Media Storm - War reporters: White saviours or vital journalists?

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Ever heard of a war reporter? You could probably even name a few… perhaps you’ve even seen them played on the big screen by Hollywood movie stars. Now tell us - have you ever heard of a fixer? Could you name a single one? This episode, Media Storm dives into the complex ethics and murky dynamics of war reporting with former foreign correspondent Phoebe Greenwood and Palestinian journalist and former fixer, Abeer Ayyoub. When mostly white, middle class, overseas journalists get more pay, more recognition, and more protection than local collaborators, but often take on less risk and work, is that any better than racism? Is there a value to detached, outsider perspectives, or an inability to truly understand the lived realities of war? How sinister is western bias in the context of foreign conflict? And what does it say when the story is more important than the people left behind to live it? From the abandonment of Afghan interpreters, to the overlooked mass murder of Palestinian journalists; from kidnaps in Tigray, to smuggler violence in Dunkirk - we look at the dark side of a profession that is rightly held in high regard for its services to truth, but whitewashed, glamourised, and little understood. You can buy Phoebe Greenwood's new novel, Vulture, here. 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

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here.

Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training tread plus at OnePeloton.C.A. Matilda, is this the type of journalism you thought you'd be doing when you decided to become a journalist? Podcasting about everything with the media. To be honest, when I became a journalist, it was after working as an aid worker,

and I really wanted to focus on immigration and the refugee crisis. I probably thought I would be doing more in the field reporting than in the studio reporting. Yeah, who could have predicted Media Storm? It'd be very hard to predict. But interesting you say in the field, because that's kind of where our episode today lies. Actually, when I was growing up, before I even wanted to be a journalist, my parents' biggest fear for me was that I was going to become a war correspondent. They really thought that that was a likely path I would choose, even before I chose journalism.

I guess I'm very purpose-driven. I'm very drawn to unfamiliar environments. And I also have zero capacity for risk assessment. Yeah, like absolutely none. Essentially like a teenage boy. I am exactly like a teenage boy in that respect. But then someone said something to me that in a moment completely shifted how I saw the role of war correspondent. He was a partner of mine, a person I really respected, and he had lived and suffered war.

And his phrase never faded in my mind. He said, our war zone isn't your playground. Oof, wow. Do you get it? Yeah, that's very stark, yeah. Yeah, and it really opened a Pandora's box. I dug into the ethics and the dynamics of field reporting and especially war reporting. There's racial and colonial inequalities, the power of the Western gays.

White saviourism. A little bit of white saviourism thrown in, yeah. This is stuff that I spent my early 20s becoming increasingly. and sometimes painfully aware of as I was working, as I said, as an aid worker. But there is this added element when it comes to war correspondence because there's such glamour to the role in the British mindset, almost like heroism. Oh yeah, for sure.

There's something very colonialist about all of this. And actually we have grown so used to fictional, almost movie star-like versions of war correspondents that they somehow become more important than the people about who, they report. There's something pretty damn jarring about the lives of Western reporters wearing blue press vests being somehow more sacred than those of the foreign civilians who are suffering all around them. Right. But that is not to say that this role, paying witness to war, hasn't been vital. Totally. Like, we consider a free press to be a pillar of democracy because information is power. And when it comes to war,

Truth and information are the first casualties. Censorship is at its strictest. You have internet blackouts. Propaganda. A war of words with two sides giving completely different versions of events. In short, information and free journalism is never more important than in war. But why should it be foreigners who provide it? People who don't know the culture, who may not even speak the language.

Especially now, what with social media and Google Translate, making it easier and easier to pay local reporters. Totally. But even before the internet, almost every piece of war journalism that made its way into, say, British papers, it reflected the work of many local experts. Who probably weren't credited or even paid. Exactly. And yet, I recently interviewed an incredibly renowned special correspondent or war correspondent. called Alex Crawford. She works for Sky News. This was for a different episode that we'll be releasing soon. And at the end of the interview, I couldn't resist.

I asked her about the colonial nature of war reporting. Ooh, awkward. I mean, it should have been. But she was genuinely reflective, and her answers really interested me, because all of these issues are entirely true. She acknowledged them. She even wondered whether the industry was a dying one.

but she also had points that complicated the story. It's always more complicated than you think. Okay, my final question then is about this role that you play as a war correspondent. I don't know if that's the term that you choose. That's a weird term, but yeah, I think it is a catch-all. Yeah, it isn't. And it is quite a glamourized role in the way we talk about it. But I have a funny relationship with it because there's local journalists.

So I suppose the world is changing, and there are local journalists. local correspondence who may be best placed to shine a light on the plight of their people and who should have a platform and who should have payment as well. I guess have you ever experienced difficulties with those dynamics? It's just a question I really wanted to ask. No, I think it's a really valid one. And I think definitely I'm probably a dying breed, maybe the last of my kind. And maybe rightly so.

I think the whole coverage of what's happening in Gaza has really, really highlighted that. I remember right at the beginning talking to one of my daughters about desperately wanting to get into Gaza, something I'd still like to do eventually again, you know, to report on what's going on there. Don't think I will. But my daughter's saying, well, why do you need to go? There are lots of Palestinian journalists then. And I was actually, obviously, following them because no outsider could get in and still can't. And it really sent me back on my heels because there are some excellent journalists.

there and they're doing an incredibly courageous job and they are the windows for the whole world to see what's going on and been massively targeted, many of them killed in quite horrific circumstances. I think different reporters from different countries bring different aspects to any story. And just like when say you're from Britain, if you're reporting on how Boris Johnson dealt with the coronavirus, you might not see it quite the same way as an outsider looking in. You might be more critical, for instance. We've got a lot of excellent journalists in Britain. Were they critical enough about the way the coronavirus was dealt with? Were all of the political reporters really getting under the skin of what was happening?

Big, tough questions, many people might say they didn't. They were a bit too close to the story. Sometimes when you're up so close, you can't see the bigger picture. I think it would be to the denigration of the whole profession industry if we just decided that you had to be in a place to report in it. I think that might lead to possibly more issues. Definitely should we be giving much more worth to those who know their subject well, Absolutely 100%. That was Alex Crawford, who has been a war and foreign correspondent for over 20 years.

Now, before we begin today's discussion, there are a few key terms we need to define for listeners. What is a fixer? A fixer is the term used in journalism to describe the work of local people who guide journalists from abroad. They might arrange interviews with sources, coordinate logistics, advice on security issues and translate. In conflict zones, the fixer may take on the responsibility of keeping a journalist safe because they're better able to read the danger of a situation than a foreigner. And what is a stringer?

A stringer is a journalist used regularly in a foreign post by news outlets. Usually a freelance journalist assigned by a news organisation to cover areas that are considered outside the news organisation's patch. In this context, stringers are also used in areas that are seen as dangerous, such as in war zones, where a regular correspondent can't be placed full-time. And on that note, what is a correspondent? A correspondent is a journalist or a reporter who's employed by a media organisation to cover news and events from a specific geographical area or a specific topic. And I feel like we should talk about bylines. Yes, so a byline is a line at the.

top of an article giving the author's name. It's basically currency for journalists. Yes. Now we realise this may be starting to sound a bit too technical and mediary, but stay with us. We promise this topic is so deeply relevant to our society. In all it's woke and wonderful and multicultural and hierarchical and colonial and generally just human ways. Oh, and it's so Media Storm because Media Storm is all about respect to

lived experience and mining everything we can learn from it. So if fixers and translators have lived experience of the wars we want to understand, why does our media still not let them tell their own stories? And given the biggest bias in our media, maybe Western bias, when it comes to war, just how sinister can that be? Today, we will unpack the ethical complexities, the colonial power dynamics and the real world impacts of war. It's about who gets to tell the story of war and at what cost.

I'm not armed. Journalists. These bests serve to protect and clearly identify journalists. Yet, they've offered little protection for Palestinian journalists. It's a higher death rate for reporters than in any other modern war. It's still difficult for me to say. War reporting is promoting war. Welcome to MediaStorm, the podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Malinson and I'm Helen O'Owadia. This week's Media Storm,

Under Fire, is war journalism a dying art? Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Our first guest is a former foreign correspondent and Guardian assistant editor. She was based in Palestine and covered the region as a correspondent for four years, leaving in 2013. Her new novel, Vulture, has just been released and is a satire on war journalism set in Gaza. Welcome to the studio, Phoebe Greenwood. Thank you so much for having me.

Our second guest is a Palestinian journalist who started her career as a fixer and translator for a couple of international journalists until she decided she wanted to be an independent journalist writing her own stories. She worked as a freelance journalist for five years, including for Al Jazeera, before moving to the UK for an academic fellowship at Oxford Reuters Institute. She's now based in Toronto and has woken up exceedingly early to join us for this recording.

So thank you so much and welcome Abir Ayyub. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Now let's start talking about the different roles involved in what we call war reporting and where these roles stand in relation to each other. Public perception of this field is often shaped by the, sort of celebrity war correspondent or war photographer. People like Mary Colvin or Don McCullin or Lee Miller, who have been, to an extent, heroized for putting their life on the line to pay witness to war.

Their stories have been brought to us, in some cases, by Hollywood. We have Mary Colvin being played by Rosamond Pike. Don McCullen is set to be played by Tom Hardy in a movie directed by Angelina Jolie, and Kate Winslet was Lee Miller. This also sugarcoats the realities of the role. I mean, I remember very clearly the day that Mary Colvin was killed while reporting on the war in Syria, likely in a targeted attack by the Assad regime. Phoebe, is the title, War Correspondent, one that you would identify with,

and what drew you towards this line of work? Do I identify with War Correspondent? Certainly I have covered conflicts. There is a slight difference between journalists who will come into a story that's breaking, like a big story like a conflict. It was for me the earthquake in Haiti or floods and places. Pakistan, you would fly in, report the story. Then you were often coming in completely cold. For reporters and correspondents who are based in a region, they're there as sort of experts.

And this is something that the better correspondence that I worked alongside would never claim to be. I went on a trip to report in the West Bank. I was staggered by what I saw there. I realized how little I understood of it. I felt I really wanted to be there and I wanted to understand it better. So that's where I ended up moving to Jerusalem in 2010. It's a great privilege, obviously, to be able to travel the world, hear people's stories and try and get a better understanding of how things work. And it always really fascinated me. But I think, obviously, the more you work in an industry, the more you get to know it, the more you see its mechanations, it becomes more complicated. And Abir, what comes to your mind when you hear the term war correspondent?

Well, it's different for me because I am from a conflict room. I come from Gaza and I report on Gaza. So it was not my choice to go to a dangerous zone. Like, no, I live in this dangerous zone. And if I want to do anything good about it, if there is anything good about it, it could be me reporting, especially that I know the area, I know the people. I know almost everything about what's happening were reporting chose me, not the other way around. but then I chose it, like when I knew how important it is

and the great impact a journalist can do, but it's a bit different. Phoebe, your novel about war correspondence is titled Vulture. Now, typically, our associations with vultures is a negative one, poor vultures. Why did you use this title and what does it tell us about the complications surrounding the job of war correspondent. Right. So Vulture is a kind of cynical, self-saturizing term

that journalists in war zones used to describe themselves as people who make their livings out of war and disaster. There is a very rye, cynical, dark, black, humid self-awareness among the foreign correspondents in conflict zones.

I think people are aware of what a strange job it is, what a dark job it is, to choose to make your living out of other people's disasters. Right, I imagine all of the issues we're going to talk about today, racism or white saviourism or colonialism, you can't protect yourselves from those awkward realities in that role. It'd be very hard not to become aware, even if you go out there, unaware of these dynamics, not to become aware of these dynamics on the ground.

Have you read Omar Al-Aqad one day, we'll always been against this, a fantastic book if you haven't read it already, also looks at reporting of the war in Gaza. he has a great line in his book, and I'm probably going to misquote him, but he's something like the worst journalists I've ever met always the most confident. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah, that's so true.

And, yeah, I think most people are aware of it. And if they're not, then it's problematic. Abir, can you tell us about how you initially started your career? So you're working as a fixer, a translator for foreign journalists. How essential was the role that you played? Also, why did you end up changing course? Yeah, I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to resume my life as a fixer. It was more like a training for me.

But then I thought that I want to be able to do my own stories and to work on my own stuff because sometimes I worked on stories that I hated. Sometimes I was taken to places that I didn't like. And I felt later that I can have. my own style of reporting. So now, after like 15 years of reporting, I made it to a point that if you read my stories, you can know it was me who wrote them.

Something we want to make listeners aware of with this episode are some of the inequalities or some of the exploitation at play when fixers are involved in foreign news reports, lower pay, higher risk, no recognition, maybe no byline, maybe less protection. Is this a dynamic that you have ever encountered in your work as a fixer? Of course, I did because I even didn't know at the beginning that if I work as a fixer on a story that I can ask for a byline,

like I wasn't even aware. And then I worked with some reporters who gave me the byline. And I was like, oh, really, I can get a byline for doing this and that. So little by little I became more aware. like at the beginning also I would accept any amount of money but after two years I knew like how much I should be paid for a job but this is a thing that I felt later sorry for other fixes that they didn't know about but about the security I never got the privilege to ask for security or insurances or anything like that I never had the privilege and also sometimes you can say no

to a story. I didn't know that when I was doing fixing. I didn't know that I can say, no, I don't like this story. I don't want to do it. So it comes with experience, but the sad part is that fixers should know their rights, but no, it should be the media outlets that recognize their rights without them asking. Why do you think many news outlets, or perhaps it's the journalists, are reluctant to give bylines to local fixes, even local reporters. Where do you think that comes from? God, sorry everyone in my industry. There's a kind of arrogance that comes with some correspondence,

which is that kind of war hero's swagger. It would be a blindness. They wouldn't necessarily see, like, yes, of course you're setting up these interviews for me. I'm the journalist. I'm the person who's doing the writing. And I want my bylan, and it's a kind of blindness, I would say. It's not always the case. there are correspondence who wouldn't even think twice about it. I think it's getting better, but it was certainly when I was working in the region,

it was really problematic for me anyway. Look, it's a conversation and we don't know these things until we know them. Yeah. Thank you for having this conversation with us. We really do appreciate that. Let's take a quick break. Did you lock the front door? Check.

Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection, and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web. Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply.

Calling all book lovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca.com. Welcome back to the Mediastorm Studio. Next, we'll look at some examples of how major world news stories are often underpinned by an invisible hierarchy and the real-life consequences of this. War reporter Anne Newman was in Ethiopia, writing about the Tigray War, which lasted from November 2020 to November 2022. Her fixer,

who she writes about under the pseudonym Zaleke, had helped her arrange interviews with sources, organized transport and translate. Zaleke was abducted by armed military, interrogated and kept in isolation. He was released for a fee, but told, we will keep eyes on you, we will never let you live here. He eventually had to flee, leaving his wife and children, and ended up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome. He was initially abducted only days after Anne Newman had left the country. She writes, we are still not exactly sure why, but we know that he and I were seen together, watched as we walked in his neighbourhood. He fled Ethiopia to survive. Abir, I have you heard similar stories where fixers or translators endure kidnapping or even worse

while correspondents are able to leave countries safely? We have many cases where the fixers were either kidnapped or killed. We had a fixer who was killed in Afghanistan while the foreign reporter was rescued by his country's army. And I don't believe that was intentional or anything, but the thing is that fixes always should have the right to say, no, I'm not putting my life in danger for this story. There was another time in Gaza when reporters went with Hamas weapon experts to defuse a rocket, and it exploded. one foreign photographer was killed and another local fixer was killed. A friend of mine didn't want to go but couldn't say

so he missed the deadline on purpose so he couldn't go and then this happened. And also sometimes when the reporter decides to go to a dangerous zone, sometimes fixers do not think that they can say, I don't want to go there. I don't want to risk my life. Like it's two people, it's two lives. If you want to go, you can go.

But if I want to say that I don't want to go, I should be respected. Can I add something to that as well? There's certainly an incident in Gaza. I remember we were filming following a conflict and the Hamas riot police unit was absolutely furious with this and tried to beat us up. I was with Hazen Belusha, who was the Guardian journalist in Gaza.

And if he weren't there, we'd have been completely lost. Everyone knew him. He protected us. He was then taken away to be questioned by Hamas. It was terrifying. And there was that feeling like, you know, he's being held to account for our actions. And that was one of those moments

where the disparity is just crystal clear and deeply uncomfortable. Something that I've seen, there are cases where, for some reporters or some news outlets, the story comes first. and the story is more important than the people actually living it. One of the reasons I went into journalism was because they were quite systemic in refugee camps.

Actually, the main thing was when the media became really obsessed with smugglers, don't talk to people in camp visibly because if a person is seen talking to a journalist and smugglers know that that journalist is asking questions about it, they'd be beaten up overnight, maybe they would be barred from making the journey that they wanted to make. That was really the big problem. It's really interesting you should bring that up. The ethical questions around journalism in that regard are huge and knotty and really complicated. And you're absolutely right.

I think particularly when you've got a journalist driven by editors back in newsrooms who are hell-bent on getting a story. The ethical dilemmas in the field getting the stories are huge. But also, for me personally, the idea of putting someone's life at risk for a story is just unconscionable. For example, the very first story I ever did as a foreign reporter, I was actually at Grazia magazine. I was desperate to be like a features writer but I was made the party editor so most of the time I was actually chasing a party editor

for you well my job was chasing Sadie Frost around like various London Fashion Week parties it kind of wore thin and so I was trying to get them to send me to Pakistan to do a story and eventually they let me go and it was my first story and I so wanted to do a good job

and it was about honour killing a woman was brought to my hotel room to interview by a male relative who had helped her escape her abusive husband. And because she'd left the marriage, she was then at risk of being killed by both her husband and her father. And she was absolutely terrified. She was tiny. She was vulnerable. And I was so focused on getting her story. And I listened and we spoke for like an hour and a half. She told me everything. She trusted me. It was overwhelming for me. I'd never even heard of a story like this. And then at the end of the interview, she said to me, well, you're going to help me, right?

You're going to protect me. Tony Blair will help me. And I was like, no, I can't help you. So there's also that dynamic which can feel deeply uncomfortable. You know, in war zones, in conflict zones or in natural disasters, you're arriving in the worst moment in that person's life and you're trying to get a line out of them. That is such a deeply uncomfortable, unnatural position to be in. It's a question, isn't it? I mean, for example, this war in Gaza, Israel hasn't let foreign press in.

We're learning about what's happening there through the local journalists there who have been killed in extraordinary high numbers. So we don't have that kind of pretense in a way of impartiality of non-bias. The news we're getting from Gaza is urgent, it's personal, and it's a different way of telling stories, but it's people telling their own stories. And I think we have to take lessons from that. Bear your nodding. Local journalists in Gaza, they are doing a great job,

but they are taking care of their children and their own lives, and at the same time they report. So this was kind of a test to how great local reporters can be. But at the same time, maybe if foreign journalists were inside, it would have not been this bad. Did you see Hassam Shabbat, who was a journalist who was killed by Israeli forces in 2024? He tweeted almost a year before he was killed something along the lines of, the problem is not that Western media are not being allowed into Gaza.

The problem is that the Western media doesn't take Palestinian journalists seriously enough. That's exactly it. Just to give a clear background, since the start of the war in Gaza, Israeli forces have methodically destroyed the Palestinian media infrastructure. Journalists have been targeted and killed, newsrooms destroyed, internet and electricity cut off, and the foreign press blocked, as you both mentioned. And this really stark example is taken from a clip from The Daily Show last year, where CNN's chief international anchor, Christine Amabour,

sat down with John Stewart to discuss the difficulty in covering the war on Gaza, but she seemed to dismiss Palestinian journalists on the ground until she was reminded of them. Well, here's the thing. Our major problem covering Israel-Gaza right now, this phase of it, which has been going on for six months, is that we can't get there.

This is an unprecedented situation. Journalists are not on the ground in Gaza. Well, they're journalists on the ground. They're being killed. You're right. You're right. I'm talking about independent Western journalists are not able to get there or anybody else,

except for those people who are absolutely risking their lives every single day. It's quite staggering to hear there are no journalists on the ground in Gaza out of the mouth of CNN's chief international anchor. because Palestinian journalists like Motazazza Ziza, Biswan Odwa and Yara-Eid have been risking their lives day in and day out in Gaza to report on war crimes and bring the truth to the public. Palestinian journalists have paid a very heavy price for that work according to the committee to protect journalists.

At least 185 of them have been killed during the war and 86 imprisoned. Yeah, there's this huge gulf between what we take seriously and who is seen as credible, a bit as a Palestinian journalist yourself, why do you think there is such a difference in platform and recognition for Palestinian journalists on the ground? I don't think it's about Palestinians only. I think it's about locals.

Like, we need to bring this discussion again and again that local reporters need to get the appreciation. I'm a local journalist. I'm covering the war. We just need to have this discussion again and again. Don't you also think what I find staggering as well is that you can get 185 Palestinian journalists killed, assassinated, versus Marie Colvin or versus Kamal Khashoggi? And all of these are atrocities. But the disparity in the significance given to individual lives, I mean, I find it staggering.

Right. Like I just said 185 Palestinian journalists have killed and we've just like, not we, but like, we as a lot. As a society of just like breeze past that. I think there's two layers that really need to be pointed out in the case of Palestinian journalists. One is that there has been a very deliberate strategy to undermine the value of Palestinian journalist's lives and of Palestinians' lives by conflating Palestinian journalists with Hamas operatives. It is not an accident that Palestinian journalist's lives have become so overlooked. However, you cannot denigrate an entire people as terrorists if it isn't for a much broader problem and that is racism, right?

When we, in our imagination, conflate an entire group of people based on their ethnicity, their nationality, their skin color, as terrorists, that is the definition of racism. And it's very particular in Gaza where, you know, what's difficult is that the controversy around the BBC documentary where the focus of that documentary was a kid who happened to be the site, of a Hamas official. By the same token, you then get a documentary that was meant to be broadcast on the BBC looking at doctors and medical facilities that have been targeted by

Israeli airstrikes and proving a campaign of destruction of medical facilities, which was also pulled with the same risk of bias. So I think what's happened particularly, and this is what I found really unnerving when I was trying to push stories out from the region, is that there is such a nervousness about the political complexity of Israel-Palestine that is pretty unique and it means that atrocities are occurring without the necessary alarm. When you look at the staggering numbers of people killed in Gaza, 64,000 by some accounts, there should be no what-ifs. There should be no, but Hamas, no, that 64,000 people killed. And the staggering lack of public outcry, it's unnerving, it's terrifying. And it's put down to this kind of muddying of the

waters. It shouldn't be political. It's human. And that is exactly as Matilda says, comes down to a baseline racism and the way that we are so used to watching brown lives be completely dehumanised. We are so used to seeing people with brown skin colour suffering that it's almost become second nature now. We don't see them really as humans with lives and wives and children. When I was working briefly for a US TV, no names, I was going to Gaza to do a story about collaborators. There's a horrible phenomenon whereby, because there's a population penned in, there's a vulnerability to being asked to collaborate the Israeli military. When you're at the Israeli border as a Palestinian crossing in and out, you know, give us information so that

we can allow your wife to get cancer treatment, things like this. So I was going off to do this horrible story about people facing execution for collaborating with Israel. And the executive, who I was working for, said, just make sure you get me an execution because I can't have any more stories about Sad Mohammed's. Oh, my God. This is in a newsroom. Abbaer, how does that make you feel?

Oh, oh my God, I'm out of words. shaking your head. Yeah. Yeah, there are all of these inequalities at play that have real life consequences for, local populations. But there's also real-life consequences on the quality of the reporting that the rest of the world is reading. And I wonder a bear, when journalists come in who have little knowledge of local customs or etiquette and are insensitive to the realities of the life

of the people that they're interviewing, how does this affect the quality of the journalism? It's the teamwork between the local journalist and the foreign journalists. journalist that makes it work, but sometimes foreign journalists need to trust the local when they say, we cannot ask this question. I was asked before to translate questions that were really unpleasant. Like, I speak the language of the people. So I had to make it clear sometimes that We cannot ask someone if you go back in time, would you still try to do terrorist attack? I cannot ask this question as bold as that because, of course, the answer is no. But the awful thing happens when I say, I cannot ask this question and I'm told, like, no, we need it for the story.

This is how bad it can be, but by time I learned who to work with and who not to work with. I worked with Phoebe, for instance, and Phoebe would be a journalist who would exactly know where to stop. She would trust the local expertise, and this is how it works. It's the balance between the expertise of the local and the foreign reporter, but at the same time, Sometimes I needed Phoebe's experience, for instance. It's not only that I'm the local I know better, no, it's not like that. You know better in some areas, I know better in other areas. You gave an example where a journalist asked you to ask someone who'd been involved in an act of terrorism,

a question that you found unacceptable. You said no, and the journalist said, no, no, I need this question. And the question was to this person, or would you go back and do it again? And you said, I can't ask that question. Obviously, the answer is no. I suppose the journalist might argue, if that's the answer, then that's important for British readers to hear. But you give the example of Phoebe as a journalist who would heed your advice.

And I wonder, Phoebe, why do you respect that boundary? Do you see that advice as valuable not just to the local population, but to the quality of the journalism you're produced? Well, thank you, Abir, for remember me in that way. I think most journalists will be doing their best to not cause offence. However, there's a pressure and there's an ego that I've been aware of amongst my compatriots, whereby getting the line becomes more important and it desensitizes people to the human beings that they're engaging with. But is that good journalism?

Is the line? Absolutely not. This is it, right? And I think Abir raises an really interesting example. And you're right. For example, someone reading the newspaper over their crumpets in the morning will want to know that someone who has committed an act of terror regrets doing it and wouldn't do it again. How to phrase that. And I think that anyone who doesn't listen to the journalists that they're working with who knows the people and the story and the political landscape so much better, they're just losing track of the story. They're not representing the people accurately.

they're kind of blinded by a kind of myopic focus on the line that they think they want to have and that, yeah, you're right, they're just not getting the story that's reality. And this is something that I would say in four years and six, seven series of doing Media Storm, I have decided as the most persistent bias in our media, whether it's the right wing or the left wing media that you're reading. It is Western bias. It might be a very, say, Western or British agenda that decides the sort of, story here is that this boy or this man regretted his terror attack. But that might not be an

important story or the most important story for people to hear. And someone with a certain worldview is deciding that that is the story. So I want to talk about the other potentially negative outcome of the inequalities in this reporting, which is the likelihood of a Western cultural or geopolitical bias. Phoebe, I'm very curious first. Was there ever a point for you at which you realized, God, I have actually been pretty, if not brainwashed, propagandized during my upbringing

and realize that you had to constantly consciously adjust for this? A thousand percent. We all have bias. All of us would be kidding ourselves and everyone else if we didn't think that we came to a story with bias. The Western bias is something that needs to be challenged urgently, particularly when it comes to news reporting. It felt to me when I was in certain places like the last acceptable form of colonialism. It had a sort of Raj mentality, you know, oh, here we are flown in journalists with their kind of public school education, who are the only ones trusted to tell the world what's happening about what's going on here.

And we work with local people and it's just, you know, and they serve us and our purposes. This is one of the things that prompted me to write Vulture, that disqualmie. that discomfort, that feeling of, is this the last acceptable form of colonialism? Why are we reporting our news like this? Why is that it is kind of white, largely, middle class, privately educated, often people who are telling foreign stories, foreign tragedies, other people's stories, other people's tragedies? There are people who fit exactly that bill, who I admire hugely, who are fabulous journalists, who I think the world would be absolutely robbed of if they stopped doing what they're doing.

but I do think there needs to be a much healthier and lively discussion about how we tell our news. I do want to talk about the bias of media outlets because today, if you watch the coverage of the Gaza War, it surprises me that some media outlets for the second year, they are still committed to this specific narrative that they like, and I know it's not true, and they know it's not true. but I want to talk about the bias of journalists. It's something that we journalists should work on a daily basis because whatever you do, you will have an unconscious bias that you have to work on to make sure you are telling the truth and nothing but the truth.

If every journalist does this, then we can at least get the media coverage much more. better. And I'm talking to you, like, I'm Palestinian from Gaza, and I try not to report as a Palestinian from Gaza. I try to report as an independent journalist telling the truth, even if I don't like it. And it takes a lot. Like, now I cover the war, and I know that my family are hungry. But would you feel this from my reporting? No. Because I would be telling the story as it should be. As long as we cannot change everything about the mainstream media, then it's our jobs as journalists to report as professional as we can.

And it's not easy. Locals expect me to report in a specific way. And when I don't follow that, I would be attacked. sometimes canceled by my community because you should only report on the casualties or on the Israeli violations, but you cannot criticize any Palestinian party because you're Palestinian, and I don't follow this school. I report what the truth is, whether I like it or not, and I believe that telling the truth can get justice. I don't have any other tool. But I'm committed to that.

This is the change that we can make. And Phoebe, reflecting on this discussion, what would you say that foreign journalists can do better to reimagine an ethical culture of war journalism? The way the war in Gaza has been covered in the media, it's going to take time to digest when it hopefully ends. However, it has to change things. It has to change things that the only information

that we received from Gaza was from the Palestinians living it. And I think that people are diverted. suggesting their information differently. You see a huge crisis in trust in traditional news media. People are turning off in huge numbers. Something like 40% of people can't stand to watch the news anymore. The news is going to have to adapt. And I think that we are a generation that demands authenticity, whether that's a good or bad thing. And I think that slowly the news organizations are going to have to catch up with that. And I think that allowing local people to tell local stories is going to be a huge part of that because people are going to want it. And I do think

that you can see the creaking mechanism of the old style of journalism, really suffering in this conflict. BBC Radio did a series about settler violence. And there was a journalist asking a Palestinian man in the West Bank who had been beaten badly by Israeli soldiers and by settlers. And he said to him in the interests, obviously, of impartiality, why if you've been so badly beaten, don't you just leave? Oh, my God. This is the BBC. And this is impartiality. This is both sides of a story. I think we often confuse impartiality with inhumanity. And I think that we can all see the BBC has really struggled with how to cover this conflict because it's tied itself and not tripping over itself and it's lost the trust of its viewers. So I don't know how it's going to

change, but I feel it inevitably has to and it is. That is all that we have time for today. But before we lose you, please tell us where listeners can follow you. And if you have anything to plug, Abir, let's start with you. I'm active on Twitter and I'm active on Instagram. It's A-B-E-E-E-R-A-Y-Y-O-U-B. Abira-Y-A-U-B. And Phoebe, where can people follow you and do you have anything to plug? I'm a bit woeful on social media at the moment. I kind of took a step back from X when it became X. But I do have a book that is, yay, it's out in shops in the UK and online now. It's called Vulture. You can buy it online. You can buy it in your local bookstores or even in

Waterstones or even in boils. It's also out in the States in August. Thank you for listening. Next week, it's News Watch just before we take our summer break. But not for you guys. You guys have to stick around because we've got some Media Storm investigations we've been working on and they'll be coming your way in the weeks that follow. 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. 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. And obviously, leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helena Waddea 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 sample.