Media Storm - News Watch: US protests, Trump's tariffs, and is Lucy Connolly a 'political prisoner'?

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Join us for the Media Storm LIVE SHOW! Tuesday 20th May 7pm, @ the Business Design Centre in Islington. Tickets available at 10am on Friday via AEG Presents HERE  Paid Patreon subscribers get access to tickets ONE HOUR EARLIER at 9am - support us on Patreon and get early access!   Content warning: Rape and sexual assault. If you need support you can contact Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222 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, some million people in the US protested for democracy and against the Trump administration - but you wouldn’t know it from the front pages (3:10). One grievance on the protest agenda was against Trump’s tariffs, described as ‘reciprocal’ in the media - but it turns out they're anything but (10:25).  Plus - can we do anything about Meta’s AI stealing over 7 million books? (9:12) (Sign the petition from The Society of Authors here!) Why did The Telegraph call Lucy Connolly, jailed for calling on rioters to set fire to asylum seeker hotels on X, a political prisoner? (21:03) And why intersectional reporting is so important in the case of serial rapist Zhenhao Zou. (31:11) Finally, keeping Eyes on Palestine, we look at the compliant reporting even the face of evidence that Israel's army killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil emergency responders. (39:14)  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

While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at dynamic.ca slash active. 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 fearmonger.

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 Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's media storms. U.S. protests, Trump's tariffs, and is Lucy Connolly a political prisoner. Hey, hey. Hi, Matilda. How are you? I'm very excited. What are you excited about? I'm excited because we have a live show coming up

and I honestly feel like we've been waiting so long to do a live show and be back in a room with our listeners. I know, I'm so excited. So listeners, we're going to be essentially kicking off the podcast show. It's on Tuesday, the 20th of May, 7pm at the Business Design Centre in Islington and tickets are out this Friday at 10am. But if you are a subscriber to our Patreon, Patrients we love you, we are giving you early access

to tickets. We will post that on our Patreon. So please make sure you come and join us. We'll have some very special guests to be announced. So we are excited but we are also diet. Oh my God, I think the eyebags are like next level today. I'm not going to lie. They are.

They are. And I have like industrial strength concealer on. But this is our penultimate week of the series. We are going to be coming back and it's not going to be a long break just a couple of weeks. Anything before we start News Watch?

Yes, so last week we were talking about whose voices we should be elevating in the post-adolescence mania. And I wanted to actually flag one more organisation, end sexism in schools. So they're fighting misogyny in schools, but also campaigning for a gender-balanced curriculum. So their research showed that schools are mainly teaching pupils about male perspectives and male achievements. But their theory is, if boys learn about women and girls, they'll understand. female perspectives and develop empathy and respect, what they call a vital part of the puzzle of ending the cycle of violence, standalone RSE lessons, relationship sex education lessons, aren't nearly enough when everyday lessons uphold the current system.

That's really cool. I think that that is a really good way forward. And that way, not only the people who are going to sign up to specifically learn about equality and relationships and consent are actually going to get the lesson. too. Okay, to begin News Watch, did you know that there were huge anti-Trump protests last weekend? I didn't know.

No, but I'm not surprised because I found out that there were anti-Trump administration protests happening in the US because a reality TV star that I follow from a show called Vanderpump Rules, which is honestly an iconic show. Everyone should watch it, but I won't go down that path right now. But she put up an Instagram story photo of her at a protest with a sign saying hands off our rights. And I was like, oh, wait, there's protests happening.

And I was initially embarrassed to say that that's how I found out. But once I looked at the news, I was less embarrassed because it didn't like really feature. Yeah, because I follow all the boring, conventional news, you know, information sources. And not fun reality TV stuff. and I'm pretty ignorant on that front. Okay, so where was this? Was this like a big march on Washington? Well, there was a protest in Washington,

but there were also protests in all 50 states. Whoa, so it was like a coordinated national effort. Yes, so these were mass action protests organized by a pro-democracy movement in response to what they call a hostile takeover and attack on American rights and freedoms. So they say they're demanding an end to this billion, their power grab. So as much as it is against Trump, it's also against people like Elon Musk.

There's not one sole reason that people are protesting. It's a variety of reasons such as the threat to democracy, the slashing of jobs, student deportations, even Trump's tariffs. You know, people are angry. So these were dubbed the hands-off protests and around 1,400 of them were organized in every US state. Wow. The largest ones, being in like Washington, D.C., New York City. There were also multiple U.S. state representatives speaking at the protests. Crowd organizers say millions of people turned out to protest across the country. Most media outlets are reporting it as hundreds of thousands.

But there is like drone footage of mass protests where you can't even see the street. There's so many people. Okay, so hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people coming together to defend democracy. I did not see this. on my X feed, and by the way, my X feed is like full of whatever Elon Musk is doing, even though I never have followed him or engaged in any of it. That just makes me think of when we had riots in the UK last summer, and Elon Musk tweeted,

Civil War is inevitable in the UK. And then that was just all over X and pushed to the top of the X algorithm. Social media, fine, mainstream media. You said millions were marching. What was the news coverage of this protest like? Okay, so if you Google the hands-off protest, Now. There's about one article in every major news outlet. The protests were on Saturday, but they barely made any front pages on Sunday or Monday. A perfect example I can give you is from

the New York Times. Their front page on Sunday featured a tiny square photograph of the protest in Asheville, NC, with the words, A Day of Protest, page 18. Page 18. Yeah. So they had covered this on page 18. And this is kind of my point. The coverage is there if you look for it, but it didn't exactly make a splash. And given how much wall-to-wall coverage there is of Trump, his policies, his decisions, his speeches, his administration,

you would think that thousands, if not potentially millions, pushing back against that would be covered. I think there's a lack of due proportionality here. Yeah, it's also a very top-down narrative, you know, taking the headlines from the White House press room and not from the people or the streets. Yes. And so I want to redress the balance here. Here's what protesters had to say about why they attended the hands-off anti-Trump pro-democracy marches. Some of these are from online and some of these spoke to media storm directly.

This is what democracy looks like. Because Trump is a traitor. He's betrayed this country. He's betrayed our government and he's betrayed our people. He's betrayed our allies. He sold us out. He's a criminal. Get him out.

Now. Grow a spine, Congress. Walk him off. It means restore what we've had as a democracy. And so it's being touched in the most dangerous ways. In fact, when we were making our poster, and we were saying, what to have hands off, we had trouble limiting the list.

The list got so long between free speech and reproductive rights and social security. I was at the protest in Boston on April 5th. We had really foul weather here. It was just like freezing and started to rain at some point and there was still a massive turnout. So it was really great. really great to be there and feel some of the anger that was wafting off of people. I went with a family member who's a Boston native, and he said he hasn't seen anything like this in terms of sheer numbers. I guess I'm not shocked that reporting was buried. Reporting in

the Boston Globe, especially was like page 11 or something, I think. They did print some sort of op-ed or collection of letters to the editor of people expressing their concern. about that. The thing that I was more surprised by was the inability of the local press to get a realistic tally of the number of people in attendance. I was looking to the press coverage, not for an understanding of the event,

but for factual representations of the size of the event. We saw that Boston Police Department reported like 30,000 people in attendance, and organizers are reporting closer to 100,000. And it is leaving. some people feeling like, well, what's the point if this isn't drawing the attention? And the organizers that I speak to and work with are sort of in one of two camps. One is like, we just keep showing up, keep doing this.

And the other one is we need to do something more extreme. A lot of what's happening seems to be corrupt division of power that's not being followed with the founding fathers and what they're intended for this country. And today at a crossroads history where tyranny and corruption titans, their grip and we are left with a choice to rise up or to surrender to a corrupt regime hellbent on remaking America in its image. Elon Musk has got to go, hey-day, oh-ho, Elon Musk has got to go. So this story ties in to that whole top-down narrative, the news being dominated by the narratives

coming from the top. Let's talk about tariffs. We have been taken for a ride, but it's not just by Donald Trump. Let me guess. By the mainstream media as well? You got it. And fair enough, there has been complete global meltdown and our hearts do go out to all the reporters pouring over the sources to try and find more and more outrageous synonyms for terms like slump or crash or crisis or plummet or breakdown or turmoil or tailspin. How about landslides, train wreck, check, shitstorm. Cryfest 2025. Gloucesterfuck.

Epic fail. Quagmire? Quagmire. Okay, I went too far. Look, it's made it all pretty hard to actually understand what's happening. I have literally read a zillion. words in the news about tariffs and, you know, why then do I not really understand what they actually are? No, I completely agree and it's probably because economics makes no sense.

Well, apparently not. So the first media storm that followed so-called Liberation Day last week, which was the day that Donald Trump got so tariff happy, an Antarctic island populated exclusively by penguins got landed with a 10% tariff. afraid. I saw that. It's so good. It is good. The penguins had no idea what they have done to piss off. What did penguins ever do to you? But, you know, neither did the people of Lesotho, a fairly heart-chipped African country, so small. Trump recently said this about it. It's $8 million to promote LGBTQI plus in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. Or like Madagascar, where three quarters of people live in poverty and now face a 47% tariff on US experts.

But seriously, what did the penguins do? Well, apparently, they didn't buy enough things from the USA. Oh, stupid penguins. And neither did the Syrians, who were apparently too busy being, you know, at war with a dictator to buy American goods. And so they now face tariffs of over 40%. Okay, so but now I'm a little bit confused because aren't Trump's tariffs to do with punishing countries for charging America too high tariffs? Right. So back to my pre-Penguine point, where was I? Yeah, the first media storm that came after so-called Liberation Day, it was a classic media mistake of compliant language that we've spoken about quite a lot recently at Media Storm.

It says using the same language leaders use to describe their policies even if it's deliberately manipulative. Donald Trump build his reciprocal tariffs, I say that in quotes, as a tit-for-tat measure. You tariff our products at 20%, we'll tariff your products at 20%. He said it again in his Rose Garden announcement. Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it to them.

Very simple. Can't get any simpler than. that. Were you trying to do a Donald Trump accent? No. You're not going to get a job on S&L any time soon. Uh, rude. Okay, anyway, simple, right?

Pretty simple. It may cause global meltdown, but at least it makes sense. Just about reciprocal. You tariff us, we'll tariff you. Yeah, except that's not really what is happening. It turns out these tariffs were based on something else entirely. Trade imbalances. So how much we buy from you versus

how much you buy from us. Okay, but wait a second, because is it just me, but how are the people of Lesotho supposed to buy as much from America as America buys from them? They're like, what, 200th of a size? Yeah, pretty much. And honestly, that kind of logic, it's a little bit too sophisticated for this tariff formula, okay, Helena.

Please God tell me, I didn't just outsmart the economists currently controlling the global economy. Like, I literally barely pass my Massachusetts. honestly yeah you did like you you just found the fault in the formula now look the media did eventually pick this up that these were not actually the reciprocal tariffs they were being described to be and they made some pretty good attempts at breaking it down themselves looking at its absurdly unequal global impact also hilariously ridiculing it i want to quote ian dunt in the eye paper he said you might as well divide the number of apples in your kitchen

by the number of bagels and use it to calculate your mortgage rate. To criticise it on political or economic grounds is too generous. It operates below the level of rational thought. Okay, that's really good. But honestly, anyone who tuned out after the first round of headlines, which is quite normal human behaviour, especially when it's economic news, they would have no idea just how insane these so-called reciprocal tariffs were because headlines were calling them reciprocal tariffs

and journalists were trying to explain them in respectful terms. The New York Times' lead story at the time. Reported the government had imposed, quote, double-digit tariffs on dozens of other countries that administration officials had said treated the United States unfairly. They also wrote, the European Union, China, Britain and India

would also face higher reciprocal tariffs based on trading practices that Mr. Trump has deemed unfair. Okay, so that is regurgitating the government's characterization of its own policy. Yeah. Before actually like questioning it and making sure it checks out. They even gave Trump credit for restraint, right?

Okay, they said Mr. Trump described his approach as kind saying he was charging other countries only half the reciprocal rate that his administration had calculated should be applied. This is just because their random formula decided to take the

random result it came to and randomly divide it by two. This is not because they were like being generous and halving the fair tariff rate. Did they do what the media does, which is basically just put the term reciprocal in quotation marks, which is that classic journalistic get out of jail free card we've been seeing? At this point of the coverage, no, they didn't even use quotation marks for the term reciprocal. Yes, now they are, but at the time, no. Anyway, we have since tried to wrong the right, let it be a lesson.

But the thing I felt missing in this second week of the tariff apocalypse is that the actual real logic behind Trump's supposedly absurd formula. And it is starting to emerge if you look in the right places, because Trump's tariffs, as tariffs normally are, will disproportionately be paid for by the poor, but they will be paid for. And what does Trump intend to do with that money? Cut tax. And he wants to do that in a way that will disproportionately help the rich.

It's like a reverse Robin Hood. Exactly. Now, as former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich explained in The Guardian, tariffs are a highly regressive tax, meaning that they disproportionately tax poorer people and taxed rich people on a relatively lower rate. So that's like the opposite of income tax, where technically the more you make a higher rate of tax you pay.

Yes, exactly. Now, Trump's administration is claiming that they will make so much money from these tariffs, including from U.S. citizens who will pay more on everything they buy, that basically they can eradicate or massively cut income tax. So they will be replacing a progressive taxation with a regressive taxation. As Reich concludes, this would create a giant upward transfer of wealth. Okay, so the tariffs do make sense, just not in the way that we're being told, they do.

Yes, exactly. And I would like to see that story better told, and more simply told, in our media. So that the bulk of us who are pretty economically illiterate but massively impacted by the economy can see through the policies that are deliberately packaged to mislead us and confuse us. Even if that means, the media stops and thinks a bit before deciding what they're going to say when a massive story break. Yeah, but they're not going to do that, Matilda, because they must say it before everyone else says it or it's not news. That is what news is. What a quagmire. Just before the break, we wanted to flag your attention to this.

So Meta has stolen millions of books. What does that mean? Meta, the company that owns Facebook and WhatsApp, has created its own AI models. But instead of training those AI models themselves, Meta created a shadow library. So this shadow library contains more than 7.5 million books that may have been used to train Meta's AI models. so that AI can essentially re-produce the creative content. Those books have been written by some very famous authors. And some authors that have been on Media Storm,

like Sophia Smith Gailer and Zing Singh. They did not consent to this, and they have not been paid. And by the way, this is not just happening to authors, this is happening to artists, this is happening to journalists. Their content being used to train AI models, and in the case of journalism,

A key point is that what will come from it, from AI, will not have gone through the same human levels of fact-checking. So what can we do about it? In this case, authors right now are fighting back. In the US, they filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta, and in the UK last week, there was a protest outside Meta's London office where an open letter was handed in, characterising Meta's actions as illegal, shocking and utterly devastating for writers.

That's a quote from the Union of the United States. society of authors. So if you want to add your voice to a petition, you can do so on change.org where the Society of Authors have written to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandi, demanding that Mehta is held to account by the UK government after the allegations of stolen work. We will put a link in the show notes. Let's take a break. When you support Movember, you're not just fundraising. You're showing up for the men you love. your dad, your brother, your partner, your friends. It isn't just a men's issue.

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Telegraph journalist Alison Pearson. No, no. Matilda, I actually called Alison Pearson. Okay, for listeners, Alison Pearson's views include that Brussels is the jihadist capital of Europe, and therefore it was great that we left the EU. Transgender identity is an evil trans ideology and wearing a protective face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic is demeaning. Just so listeners are aware of who we're dealing with here. Yeah, okay. I mean, it gives some context of why this article was written,

but I promise this is still a really good media storm story. Okay, okay, I'm locked in now, I'm ready. So she was tugging at our heartstrings with a telegraph article she'd written titled, I heard the full story of the woman jailed for two years for a tweet. Her injustice shames Britain. This is the story of Lucy Connolly. jailed for 31 months.

Alison Pearson tweeted her article writing, Lucy Connolly is a political prisoner, not in Russia, here in the UK. Denied bail, given a horribly harsh sentence for a tweet, prison governors now deny Lucy her right to prison leave. Free Lucy with a broken heart emoji. Sorry, okay, so this woman, Lucy Connolly, is in prison for tweeting. I mean, if that's the case, then maybe I should join the free

Lucy broken heart emoji brigade. Just before you do, let's take a little reminder of what poor little political prisoner Lucy actually did. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to prison for publishing written material that incited racial hatred. On the day that three girls were fatally stabbed in Southpot at a Taylor Swift themed dance class by Axel Ruder-cabana, an act which sparked far-right riots across the UK.

Lucy tweeted on X, Mass deportation now Set fire to all the fucking hotels Full of the bastards for all I care If that makes me racist So be it Okay I probably won't be joining The Free Lucy Broken Heart Brigade

And by the way The bastards she's referring to Are asylum seekers People seeking asylum from persecution and war Etcetera Okay so already just from the title Of the article and from Alison Pearson's tweet I see a lot of minimisation of Lucy's actions.

Is that what makes this a media storm? Partly, but it is so much more than that. The whole article is written on the basis that her jail sentence is unjust. And that is a legitimate argument to make, except the article fails to base itself in fact. It is a piece of journalism that tells us much more about the author's personal opinions than it does about the justice system and the facts of this case. case. One example. Alison Pearson writes, having posted the tweet around 8.30 p.m. Lucy took the family's German pointer, Harley, for a walk, had a chance to think better of what she'd written

in the heat of the moment, returned home, and deleted her tweet. It must have been visible for less than four hours, but that was enough time for someone to take a screenshot. Well, she had 10,000 followers, and her tweet was viewed 310,000 times. Okay, so that's not. just one screenshot up for a couple of hours. No. And one of the worst inaccuracies in this article, I think, is this one. So in passing sentence, the judge in Lucy's case said, when you published those words, you were well aware how volatile the situation was.

This, of course, refers to the far right riots that sprung up in the wake of the stabbing, based on inaccurate information and conspiracy theory that the stabber was a Muslim asylum seeker who had crossed the channel on a small boat and that his identity was deliberately withheld from the public. And for people who don't know, that was completely false. Axel Ruder Cabana is not an asylum seeker, is not Muslim. Right. So a big part of this was the idea that his identity was being withheld

because the government doesn't want us to know asylum seekers are all murderous criminals. Right. And in her article, Alison Pearson almost leans into that myth. She says, In the absence of any clear information from the authorities about the killer's identity, Brackets, Ruder Cabana was initially described to a disbelieving public only as a Cardiff-born choir boy. This situation on social media was extremely volatile.

There was widespread anger that such a monstrous attack had been targeted at the most vulnerable members of our society. That was the state Lucy Connolly was in when she posted the 51 words that would ruin her life. end quote. But the reason Rudacabana was not initially named to the public and that further details pertaining to his identity were not published is because of standard reporting restrictions. This is how it always works. Police did not name the person they had in custody as they continued to question him and he had not yet been charged. And after the 17-year-old was charged, under British law, a minor cannot be identified until a judge has ruled that the the suspect can be named.

This is completely standard practice. You will also notice that Pearson wrote, Ruda Cabana was initially described to a disbelieving public only as a Cardiff-born choir boy. So the first thing I'd say about this is that Lucy Connolly posted her tweet on the 29th of July. The reporting of Ruda-Cobana as a choir boy only came out on the 31st of July.

The second thing is that the choir boy quote was reported from a newspaper who had spoken to a neighbor, something that is, yes, wholly unhelpful in this context, but was never a detail released by police or authorities. This was not the official information given to the public. So to blame that choir boy narrative, as the reason Lucy Connolly tweeted, exposes the total bias behind this article.

A lot of details about this story was brought to my attention by criminal barrister Jamie Hamilton, or View from the North, on X and Blue Sky. I mentioned him last week as well. So I just want to quote his message about this article to end. He wrote, This article goes on to simply parrot in an unverified and unchallenged way, a whole series of assertions.

All of this, because the journalist does not like the outcome. You can, of course, think the sentence is wrong, that it was harsh, but that debate should be framed in the correct factual context. Okay, immediately I feel the need to point. a couple of things out. So this article by Alison Pearson is really kind of doing its best to paint Lucy Connolly

as misguided rather than racist. It's essentially like a profile of her life. You know, it's complete with quotes from her friends who are backing up that she's not racist, quotes from her husband, who is, by the way, a conservative politician, which I really think adds another layer here.

The article also has multiple mentions of the family's tragic history of when their child passed away at age 19 months. It's highly sympathetic towards her and Pearson calls her now criminalised tweet ugly and a mistake rather than, you know, racist or wrong. But dig a little deeper, there is also history here. Also found on Lucy Connolly's ex account

was a tweet commenting on a sword attack which read, I bet my house it was one of those boat invaders. and a comment on a video posted by Tommy Robinson which read Somalian I guess and that was accompanied by a vomiting emoji and that was conveniently left out of this soft focus profile in the telegraph of Lucy Connolly's life

which is disgraceful but the second thing I want to point out might surprise some listeners I don't think Lucy Colony should be in jail either but that's not because I think there's two-tiered justice against white people or because I'm trying to minimize racist incitement to violence, it's because I have a fundamental problem

with carceral justice being posited as the solution to all crimes. We've heard on Media Storm time and time again that prison does not work, and we need to be looking towards systems of rehabilitation and community sentences for non-violent offenders. And I think it is so sad that this is probably one of the first times that topic has come up in The Telegraph, and it's come up in this way.

And it's funny because Alison Pearson actually points to other methods of punishment for Lucy Connolly, release on temporary licence, bail, home detention curfew. You know, Alison points to the strains that prison can put on someone's mental health. She points to the fact that Lucy's a mother and that her husband has a blood disease and therefore she's a carer.

All the reasons why prison might not be the best fit for Lucy. But it's funny, isn't it, that Alison Pearson has never before written a nearly 6,000-word article defending, I don't know, pregnant women in prison for non-violent offences, or working-class black boys being sentenced for minor drug charges disproportionately. I wonder what's different here? What made her do this for this case? Yeah, if you want to understand why our custodial sentencing system is not more reformed and empathetic, you don't have to look that much further than The Telegraph and the tough on crime right-wing media. Calling all book lovers, the Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place.

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And there's one story I want to centre because I think in the mainstream media churn, it's got lost a little bit. And it's a huge story that is very much in the public interest that we can learn lessons from. A PhD student at University College London, Chun Hao-Zo, was convicted last month of drugging and raping 10 women,

three women in London and seven in China between 2019 and 2024. However, because of the fact that Zoe filmed most of his rates, police have recovered videos of him attacking a further 50 victims, but they say

that they believe his offending group is actually far greater than that. This would make him one of the worst sexual offenders in British history. And now it's been reported that 23 more women have come forward to the police

with allegations against him. The scale of that is incredible. When you're saying that, 50 victims, 50 women raped. It's like the Giselle Pelico story in reverse, right? There was global outrage and media coverage because of the number of men who were involved and everyone's like, oh, so shocked that so many men could be involved in this. But 50 women raped.

What's another 50 women raped? there should, yeah, there should be way more coverage of that. I agree. But crucially, it needs the right type of coverage. We have to talk about intersectionality here. Many of those victims, if not all so far, were Chinese. And in the UK, part of London's Chinese student community. This means a lot of them may have been foreign nationals when studying here.

We already know, right, that reporting rape or sexual assault to the police can be a nightmare. Well, it's even more challenging for foreign nationals to report sexual crimes in the UK. As reported in the BBC, Sarah Yeh, a trustee at Southeast and East Asian Women's Association in London, said it would be daunting for anyone from overseas to be traumatised by rape and then have to navigate the British legal system and the NHS or even access the services provided for victims. Right, they may not understand their rights or what resources are available to them. She added, as well as being concerned about repercussions,

negative impacts on their studies, shame bought on themselves and their families and potential legal challenges. Actually, you know in Media Storm's recent investigation about sexual assault at universities, the student we spoke to who used the pseudonym Charlotte, she was a rape survivor who really struggled to know how to report it

also as an international student and student of colour. here's what she said on that. I felt so alone, although my pseudonym is Charlotte. And it sounds like, I don't know, I might come from somewhere in Europe or something, but I'm an international student, like 70% of the student body. And we travel, like, across the globe to study here and be immersed in this academic environment. I just felt like I was just put in the middle of the ocean with no social.

support. So I just felt very alone in navigating this whole process. That was Charlotte speaking in Media Storm's investigation, abuse in academia, our universities protecting predatory professors. Now we've seen these factors of intersectionality play out in some of the cases of these brave women who have come forward against Zoe. Beth, not her real name a pseudonym was raped by Zoe in 2023 and had tried to report the crime to the Metropolitan Police soon afterwards. But then she decided not to pursue things

because she felt unsure of UK law and had been left feeling discouraged after her initial interaction with the police included a poor translation of her 999 call. Oh, that's so predictable and so sad. Another victim survivor, Rachel, again a pseudonym, says she was drugged and raped by Zoe in 22 in his hometown called Dongguang in China. Rachel says that Dongguan is a small place and there was always a risk that people she knew,

her parents, relatives, colleagues would find out and think she was, and she quotes, indiscreet. Now, of course, many survivors of sexual violence can feel shame and fear of their family finding out. But there is also, once again, an added layer here of cultural, sensitivities, cultural shame. I know from being in a South Asian community, there's a lot of shame that surrounds sex in general. And we have heard, even on Media Storm, that it is the same for East Asian communities.

So it sounds like you've found some testimonies of that in the mainstream media. Would you say, by and large, the coverage has been intersectional in its approach? I think yes in one particular place. And I wanted to praise some really good coverage of this story from the BBC World Service, other coverage I would say

has not given such an understanding of intersectionality because the BBC World Service has a Chinese journalist on this story and as the point of contact for other victims to come forward

and this speaks to a massive reason of why we need diversity within the journalism industry. The BBC World Service also had a button at the top of the article to translate the story

so you can read the story in Chinese dialects, which is so important because police are currently trying to trace other victims of Zoe. And so some might not speak English, and they need every opportunity to be found, to be supported and to be heard. Wow, that's pretty cool from the BBC World Service. Media Storm has done multiple investigations into rape and sexual assault, and in every single one of them, intersectionality has been a really, really key theme. I just want to shoot back to one of Media Storm's first episodes.

Rape justice, what happens to the 98%, i.e. the 98% of reported rapes that never make it to trial. Queerness was just one example of intersectionality that was explored. And here's what Survivor, Alison Tarkos, had to say on the matter. There are glaring factual errors on my police report. The date that I reported on my police report is wrong. My address on my police report is wrong. I knew that they were not going to be helpful. I never knew how unhelpful they would be.

I never knew how they were going to, like, truly ruin my case. The privileges that I hold that allow me to navigate the system are just, like, seeping out of me. I am a white woman. Can you imagine how black trans women are treated? How sex workers are treated? Do you think that your queer identity has had any impact on your experience? I'm so like I used to have very very short hair at one point in time I shaved it but the FBI told me that I should grow up my hair because I would a jury would be more likely to believe me because I would be read a straight they would look at me and not ask questions internally and being like but she looks so gay why would men want to rape her I'm doing it my hair is very long right now so I just wanted to bring a little bit more attention to this huge story and yes give praise to the BBC World Service but also also say it shouldn't be so rare, this should be standard reporting on this topic.

Time for Eyes on Palestine. Now last week we spoke about the killing of 15 emergency workers in southern Gaza on the 23rd of March, a convoy of Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulances, a UN car and a fire truck from Gaza's civil defence. disappeared near Rafa and later a mass grave was found with the bodies of 15 medics and aid workers. So when we spoke about it last week,

we were saying, okay, this mass grave has been discovered what is what is going to happen now? This is quite clearly, you know, indicating potential war crimes, crimes against humanity, what's going to happen? Well, Israel's initial position was sort of silence claiming they don't really know about the whereabouts. Then after this discovery of this grave

site, excavated on camera, right, official UN footage, evidencing that these medics had been killed in cold blood, some had been blindfolded, their hands tied. One body was decapitated. Well, then, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Gideon Zah, says, well, look, these cars were approaching suspiciously. They may have been ambulances, but they had their headlights off. They didn't have any lights. They were approaching suspiciously. And so the IDF, the Israel's army, determined them be a terrorist threat. Now, firstly, that account, well that was reported in our media, given headlines, in some cases, direct quoted headlines, explaining the killings according to Israel's justification. What wasn't known then but is known now is that footage of the attack

existed, footage that has since been recovered from a phone of one of the killed medics, which disproves this justification. Specifically, the justification that the vehicles had no headlights or emergency lights on in a seven-minute video which is harrowing to watch the cohort of ambulances with their emergency lights flashing and their headlights on are ambushed by Israel's military without warning and showered with bullets as they fled unarmed from their vehicles and that's where my media storm is on this story honestly because I have seen some shocking headlines go on I'll just read a couple of them out. BBC News, Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza. The Independent,

Israel's military admits it made mistake in single inverted commas over killing of Gaza medics. Mistake. This was not a mistake. If that footage hadn't had been recovered, Israel's account would still be the official narrative. It is not a mistake, right? It is a very carefully designed propaganda line to justify that killing. And by the way, since that line was falsified, there's been a change of tack in Israel's strategy of defense. Israel has now said that six of the medics killed were actually Hamas terrorists, unevanced and denied by the aid organizations that they work for, the International Federation of the Red Cross, the Palestine Civil Defense, the United Nations. And look, I'm pleased to say that

some media have apparently been humbled by their first hoodwink This latest claim that they were terrorists has not been widely reported, at least not as a headline statement. Maybe the media is learning because that was embarrassing. You know, what they did made them look complicit at best, foolish, at worst.

But this is not a universal lesson. A Sky News headline on Tuesday said, Israeli troops opened fire on ambulances because of perceived threat, preliminary IDF investigation says. Sorry. No. After you totally discredit your integrity and betray a clear agenda of whitewashing a probable war crime, your defense does not warrant a word-for-word headline.

Thank you for listening. Tomorrow, our deep dive looks at free speech in the US and beyond. What does it even mean anymore? 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 already. We appreciate you so much. If you enjoyed this podcast, 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 Helena Wadia and follow the show via at MediaStorm pod.

MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Malinson. The music is by Samfire.