News Watch: Adolescence, ICC 'white man's justice', and should ketamine be Class A?
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This is MediaStorm's Newswatch.

You look at some of the fake news on these platforms, there's just so much out there right now. Some breaking news to bring you now. People want to be able to express opinions. I understand that. I have only one objective, which is to make sure the BBC is truly impartial. Well, I don't think that the mainstream media was lying. I think we missed the overarching story.

Welcome to Media Storms Newswatch, helping you make sense of the mainstream media. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storms. Adolescence, ICC, white man's justice, and should ketamine be class A?

Hello, media stormers. Hello, Matilda. Hi, Helena. Another week, another series of unhinged news alerts. There was a stream this week. I'm guessing you're thinking mostly of the journalists that got added to a signal group by the US White House team and...

given all the intel on airstrikes being dropped on Yemen before they happened. I mean, can you imagine? Like that journalist said that he thought that it was like fake. It was always like something to trap him. Yeah, yeah. And then actually to realise that it's real. I mean... So much going through your mind. We live in a farce. We live in a farce. Yeah, I mean, it's quite cinematic actually. This journalist from the Atlantic, he ended up sitting in this car park at 3am when he'd...

seen these messages from people called things like Michael Waltz, National Security Advisor at the White House, saying that bombs were going to be dropped on, top secret, bombs are going to be dropped on Yemen, and refreshing Twitter and indeed seeing at that time bombs had been dropped on Yemen and realising this was real. And by the way, the emojis, did you see the emojis? Oh, yeah, yeah. This is how they describe, you know, an act of war.

And civilian slaughter. With an American flag emoji, the fire emoji and something else. It was fist bump. Fist bump. America flag. And the fire emoji. Great job, guys. They've like honestly ruined the flame emoji for me. Oh, no. I know. I saw that screenshot with the emojis under a statement from the National Security Council spokesperson saying something like, this WhatsApp group shows how much thoughtful consideration goes into American foreign policy decisions. And then there was a screenshot.

Of the fist bumps. But you know what? You know what is interesting from a media storm angle? This story got more media attention than the actual airstrikes. This story that Goldberg, this journalist, had been accidentally added to a top national security signal group and that these decisions were being made of a signal at all.

Yeah, that got more traction than the actual airstrikes, which killed over 50 civilians in Yemen. We talked about it last week on Media Storms Newswatch, so you can go have a listen. Anything else before we start?

Yes, so we got a DM from a previous MediaStorm guest, the lovely Lady Unchained, if who you remember was on our episode about prisons and overcrowding and strip searches. And she was promoting an event which unfortunately Matilda and I cannot make, but we wanted to plug on MediaStorm. I feel like it'll be right up your guy's street. It's called Unchained.

Unchained Nights. It's an artistic showcase that celebrates artists with lived experience of the criminal justice system. In East London, 11th of April. East London, the coolest part of London, obviously. We will post a link in the show notes so people can get tickets.

Right, let's begin our first Newswatch story. So for anybody who doesn't know, hasn't heard or isn't a drag or drag race fan, the Vivienne was a drag queen who won the first series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK. They were honestly brilliant and it was shocking and so sad when it was announced in January that they had passed away and the Vivienne was only 32.

I know, Matilda, you're not a pop culture girly, but the Vivian was so fantastic. So many of us fell in love with them on Drag Race, but then also followed their career, which just completely skyrocketed. And what so many of us loved about the Vivian, alongside how funny and quick-witted they were, was their openness.

The Vivian had spoken openly about how they had struggled with drug addiction throughout their life. Even on national television, on Drag Race, the Vivian openly discussed how they sought help for an addiction to party drugs. I was a drug addict for four years of my life.

It was party drugs, but I couldn't leave the drugs at the party. It was constant for me. A lot of my drug use was pure boredom. I mean, I worked seven nights a week in the day. I didn't do anything. And it was just a habit that caught on a bit too quick and a bit too hard. It was the loneliest part of my life. I was killing myself. And I'm two years clean of drugs, and I just feel amazing for it, and I just want to have that platform to help other people.

This week, after two months, the Vivians' cause of death was revealed and it was that they died from a cardiac arrest caused by the effects of taking ketamine. Since the cause of death was revealed, purposely revealed by the Vivians' family, by the way, their

There has been a huge campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of the drug and also a campaign to reclassify ketamine from a class B to a class A drug. Now, this campaign is being spearheaded by the Vivians family, and that's fantastic because they've got the media behind them, and rightly so. The family are working with drug rehabilitation centres and are as much raising awareness of substance abuse and addiction as well as the dangers of the particular drug, ketamine.

But what I want to point out from a media storm lens is that a lot of the media has jumped onto the bandwagon uncritically. And what I mean by that is not to have criticism of the devastated family of the Vivian, obviously, but to have criticism of the UK's drug lords and policies. Mm-hmm.

Evidence has, for years now, shown us that the illegality of drugs, the war on drugs, does not stop people buying, selling and using drugs. If I can cast my mind back, in series one of MediaStorm, we did an episode about the war on drugs here in the UK and how the media reported on drug use. Loved that episode. Same. I still think about it so much and it actually really pivoted my perspective on the issue.

We had two guests who joined us in the studio, okay? Niamh Eastwood, the executive director of the charity Release, which is the national center of expertise on drugs and drugs law, and Juan Fernandez, who leads the development of the Support Don't Punish campaign. Now, this focuses on harm reduction and drug policies that prioritize safety and safety

and human rights. Yes, and honestly, they can tell you better than I could why a drug policy that punishes and imprisons people is only perpetuating the cycle of drug misuse. And by the way, we can look at the government's own statistics to prove this. A piece of research that actually comes from the Home Office in 2017 analysed the government drug strategy and found that despite spending £1.6

billion pounds a year on law enforcement to tackle the drugs trade, it concluded that that had little to no impact on the availability of drugs. But guess what it did have an impact on? Drug use? Right. The report said that there were a number of unintended consequences, including increased violence associated with the market, increased overdose due to ovarian purity and an increase in drug per capita.

purchasing. Yeah, when we did this drug episode, we were still fully in our MediaStorm Investigates days and I did a little undercover chapter accessing these drugs on record to show just how easy it is and how much this regulation is failing to actually curtail the market or the demand.

And I remember we asked this exact question back then, but I'm going to ask it again. If there is so much evidence staring us in the face that tells us time and time again that drug prohibition does not work and that legal regulation is more likely to work.

Why does the government keep on pursuing these policies that have no evidential backing at all? It's a great question. Here's a snippet from our episode, the UK's war on drugs, politics and prohibition. The first voice you'll hear from is Juan Fernandez, the second Matildas and the third Niamh Eastwood.

We need to interrogate the idea that the war on drugs doesn't work because it works very well when it comes to serving as a mechanism by which racialized and minoritized communities are prosecuted and involved in the criminal legal system. So in that sense, it is working. Now, the stated goal of prohibition, according to the international conventions, is the health and welfare of humankind.

And in that sense, yes, the war on drugs is a catastrophe. Also, let's be clear, most people who use drugs do not need to go through a treatment or education program

They mostly need to have access in case they ever need to have recourse to those services. But we need to completely end this idea and commit to a response to drugs that is about promoting health, promoting rights, rather than punishment and neglect. I can think of a third...

possible cause for the war on drugs. You mentioned social control. You mentioned actually improving public health. What about scoring well with voters? Do you think that's a factor?

It reminds me of a quote by a federal judge in Chile who said, criminalization is the best way for politicians to say that they're doing something without doing anything. And that is basically what these declarations do, pander to this idea that justice should be associated with punishment, when in reality, punishment doesn't deliver justice. And I think one brings up a really great point about how

drug policy and drug prohibition and the drugs trade can be utilized by politicians as a way of excusing

policies, social policies that they've created. The last 10 years, we have gone through the most punishing austerity that has seen youth centers closed, that has seen educational maintenance grants taken away, that has seen exclusions at school, which are also driven around kind of racialized narratives of unruly black kids that can't be looked after. And so they need to be pushed out of school. Those are the problems. And those problems are created by government

But government has this very useful excuse of going, oh, it wasn't us. Look over there. Look over there. It's the drugs trade. Not our fault. Not our policies. I often find that this idea of legalisation of recreational drugs feels a very out there, radical policy. But when you think about it, legal regulation of drugs means establishing formal control over the production, supply and availability of drugs, like we do with alcohol and loads of things that the government...

you know, regulates in the same way. And that is why people aren't drinking dodgy alcohol laced with dodgy chemicals. Whereas under the current system, where many drugs are illegal, are unregulated, but still in high demand, it means they are dodgy, impure, and can be sold to anybody, regardless of, for example, their age. Right. And so now...

As this topic comes into the news cycle again, the media are unflinchingly reporting that moving ketamine from a class B drug to a class A drug, therefore making the punishment for using ketamine more severe, will help solve the problem of ketamine use. And in doing so, they are ignoring years of evidence that the more we have pursued a war on drugs, the more drug use and fatalities happen.

have risen. And by the way, the more racially unequal the criminality policies have become, the more young black working class boys have been sent to prison. Exactly. So I'll give you an example. In 2014, ketamine was reclassified from a class C to a class B drug. So it's already moved up a drug class.

Wow. What has happened since? I'm guessing in that time, Ketamine use has not decreased. Bingo, it's increased. Ketamine use among 16 to 24-year-olds has increased 2%.

231% since 2013. It's insane. A study for NHS England found ketamine use among school children had more than doubled from 0.4% in 2013 to 0.9% in 2023. In fact, many of the media articles recently about ketamine have quoted statistics

statistics like this without realising that they're kind of undermining their own argument. Oh, yeah, I'm sure the problem was that, you know, we only upgraded it from C to B and not C to A. Let's keep doing the same thing. That'll work suddenly. I love this level of anger. Yeah, I actually feel so passionately about this and that has come from the first series, Media Storm episode we did, and the fact that nothing has changed, not only has nothing changed, everyone is just so gullible and...

bandwagon-y and it is sickening because people are dying, people are going to prison.

None of it works. Yeah, it's a flawed logic. And the thing is, the role of the media is to question flawed logic. The media should be unafraid to question what is causing an increase in ketamine use, in ketamine addiction, should be unafraid to question whether or not ketamine being a Class A drug will change anything in regards to usage. And they should be unafraid to question what is going wrong with current drug policy.

Now, picking up the war on drugs theme and taking it down a very different road, a major world news story earlier this month was the arrest of former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. But the drama unfolding in its wake has piqued my media storm radar. Duterte, was he the guy who murdered loads of civilians in the name of a war on drugs? No.

just a few years ago and that's why he was arrested. Yes. So he was arrested by the ICC, the International Criminal Court, and taken to The Hague where he will face trial under international law. Duterte will go on trial for alleged extrajudicial killings committed during his war on drugs from 2016 to 2022 when some 30,000 people were summarily executed and Duterte...

once told a campaign group he would, quote, kill so many people that the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on their bodies. Oh my God. Yeah. And despite this, the arrest has actually been divisive in the Philippines, which interested me. Yes, I've seen families of victims express newfound hope that justice will be served.

Filipino journalist Pia Renada, she wrote on Rappler, a local news site, celebrating the arrest and reporting she had witnessed this man joke in front of Boy and Girl Scouts about murder, heard him openly make rape threats. But other columnists disagree. Lots of people point out that this is a political arrest to the extent that he would never have been arrested on Filipino soil if he hadn't fallen afoul of the current government. But

But a piece in the Manila Times called this a kidnapping outside the ICC's jurisdiction. So they point out that the Philippines withdrew from the ICC, the International Criminal Court, in 2019, although this was after the alleged crimes occurred. But what I want to focus on

is this cynicism of the ICC. Because it's heard in quite a lot of places around the world, and not in a way that I was particularly aware of. You see, almost all previous ICC defendants have come from the global south, the vast majority of them Africa.

Putin and Netanyahu are two of only four that I counted from the Northern Hemisphere. And a lot of the Western world literally, you know, roll out the red carpet for Netanyahu and have done since the ICC arrest warrant was issued. So Duterte, like many defendants, he will defend Putin.

by calling the ICC white man's justice. And if you dive into their history, they have made themselves pretty vulnerable to this defence. Wait, so is this the same ICC that had Western politicians calling it biased when it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and for Yoav Gallant, Israel's defence minister? Yeah. Even though...

They also issued arrest warrants for Hamas at the same time. Yeah, I think that's why I picked up on this because that was sort of the ICC controversy most recently in my memory. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and our leaders, American leaders, were like, what? ICC is biased. In truth, Netanyahu and Gallant are the only Western-aligned figures the ICC has ever

ever prosecuted. And I did the maths, over 90% of the 60 defendants in ICC history are from Africa and Asia. Oof. Okay, so never a Western leader has been prosecuted. And Netanyahu is the first Western-aligned leader to be prosecuted. And then Western leaders had the nerve to call the ICC biased. Yeah. And the media too. I...

want to bring back this opinion piece that was published in The Times in November when this happened. It was titled, The World is Full of Tyrants. Why is the ICC so obsessed with Israel? It critiqued Netanyahu's arrest warrant, suggesting that the ICC's apparent obsession with Israel may undermine its credibility. Well, Times, I could say the same about you. Okay, so what is the big wide world beyond the West saying?

So I looked into this. Politicians, media commentators, activists, academics in the global South, they have long criticized perceived racial bias in The Hague, which is where the court is based. And they've done so over the past decade. Former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalines accused the ICC of race hunting against Africans. In 2016, several African nations, including South Africa, Burundi, Gambia, announced their intentions to quit the court.

An article from the East African at the time said that they were countering what they called lawfare, the misuse of international law to subordinate Africa. OK, and are there specific examples of alleged Western crimes that these same critics think the ICC has overlooked?

Yeah. So as mentioned, the ICC has issued zero arrest warrants for Western leaders. But it is not like there aren't documented cases of human rights abuses and war crimes. But there's a strong case that investigations into the US, UK, NATO and Israel have been delayed, limited or blocked under political pressure. So like some examples would be war crimes committed by the British in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. An invasion which, by the way, is widely seen as illegal in itself.

Video footage has shown UK soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees and killing civilians. Bahamusa is one Iraqi hotel worker who was beaten to death in UK custody. But no British military figure, nor any of the Allied leaders who pursued this illegal invasion, have been investigated by the court.

You know, we could also talk about the US in Afghanistan. Or, hello, Guantanamo Bay, where they long detained and tortured terror suspects without trial. Or how about NATO's bombing of Libya, which not only destroyed the state, but has caused long-term ongoing turmoil. Critics...

I'm not short of examples. Okay, so while everyone from Joe Biden to Robert Jenrick were calling the ICC biased for daring to prosecute a Western ally, the rest of the world was like, um, hello? No, no. Yeah.

And look, for context, a lot of African governments have referred cases against their own governments. But the ICC's funding comes largely from Western states. And there's definitely something quite colonial about these double standards, the idea that African states need external intervention. But God forbid international courts intervene in our states.

And for the record, I'm a big believer in international law, but it needs to be applied consistently. Otherwise, it's meaningless. Yeah. And there'll be more on that in tomorrow's episode. But for now, let's take a quick break.

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Have you seen Adolescence? Some of it. Just finished episode one. Okay. I actually put it off until a couple of days ago because everyone was saying how harrowing it was. So I've now finished it. And I guess my hot take is that I didn't find it that harrowing. Like, I'm not sure what that says about me. You are disturbed, lady. Yeah. But I was thinking about why I didn't find it so harrowing. And I think the answer is because...

I'm a journalist. I read the news a lot. I report about male violence against women and girls a lot. I'm part of a campaign that aims to help the media report responsibly on violence against women and girls. So, you know, I've done a lot of research into the area. And...

I know a lot of what adolescence covers to be true and therefore not shocking. You know, I've reported on real life adolescent stories. No, it's really interesting actually that this is your take because I have a lot of cousins. We have a WhatsApp chat and there were about 250 messages on my phone the other day from the cousins discussing adolescence because one of them who has worked in TV and is a huge, like she thinks it's amazing as a piece of TV. But she was like, guys, I'm not that shocked.

And she is a teacher in college. She was like, this is like nothing compared to the shit teachers see on a daily basis. Something she said was, I didn't understand why the therapist was so freaked. Honestly, every day in my college is that energy and the teachers just ride it out. So she was like, yeah, I'm not that shocked. But some of the others who are not so close to the field were shocked and were like, what are you talking about?

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. And I agree with that. And okay, for those who haven't seen the show...

This is not really a spoiler because you find out in the first five minutes, but you may get a couple of spoilers later on. So the show follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who is arrested for murdering a female schoolmate called Katie. Over the course of the four episodes, we come to explore Jamie's motives for killing Katie, which forces the adults in his life to confront the origins of Jamie's feelings about women and girls.

It's a critique on social media-boosted toxic masculinity. It confronts the influence of the manosphere, online spaces that promote rigid notions of masculinity, misogynistic stereotypes about women and messages about alpha males or incels and incel culture. We come to understand that Jamie had been spending a lot of time in those online spaces and crucially, or at least for me, I thought crucially...

that Katie had at one point rejected Jamie's advances. Advances he only made because he viewed her as weak after she was upset at being a victim of image-based sexual abuse, otherwise known as revenge porn, when a topless photo of her was shared on Snapchat by another male member of the class. Now,

Now, something I think that it did really well, bearing in mind, you know, I'm only one episode in, is it's all filmed in one take, the whole episode, which is not only incredible as a production accomplishment, but what that achieves is you watch it in real time. There is no escape. And you go through the emotions that the characters are going through as they do. And, you know, you learn about everything happening as they do. So your reactions just happen.

happen as one and I think that that brings it home I think this does well is it brings this issue home it makes it puts you in their shoes and it makes you feel those emotions and I think that that is quite important I mean everyone has been talking about it wasn't it

even mentioned in Parliament? Yeah, that's right. So the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has said that he's worried about toxic masculine behaviour on social media influencing young men. And that came after somebody raised the topic of adolescence in Parliament. He's now really promoting the importance of positive role models for men. And there have actually been, you know, quite a lot of men...

speaking out about toxic masculinity recently on social media. One of the writers, Jack Thorne, and the co-writer and star Stephen Graham, who played Jamie's dad, they've accepted an invitation to a parliamentary meeting by a Labour MP to discuss online safety with MPs.

And there's been a campaign started to get adolescents to be shown in schools, a campaign that Keir Starmer says he supports. But the thing is, does this really go far enough, just showing adolescents in schools?

And what about the campaigners and facilitators who have been working their whole lives to tackle and dismantle toxic masculinity? Why aren't they getting invited into Parliament? Here's what gender equality activist, school workshop practitioner and previous MediaStorm guest Gina Martin had to say about it.

But one of the things I've been thinking about is that adolescence is not the silver bullet to solve all of your incompetency. You can't just show that in schools and expect things to change. There's actually a trope in the show about how in schools they're showing videos rather than engaging in...

Proper education. So that's not gonna work, but also anti-misogyny lessons in the curriculum? Sure, fine, but that's also not gonna solve it. People's hearts and minds don't change because you tell them misogyny is bad or police their behaviour. We need to have specialist practitioners and providers writing programmes for schools and you need to start funding it!

fund them. That was Gina Martin on the importance of funding programmes by specialist education providers in school. It does show the power of pop culture though. Yeah, and we spoke about that last week with the EastEnders storyline. Yeah. Not to bang on about it again. Not again.

OK, but I also want to take this moment to draw attention to another news story that kind of fits in with this. And that's that the charity Everyone's Invited has published a list of 1,664 primary schools in the UK where pupils between age 5 and 11 have submitted anonymous testimonies of rape culture, their experiences of sexist name-calling, harassment, groping and inappropriate touching. That is one in 20.

12 primary schools in the UK. You know, I think

I think that what that says is it's not like the show isn't valuable and the stuff isn't happening, but it's not radical today. This should have been made years ago and it shouldn't be a drop in the ocean. There should have been loads of shows like it. But the fact it's seen as so pioneering, that shows where we are as a society that we haven't yet confronted this very pervasive reality. I mean, I think, you know, the main thing that's shocking about it is maybe the fact that it is the only one of its kind, despite the issue being everywhere.

But I do think it does it differently and better than most because where we most commonly see this problem represented on pop culture is like true crime documentaries, femicide documentaries that are about violence against women. And they fetishize details of rape or trauma, like real women's trauma, abduction, murder.

Adolescence, you know, it puts a normal teenage boy's face to these acts. Not like a, "Oh, here's Ted Bundy, look how attractive his face is, but he's some actual freak monster." Like, no, these things are not being done by freak monsters and they're not the consequence of, like, one crazy individual, they're the consequence of society.

adolescence shows that well, I think. Yes, I agree. I agree. And do search Everyone's Invited to read more on that story because it probably should be making more waves than it is. I do agree with what you said so far about adolescence, but something else I thought was quite interesting about the show is that we never saw the impact of Katie's death on Katie's family. Do we not? No. Spoiler alert, sorry. In fact, Katie, the victim, is rendered...

pretty much invisible in the whole thing. I mean, even the description of the show on Netflix is a family's world turns upside down when 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for murdering a schoolmate. The charges against their son force them to confront every parent's worst nightmare. Yeah, sorry. I mean, as hellish as that is...

surely every parent's worst nightmare is their child being murdered. Right. It would be to be Katie's parents. Like Katie, yeah. Yeah. And I thought that. And look, I guess the hyper focus on Jamie and his family and his friends and trying to work out his mind was a deliberate choice, you know, because they're focusing on how and why young boys are radicalized. But I do think it could have been even more powerful if they showed the devastating effect that this has on victims' families. Series two? Yeah.

Maybe. But yeah, no, maybe. I mean, maybe their intention or what I felt their intention was is kind of appealing to teenage boys because you experience most of it through the eyes of a teenage boy. And I think it makes you put yourself in that position. Like if I had done this, say I had done this, you know, how scary would this moment be when the police raid your house? How would you deal with it? Would you say no comment? Would you not? Yeah.

Why I think that might be important is because so many teenagers are exposed to desensitizing content, probably violent, misogynistic content, probably, you know, highly likely approached by radical recruiters, far right, misogynistic recruiters.

who are never going to show them or expose them to the consequences of what these acts actually lead to. You know, this is a boy, he's a smart and studious boy, and his life is kind of over too. And I think making boys confront that

probably is quite important right now. Bringing boys into the conversation. Yeah. That is a perfect segue. Yeah, we did that. We tried to do exactly that here. Exactly. So last series, we did an episode called Violence Against Women is a Man's Problem. And we spoke about how and why we need to bring boys and men into this conversation in a way that does not stigmatize them and throw up their defenses.

So to round off this segment, here's a snippet from that episode with Daniel Guinness, the director of Beyond Equality, the UK charity working with boys and men, and writer, researcher and workshop facilitator Nathaniel Cole. MUSIC

How do you have this conversation with boys without putting them on the defensive? When I speak to boys, I ask them to speak to the women in their lives about their experiences of sexual harassment and violence and see if that will line up with what they actually think. Because when I come into classrooms talking about sexual violence, boys just talk to me about false accusations. They want to focus on the fantasy and...

the stories about lying and all this sort of stuff, because that's more exciting. That's way more exciting than thinking and knowing that you, your friend, your father, your uncle can all be capable of harming someone. The hashtag should be not all men, but all men. I think I'd start by saying that I really, really strive not to be defensive.

but there's still times when these conversations come up when I do get that feeling of like, oh, wait, am I going to be on trial here or something? And I think what's crucial about the sort of approach that we would take as educators is

is not to say, like, straight off, you shouldn't have that emotion, but rather actually help someone understand where that emotion is coming from and how can they get to a different spot. Boys will be dealing with a lot of insecurities. They're trying to figure out who they are. They're trying to figure out who they're attracted to. There's this expectation that they put on themselves and their peers put on them that they'll be somehow like this incredible Casanova despite having never, like, had a conversation before. Mm-hm.

You know, that can feel like an awful lot of pressure and expectation. But I think one of the really key things that we do as educators is to give them that sense of like they are important, their identity is important. And if we have a conversation about masculinity, you know, these expectations about what it is to be a man, that isn't a conversation about them, but it's a conversation about how they relate to that.

how they're influenced by that, how are they pressured by that, and help them navigate that system of expectations to do that differently, do it better, do it better for them, do it better for others. Okay, time for our final story, COP.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is to be held in Brazil later this year. Okay, I know exactly what story this is. Oh my God, they're cutting down the rainforest, right? Yes! Honestly, you couldn't write the irony. A new four-lane highway...

Cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. It's essentially to ease traffic to the city because 50,000 people and world leaders are going to descend on the city in November, probably by air travel. And I want to highlight some brilliant reporting by Ione Wells for the BBC because we always want to highlight good mainstream media reporting when we see it.

I only reported on the forest felling with a clear description of why this is a problem for our climate. Because...

To quote,

and her concerns about a fragmented ecosystem and the loss of natural habitat for wildlife. We'll link that article in the show notes. Yeah. And...

This story has otherwise gone quite largely underreported alongside, you know, other aspects of the conference. For example, last week it was reported by the Center for Climate Reporting and The Guardian that the world's largest PR agency, Edelman, is in talks to work with the COP30 team despite its prior connections to a major trade group accused of lobbying to roll back measures to protect the Amazon from deforestation.

Okay, sorry. It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous and ironic. They've also doubled the airport capacity in advance. Oh my God. I've also often felt like COP is just a bit of a joke. Like everyone getting in their private jets to get there and a whole lot of talk and not a whole lot of action. And that's what some small nations, countries that are facing irrevocable change from rising seas say as well. They say that

Essentially, COP doesn't work. And islands like Vanuatu took this to international courts instead. And in 2023, Vanuatu won a historic vote at the United Nations that meant the UN International Court of Justice could establish for the first time the obligations countries have to address the climate crisis.

and also the consequences if they don't. So they couldn't wait for COP? No, they literally cannot wait for action at all. And this is the very point of the climate debate, isn't it? There are voices in the climate space that have been historically silenced and they're usually the people most affected by it. COP30 is going to be brought right to the heart of the Amazon.

But will it include the inhabitants of the Amazon? The majority of the people in this region is made up of black, mixed race and indigenous peoples, communities that have historically had less access to opportunities for active participation in global forums, which, you know, last time was in Dubai, where oil barons were invited. And by the way, like oil deals were made behind the scenes. So while we are focused on COP being a diplomatic event, what we're missing is...

is the fact that people with lived experience can contribute expertise, their ancestral knowledge, to climate solutions.

And it reminds me of an interview we did way back in 2022 with Thimali Kodikara on our episode Climate Frontlines. Thimali is a producer and she was the co-host of the Mothers of Invention podcast, which highlights the stories and innovations of black, brown and indigenous women and girls who are at the forefront of climate change solutions and activism. And here is what she said about putting those people at the heart of climate solutions. ♪

The climate crisis is a global crisis. It's affecting everybody on planet Earth. It has been affecting certain communities for entire generations, for hundreds of years at this point. And we're so willing to talk about carbon or animals or biodiversity, which is all great and all absolutely true and critical that we know about all these things.

But we also have to recognise the importance of the justice issues that have had fallout from all of this. The human rights aspect of climate change, and none of that is being reported on nearly as much as it should. Could you just tell us really, like, what are the main human costs? What are the biggest human costs of climate change that are happening right now? We're talking about people who are having to migrate away from their homes,

people who are unable to grow food on their landscapes.

People who are developing new diseases through their water systems. People whose homes are literally disappearing into the water. Like these aren't imagined dystopian stories from the future, which is how the UK media has sort of described climate to us as like something that will happen sometime in the distant future.

But that's because it was going to happen to the UK later than it has been happening to largely black and brown, indigenous, global south, people, Arctic people all over the world. So now we have to start connecting the dots between what's been happening to people far, far away from us and realising that by supporting them, we can support ourselves too.

Time now for Eyes on Palestine. Now, a few weeks ago, during our Eyes on Palestine segment, we spoke about the dangers of being a journalist in general, but being a journalist particularly in Gaza. And this week, that has just

really come to the forefront. Yeah. There were two journalists, Palestinian journalists, who were killed in airstrikes on Monday night. Mohamed Mansour, who worked for Palestine Today, and Hossam Shabbat, who was a correspondent for Al Jazeera and also for Middle East Eye, where I'm partially working. And...

Look, they knew this was coming. Hossam Shabbat had actually written a letter before his death to be published in the instance of his death. He'd been put on a list by the Israeli army. That I found really haunting, like pre-preparing a statement because you know that your death is going to be imminent. I mean... Yeah. It's not a secret that Israel has been targeting journalists. This is the sixth Al Jazeera journalist alone that has been killed. The total number of press workers killed in this...

war or since October 2023 is 208. And this should be completely shocking. You know, when we were trained as journalists, right, we were told that journalists are protected under international law. You wear press vests and you're not supposed to be touched by foreign armies.

And I studied the case of Jamal Khashoggi, right, who was the Saudi journalist who was murdered, widely believed by the Saudi Arabian state. And at the time, the media spoke in outrage, in uniform outrage against this. You couldn't read an article about Saudi Arabia that didn't mention this. Saudi Arabia was shunned by diplomats around the world for a long time.

But we seem to feel differently about Palestinian journalists. These deaths, they were not reported almost anywhere in our media. I saw Hossam's name mentioned in one Guardian article about the airstrikes sort of lower down in the article. I didn't see it anywhere.

anywhere else. I first read about it in an Instagram post from AJ+. Yeah. Al Jazeera, of course, was publishing a lot about it and a lot of Middle Eastern outlets, news outlets. It was everywhere. But here in the West, it's not just that we don't care. Why don't our media care more about Palestinian journalists' lives? This is something that normally is not controversial to the media. If a journalist is killed in the line of fire...

Everyone in the media is pretty upset about it, but journalists from Palestine seem to carry different value in our currency. And look, by now it's very easy to be desensitized to these stories about airstrikes and casualties, civilian casualties. But something that really brought it home for me was that the other day I managed to interview a doctor in Gaza while I was working at Middle East Eye. His name is Dr. Mohamed Mustafa, and he's volunteering as a medic in Gaza from Australia.

And not only are they facing now, you know, the renewal of full scale attacks, but they are also crippled after weeks and weeks of an aid blockade into Gaza and electricity cuts that has completely stripped them of the ability to respond to this situation.

I'm going to play a clip with the interview with Dr. Mustafa, but if you want to listen to it in full, search Middle East Eye on YouTube. The bombings are continuous right now in Gaza. There's something out of a horror film, people screaming, children lifeless on the floor. It was about seven or eight doctors and, you know, we had 156 victims.

deaths in Gaza City itself. We had hundreds injured as well. We just saw women and children, even before the ceasefire, especially more so children than women. It's still harrowing just to think about because it's been three days and I'm still running on the adrenaline of that night because of just the screams and the smell of burning flesh that was coming in. I can see in your face just how

affected you are by these pictures in your brain. And it is really, really hard, I think, for anyone from afar to understand it. Following your social media, people will see a reality on the ground that they will not get on many news broadcasts. It is so difficult to convey. But the media face additional hurdles to do with graphic censorship of distressing imagery and

There is, however, one unforgettable image on your Instagram feed that we can share. And it shows a boy just staring at a wall for an hour after reportedly losing all of his family members. Is there anything that you can say to people witnessing this through a screen about what you have learned seeing it up so close?

You know, when you see it, because obviously like everybody else, I'm one of the millions of people around the world that have seen these images over the last few months. And sometimes it's very hard to humanize what you see when you see so many lifeless bodies. They become just graphic images. But when you're there and you have these children screaming out to you in pain, and you have children reaching from underneath the beds,

when there was these mass casualties, I had one child grab my ankle asking me to help them. I'm sorry I get emotional about this but they're human beings to me, they are people, their lives matter and

It's very, very hard as a doctor to know that if they were in the UK, if they were in Australia, even if we had a mass casualty event like this, there are so many of them that we could have saved if we had the right equipment, if we had the medical personnel, we could have done something, we could have helped these people, but instead I had to watch them die.

Thank you for listening. Tomorrow, we will be diving into the question of sanctions, which might be something you associate as humanitarian action our government takes when something bad is happening in the world, but which civilians from those countries might often disagree with. So we will be speaking to a number of civilians from those countries and one of the best reporters in the world on this topic.

Tune in tomorrow to listen. If you want to support MediaStorm, 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 episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast. So please do tell your friends.

You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Wadia and follow the show via at MediaStormPod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Sam Fire.