weave their own narrative. The affordance of mental health is given to certain people, but for others it's very much like, no, you were motivated primarily by theology, you were motivated primarily by race and so on. And I think in the aftermath of like terrorist attacks and also in other stories like, you know, grooming gangs, for example, right? Immigrant men and particularly dark-skinned immigrant men who are like threats to your nation and like threats to your race and threats to the spiritual health of your country. It's always largely like fixated on this idea of the immigrant savage, the foreigner who is not subjected to the individualistic

moral failings that are afforded to like people who are white or people who are not come from immigrant bratcans or like who are not Muslim. It's always sort of framed as culture wars and it's always framed as like clash of civilizations. I guess the point that I'm trying to say is When it comes to people of colour, very often these people are commodified and they're sort of used to particular ends in order to kind of tell stories rather than individuals who have agency over their own actions. That was Hussain Kassvani on Media Storm's series one episode about anti-Asian hate. And just to take this back to the initial news story I was talking about here,

remember that quote from the German MP, Opportunity has trumped integrity in politics. But this is true for MPs, and it's true for the media. For MPs today, sharing and re-sharing any story about migrant crime, even if it's not on a representative scale, even if it's not even true, right, Southport, it gets you votes. Reform built themselves on this, and now Labour has bowed to it. But this is how extremism and hate and fascism take root.

And for the media, when there is such a gap between public perception and evidence-based reality, then the media has failed at its main function in a democracy. Time for eyes on Palestine. Now, if you remember last week, Helena and I said we were going to be latching this on to the end of every news watch because for all of the major news happening in the week, there is one major story that we cannot and should not look away from.

And that is our complicity in genocide and war on Gaza and the people of Palestine. We were talking earlier about human stories, and I want to talk about humanization in the coverage of hostages and just point out some key differences in the reporting of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Did you see a key difference in what I just said? Hostages, prisoners. Right. And prisoners implies that somebody has done something wrong, they have committed a crime, and therefore they are in prison. But a lot of Palestinians have never even been tried for their supposed crimes. I mean, it's widely known that Israel practices so-called administrative detention en masse has done for decades and decades.

And this is the practice of detaining, imprisoning, indefinitely, without trial. So they should also be called hostages or captives. And actually there are many, many among them who are, you know, healthcare workers, journalists, laborers, who were widely believed to be completely innocent. Exactly. That's the first bit of difference I wanted to point out. The second bit of difference is really about what this all comes down to, and that's humanisation.

We know the names of the Israeli hostages. We know their backstories very often. These Palestinian captives, we don't get to hear their names. We don't get to hear who they were. We don't get to hear their jobs. We don't get to hear from their families. It's just a number.

And it is completely and utterly dehumanising. Yeah, and the world was rightly shocked when three Israeli hostages were released on the weekend, the conditions that they'd clearly been held on. It was really, really upsetting. But where was this shock? The Palestinian captives being held, there are countless testimonies,

there's video footage that the conditions they're being held in include the worst, most unimaginable example of torture, rape, beating starvation. And yes, death in captivity. And there was a BBC headline and it read, What will anger at sight of gaunt hostages mean for a fragile ceasefire? And it's important to talk about that. But what have we seen from Gaza? I've seen body parts of children. I've seen Palestinian men stripped and chained together. I've heard five-year-old Palestinian girl behind Rajab on the phone to paramedics trapped in a car with six of her dead family members around her

before being killed herself. What does that mean for the ceasefire? Nothing, clearly. And you know what also might have implications for a ceasefire? The fact that, as the UN has just estimated, 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from the West Bank by the current and ongoing Israeli operation there, which we talked about a bit last week.

And there's one other frontier of this war that we need to keep our eyes on and that's East Jerusalem another annexed Palestinian territory where Israel has been cracking down with new methods of censorship and terror an example from the week that shocked many local Israelis as well as Palestinians was a police raid

at the famous and much loved educational bookshop this place was opened in 1984 and it's become widely known as an iconic meeting place for researchers, diplomats, journalists, tourists from all sides, right? It's Palestinian owners proudly present it as a place where Palestinians and Israelis can mingle together. To quote, we have room for anyone's opinion

and we don't always agree, but we can talk about it. But earlier this week, those owners were arrested and dragged in front of the court with their hands and their feet shackled. Witnesses say that books with Palestinian flags were seized. This place is known for books where people can read about the history of Israel-Palestine and where Israelis can access

really rare insight into Palestinian perspectives on their shared history. The police in their statement labelled the booksellers as inciters of terror with no evidence. I think that what we need to see in this is that Israel's war is now targeting not just the Palestinian people,

but Palestinian culture. And that is the second ingredient of ethnic cleansing. Thank you for listening. Tomorrow for Valentine's Day, we have another episode dropping, a deep dive into asexuality, with our guest, Yasmin Benoit. That episode will be out tomorrow at 5am.

If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout-out to everyone in our Patreon community. 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 Awadier and follow the show via at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfire.