Media Storm - This Is How You Do It: BBC gender and identity correspondent Megha Mohan

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Media Storm hosts Mathilda and Helena meet their mainstream media matches! In this crossover bonus series with The Guilty Feminist, they interview journalists trying to make an imperfect industry a little bit less so, about their noble goals and - you guessed it - the hypocrisies and insecurities that undermine them! Brought to you by The Guilty Feminist, every other Thursday. This week’s episode features the BBC World Service’s first global gender and identity correspondent, Megha Mohan (@meghamohan). Her reporting on women's rights, LGBT communities, race and ethnicity has global reach across 41 different languages, has taken her to six continents and includes exclusive interviews with Finland’s all-women coalition government, Samoa’s first woman Prime Minister and pop star Billie Eilish. We discuss global reporting of transgender rights, differences in 'identity politics' in the Global North and South and meritocracy in the media. The episode is hosted by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). For more information on The Guilty Feminist and other episodes: visit https://www.guiltyfeminist.com tweet us https://www.twitter.com/guiltfempod like our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/guiltyfeminist check out our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/theguiltyfeminist or join our mailing list http://www.eepurl.com/bRfSPT   For more information on Media Storm: Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com   Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network.   The Guilty Feminist theme is by Mark Hodge and produced by Nick Sheldon. Media Storm music is by Samfire (@soundofsamfire). Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant, you're building something big. And Square's there for all of it. Giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in-person with Square kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things, your tools should to. Visit square.ca to get started.

The Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Welcome to This Is How You Do It, the mashup series from The Guilty Feminist and Media Storm, where we celebrate the people working to make the media a little bit better. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia, and we're the hosts of Media Storm,

the podcast that hands the mic to people with lived experience and calls out what the mainstream media could be doing better. to report on marginalised groups. Our guest this week is the BBC World Service's first global gender and identity correspondent. She covers issues concerning women's rights and LGBT plus communities and race and ethnicity

for the BBC's 41 language services. It's Megamohan. I'm just laughing at that. That written introduction by the press department of the BBC. You were just sitting opposite us, cringing. But you shouldn't be. What would you have changed about it if it was to submit by you?

I mean, obviously the top line is sexy. I don't know. The BBC's sexiest reporter. The BBC is as sex. Honestly, we won't watch that turn it to something now. Well, we wanted to have you on for so many reasons, and it's that you have taken on this trailblazing role by being the BBC's first gender and identity. entity correspondent. So tell us, did you happen upon that role, or was it a role that you

helped to develop yourself? No, I get asked that all the time, actually, and I wish I had helped develop it. No, it was advertised in the BBC for a part of the World Service, and it was advertised in 2018. I got the job at the end of 2018, and they advertised for this job to promote the work of the 41 language services within the BBC. And at that time, we didn't know that gender and identity meant gender identity and it's like sexual of the culture war of the culture I had no idea I thought it was I the job that was advertised

but then when it was announced and then I just tweeted it and I can't remember who was some media editor retweeted me and then suddenly there's a storm of gender and identity what does this mean and as soon as that happened it was such a shock to all of us because we don't do UK news We don't talk about what is happening, you know, north of the equator generally.

So it was such a shock. It was such a shock to us, you know, kind of what follows. So the role in a UK context meant something totally different to how the role had been defined for global context. Exactly, exactly. We were telling stories of underrepresented communities. As we're seeing, you know, Iran, this year, our Persian service could have told you the seeds of this uprising from years. and years ago that it was, you know, bubbling and happening. And we just didn't know of all the articles that followed since, you know, after after announcing it, what the, what the global

north meant by gender and identity or gender identity. And have those worlds come, come together at all? Or, okay, or is it still received very differently? We keep it separate because my remit is still to, to amplify those voices, to talk about those voices from, and LGBT communities and ethnicities in the global south. And those are people who aren't arguing about bathrooms. That is what is really refreshing right now is you are able to tell us the impact and the importance of these stories in a context totally removed from the cultural world context

in which we discuss those issues today and where like you're pointing out the topics of significance have been so sidelined to topics of heated. political binary debate. I think in certain countries in the global north, you can become distracted or a news cycle can become distracted by what, you know, a few columnists or a few influential social media accounts say, and that sort of moves the thumb to a discussion that turns into a new cycle. Now, that is very different from what's happening in countries where people don't even have access to tell those stories.

So for example, I'll tell you one example of the story that we did, which I'm really proud of in Rurundi, in the Great Lakes, near Congo and Rwanda. I was seeing this meme popping up again and again sent between women. And in the end, I got in touch with a few of these women. It turned out was a secret symbol to show that you're gay to each other, to show that you're lesbians. And these were all women that were married to men, because it's illegal to be gay,

and they were living the secret double life. where they were they were reaching out to each other using like a very famous popular culture, lesbian term that I think we might recognize but didn't know is a meme. And then so we decided to, how do we tell the stories that we don't reveal these women? And at the same time, we reach their community. And so it's something that they, and you know, I'm born in India. You know, I lived there and moved here when I was, you know, nine years old. So I know what it's like to come from a country and see yourself in the news and go, that is, what are you talking about?

That's not my people. That's not how we communicate. It's almost like you're explaining, you know, explaining us to people who don't understand, which is fine, but you should still tell a story that I understand about my own people. And I try to keep that in this remit of minority communities. We wanted to keep the spirit of what people are, which is people are messy, people are funny, people have dark humour,

people have these threads of inconsistency. And those are the elements we want. We don't want to get the soundbite of the worst thing one person has been through. That's not the son of the stories that we want to tell. Well, we did an episode in our first series of Media Storm about how transgender plus people are portrayed in the UK media. And you've mentioned already in this conversation

and you've reported quite widely on trans rights and intersex rights. And we've kind of noticed in your work, you approach it in a different way to how the mainstream media approaches, you know, when they talk about the trans community and so-called issues within the communities. When you cover this community, What do you make sure that you do? When I cover any communities,

I just want the people that we're speaking to to be central to the story. So I try and empathetically convey what a person has lived through and they become the vehicle for the story. And it's their story at the end of the day. They're not politicians or big corporations that we need to hold. to account. These are people with lived experiences. So that's kind of how I approach any story when

I'm dealing with a rural person. And, you know, they all come with certain challenges. So we did a story about they had gendered days to go out during COVID in Colombia to the supermarket. So there were men's days and women's days. That's the way that they controlled it. But then what ended up happening is trans women would go out in women's days and get completely humiliated by the police and I was hearing from trans women in in Columbia so I decided to just write a story about the experience of one woman and then found out that you know at least a dozen women had experienced this and that became the online article so it's really that's really how the point at which it starts and I really don't want Twitter um to be the the start of a story for me I think that that's

that's something that I take as a no-go. That's not the starting point of the birth of the story. Totally. But already this grassroots approach you have to story finding and how it starts with the people whose experiences are at the center of these stories, already that's very different to so much mainstream media output, which is often, especially today,

just really dependent on press releases and tweets by political or industry leaders and multinational corporations and partly due to time constraints and partly due to clickbait requirements, you do see content being churned out often without that grassroots approach considered at all. You mentioned earlier that you grew up in India. Do you think that has formed part of the reason of why you were first attracted to telling stories outside of the UK? Yeah, definitely, definitely.

But also I grew up on the internet, so the whole world becomes your playground. And, you know, I think we're all really lucky that way in that we had all these barriers broken for us. And especially if you're an awkward kid, which I think a lot of storytellers are. So you kind of, you sort of inhabit a lot of communities online and you see the nuances of people in ways that they might not reveal to you face to face straight away. and I think definitely coming from a community like that and then moving here and just how challenging it was moving here, how hard it was for my parents. We lived in one room in the Indian YMCA and Tottencourt Road.

And it's really hard. It was really tough. I just remember school not being fun and just a lot of disappearing into books and disappearing into online. and kind of learning to enjoy my own company. And I think actually that that helped for so much of my work because I feel comfortable anywhere

and I can make myself comfortable anywhere without someone having to fuss over me or anything. And that helps with, once you don't appear an intimidating person, it's amazing what people will tell you and how much they'll open up to you. And then suddenly you have a story that they'll do. really well. So let's talk about some of those stories. You have managed to secure interviews with such incredible people spanning all parts of the world. And it's not just some of the people

you've been telling us about so far. It's names like Finland's all women coalition government, Samoa's first woman prime minister, even the pop icon, Billy Eilish. Who? So who's been your favourite ever interview? Oh, it's, I actually, actually my, my favorite piece and interview, interviews that we did was in Chile we went to the world's first school for transgender children and I loved doing that piece. I loved spending time with those children and their siblings and their families and it was just lovely to spend all that time with them and and how creative, seeing how creative and expressive they were at that age. What an amazing job you have. I think also important about quite a lot of the stories you've mentioned but that one in particular about the

the school for transgender children is just like showing the joy in those communities, because when we consume the news, it's always a lot of negative stuff. Why is it so important to also just show that kind of everyday joy? Isn't it, I feel like when you hear these stories about minority communities, you get these two extremes. One is like this woman where, or this, you know, minority where something awful has happened to her, the unthinkable. It's, and it is so, devoid of your understanding that you are, she has, or they have become the experience. Secondly, you get this lionized woman that is, or person who is not something you recognize either, you know, either it's like the first person to go to the moon or the only woman in the

village to have won the lottery and married this really hot person, you know, and it's not, and then it feels like these two extremes of storytelling and minorities, which is deemed newsworthy, reality is everyone's experience is all those highs and lows in between and actually really good storytelling and really good current affairs and the thrust of what matters now and what could shape our future doesn't have to rely on these kind of tired threads that you're tied to just because everyone watches the same programs and follows all the same people on Twitter and just thinks there's three ways in which you can deliver a story on that note we will take a break have a chocolate biscuit and come back in a hot second is that saying a hot second a hot minute

do we actually have any no why did you say chocolate biscuits i was like where are the chocolate biscuit we've always said chocolate biscuit i would love a chocolate biscuit Welcome back to this is how you do it. Now, Megha, I'm slightly biased because I'm also part of this wonderful group, but you worked with the charity level up to create media guidelines on how to report responsibly on stories of domestic abuse and violence. How and why did you go about creating those guidelines? I really can't take credit for creating the guidelines, and this was created by Janie Starling, actually devised guidelines which are journalistically so robust

in honouring the spirit of women because dead women don't have a right of reply, showing that violence against women is a public health emergency and not a quote-unquote woman story, which is something that is mentioned all the time, in newsrooms. I actually challenged somebody about this the other day. It was just like, what is a woman story to you? And it was like rape, um, babies, periods. Wow. And what is a man? What is a man? What's a man story? Everything that happens in the world. Exactly. Exactly. I really don't think it's maliciousness on the part of people not

taking, um, sensitive reporting seriously. I think it's just a lack of knowledge and a lack of priority. And a lack of empathy, right? Because I think what a lot of general struggle with. When reporting on something that has such horrible details is I do think journalists can get quite numb to horrible stories because we're around them 24-7. Lack of empathy is a huge issue. This is actually so valuable for me right now because the day after tomorrow I'm doing a training day with survivors of domestic abuse where I'm giving them a media training so we'll be doing some drill interviews. Speaking to a journalist who's going into that situation. What's like the main do and the main don't that you would advise?

I always put in at least, you know, 15 minutes beforehand and at least 20 minutes afterhand just to bring the temperature down from what we've spoken about. I don't like ending interviews with and what's the positive because and the reason why is because I think we should be uncomfortable sometimes. You know, we deal with serious subjects. We're not trying to make things palatable for the audience sitting at home. Actually, it's It's okay for them to be uncomfortable sometimes. That's okay. They'll survive that.

But I think for the people that I speak to, I always leave time so that they don't feel that this transaction was that, this transaction. I went to, just got back from Honduras. It's one of the only countries in the world that's banned the morning after pill. What means that there's this illegal world of men selling these pills that you insert vaginally and induce an abortion is so incredibly dangerous. And women are buying these pills in their hundreds, if not thousands, and ending up in incredibly vulnerable situations because they have no other options for safe, you know, healthcare when it

comes to not wanting to go through with a pregnancy. And talked to one woman who, you know, raped all through her childhood by a family member got pregnant, has kept the child. And she'd never told anyone this before. In doing that interview with her, what I didn't want to do is we weren't just coming in just to get that one line, that one story that'll go viral. Which I've seen done so many times. I mean, I set up this organization called Refugee Media Center a couple years ago, which is designed to connect journalists with people who have lived experience of displacement in order to get that perspective, which is so often missing from news reports on the topic. And I have had some really bad experiences with reporters where they have put people through really traumatic

interviews and then extracted single lines included them completely decontextualized and in a way that won't even serve the issue that person is speaking to that person is speaking to problems with the afghan resettlement scheme that line has been taken purely to say oh we want to point to how sexist and evil the Taliban is. And it's like they would not have agreed to an interview if it was purely to serve your very specific news agenda, which isn't representative of their story. It's just, it happens all the time. It's just really upsetting. Not everyone does this though. There are so many brilliant journalists who don't do it and they become inspiration for me. But there's enough that do do do it and you can see that. I think you can see the ones that do and you can see the

ones that don't serve communities and who miss outlived experience voices it's harder when you work on daily news though i have worked in daily news and you know everything was like a two and a half minute slot for everything i remember what someone said to me find a stalker oh god at 6 a.m it's like the world's first clinic for stalking had opened and someone at 6 a.m. goes find me a stalker by 10 a. If that just doesn't sum up the UK media, I don't know what does.

Find me a stalker by 10 a.m. What have been some of the funniest or most ridiculous responses to a piece of journalism that you have seen? The funniest response, I've... So I did a piece about

the lived experience of women's psychopaths recently. And the reason why I did that, because the standard testing for psychopathy is for a violent prison-based male population. So the standard of measuring this antisocial personality disorder doesn't include the spectrum of the condition and hasn't looked at factors in which women are affected. So I wanted to do a deep dive into that. and someone, and I won't name who it is or where they work, but they shared it on social media like, oh my days, the BBC's gender and identity correspondent quote marks is done a piece on why we should love evil people.

It's like they want to be defunded. The BBC is now telling us that we should feel sorry for psychopaths. So many things with this woman's tweet, where she has obviously just been looking to make a case. case for defunding the BBC and she's like oh what is going to stir the pot we can throw in this quote gender and identity correspondent and let's say that she's she's a psychopath simpath it's it's not just that she's you know manipulating what the story is about to serve a very kind of binary cultural agenda it's also how it cheapens the reporting that you've done on psychopathy because what you pointed out

when you explain the story is that this is a mental disorder and it's actually one of the areas that we found on media storm there is such a total lack of understanding around and how harmful that can be for healthcare so we did do an episode on pedophilia again in our lingo pedophilia is often just conflated or confused with child molesting which is a crime pedophilia is a clinical disorder it is not necessarily something that has acted on and actually i think something like 60% of child molesting is nothing to do with paedophilia. Psychopathy like paedophilia is not necessarily a choice, and yes, well, it can be very socially harmful. The individual is not the problem in the way that we would describe problem with moral ideas about individual choice. And so I think that if she

has read your story the whole way down, and she's someone who's intelligent enough to grasp the complexities of that, she is feeding such a harmful naivity. willful ignorance that is so common in our media culture by which we we're obsessed with demonizing individuals and not pointing to systemic problems yeah i mean i'm so excited to go and read that story it's one of the most pioneering examples of tackling stigma that i can think of like taking on psychopathy thank you and i i do think you're right in in terms of our culture demonizing individuals has it always been like this i don't i don't know i mean all stories we tell we love to have have heroes and villains, don't we?

It's how we taught to understand the world when we're children. Do you know, in some ways, that's kind of, you can pitch stories easier when there are heroes and villains as well. Like, that's why it was really hard to talk about the Civil War in Sudan, whereas it was easier to pitch stories about the genocide in Darfur, because that people could get their head around the fact that, you know, an ethnicity were being wiped out by these evil people, as opposed to this 40-year-long conflict around oil and tribal factions,

but it's not really tribal. You try and pitch the story and then you can see everyone's eyes glaze over. I just don't know why we do that. I don't know why we demonise individuals. I hate the fact that this model has become successful in storytelling. It's not just storytelling as well, though. It's policy, isn't it? it's tough on crime responses to issues that are just as much fueled by socioeconomic inequality

and racism and broken education systems. You know, we respond to these complicated systemic problems. We look at them and we're like, ah, that's way too hard to fix with policy. But let's just be tough on crime. Let's throw more and more people in jail. And then we don't have to deal with like these really tricky underlying problems that all contribute in myriad ways. So I think it's a, yeah, we like heroes and villains in our storytelling, but we also like quick fixes in our solutions.

We like comfortable endings. Not everything has to be a comfortable ending. Sometimes we just need to work it through. Final question? Final question. She'd make it really uncomfortable. Yeah. Okay, this is the final question.

Here, on this is how you do it. We like to ask every person who has been in the hot seat. we have a very stingy genie here so instead of three wishes you get one wish one wish and it's one wish to change anything you like about the mainstream media what would it be i would like if we existed in true meritocracy i've seen people who have immense talent who are not nurtured you know who speak four or five languages i wish that we nurtured more than we nurtured more people and you don't have to be perfect straight away. Sometimes we discount people really early. We don't pull, you know, we don't necessarily open the door behind us. I have seen people take

credit where they should share it. Like I try to be really super transparent in everything that we do in terms of who worked on it, whose idea it was. I really hope we break it. But that is a huge thing, right? There is so much competition within the world of journalism that some sometimes that gets put ahead of telling important stories. That's also a big stem of like lack of diversity in newsrooms because they're like, oh, we've already got one Indian woman. Oh, we've already got one black guy. They were all fighting for that one spot and we've got somebody now.

Well, we've done that now. Yeah, so that's done. So we don't need to nurture any more. Megamohan, thank you so much for joining us on this. is how you do it. Before we leave, have you got anything you would like to plug? And can you tell us where we can follow you? It would be great if people went to my website,

because that's where I'm going to start putting my latest info. Who knows where social media platforms are going to exist in by the times this podcast comes out. So it's just megamohan.com. And if you can support the world's service, just tune in to the stories that we're telling from communities that are harder to reach and just keep and, you know, keep your eye global.

That's all from this series of This Is How You Do It and this series of Media Storm. But don't worry, we've got one final bonus episode for you. Next week we'll be releasing the second half of our live show recorded at London Podcast Festival on comedy and cancel culture with the guilty feminist's very own Deborah France. is white. And we're busy cooking up some exciting plans for Media Storm Series 3, so we'll see you in the new year. Get in touch if you have any idea for a topic you'd like us to cover.

And don't forget to listen to the latest episode of The Guilty Feminist about safety online with Kuma Bob and special guest, Sayi Akiwo.