News Watch: Chagos Islands, GB News queerphobia, and Sweden's mass shooting victims
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Hi, MediaStormers. It's Thursday, and you know what that means. We're dissecting the week's main stories. Finding the facts behind the fear-mongering. Calling out the most unhinged headlines. And helping you read the news critically. It's your essential guide to the mainstream media. 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. I don't think that the mainstream media was lying. I think we missed the overarching story. Welcome to MediaStorm's Newswatch, helping you to make sense of the mainstream media. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson.

This week's media storms: Chagos Islands, GB News queerphobia, and did the Swedish shooter target migrants?

Hey, Helena. Hey, Tilda. Look around. We're in Studio One today. God, it feels good up here. That won't really mean anything to our listeners, but we record at Spotify. We're usually in Studio Two. And now we've been upgraded to what looks like a very traitorish round table vibe in Studio One. We are now doing YouTube versions of the podcast as well, so you can actually check it out. How was your weekend? Good.

It was great, actually. I ended up doing karaoke with one of my favourite bands. What? How? Wait, are you talking about The National? No, I bloody wish. Realise I said one of my favourite bands. Oh, okay. Not my favourite band. Come on, if I did karaoke with The National, do you think I'd be, like, sitting here alive today? Yeah, I was like, what?

Why did you come in? Exactly. Still pretty cool, though. Which band? Yes, the band is called Los Campesinos. They are actually so amazing, and their lyrics are actually very political, and I was just...

so happy that night and on stage they have this sign that said like dignity, healthcare and love to all trans people and I was just like this band are the best band in the world. So how did you go from watching them on stage to doing karaoke with them? Oh you know just got invited to a very cool after party no big deal. You know what I reckon my after party this weekend was cooler than yours. Oh really? Tell me. Yeah it's

So I went to this, you know, I should actually plug this. I went to this rave that a friend of mine threw. It was the first one of what is going to be a series. It's called Healy Case. So it was so good for the first one. He was trying to hustle to get us to invite people. And I was like, you know, but is it going to be good? But it was so good. Now I'm doing you a favor if you come along. But then all the DJs came to our place for an after party. Wow. We sound so cool on today's podcast. Well, we would if we didn't.

keep talking about how cool it made us. Yeah, that is true. Also, just for balance, you know, we love balance here. And just for balance, I am going to spend this week talking

every night watching the Stenders' 40th anniversary. So, you know, the coolness comes in waves. You know what I mean? Okay, news. Any media storms? Many, many a media storm. But just quickly first, okay, I was flicking through the front pages on Tuesday where naturally at that point, peace talks between Russia and the US over the war in Ukraine made progress.

pretty much every single front page. Apart from, take a guess. The Daily Mail. Correct. Correct.

Which led with, take a guess? Something to do with wokeness. Bullseye. Okay, so the male led with a Kemi Badenock quote about how it's time to get off our knees and start fighting for Western values. It's just PR. And also they said that she's declared war on poisonous woke ideology. It's just like funny how they could be writing about an actual war but instead they decide to write about a made up war. Also,

Side note, shout out to the Daily Star. I get a real kick out of their headline front page every day. Honestly, so they were the only other front page to not be reporting about the Russia-Ukraine war. And their front page reports that Gen Z are bonkers for bangers as they ditch vegan diets in droves. Honestly, they could have put that headline through a keyword generator. For real.

Anyway, on to some real media storms. What have you got for me today? So there's no more media storm story than one where the most important voices are totally missing. And that's why I want to talk about the Chagos Islands. Okay, so I've seen this as like a passing story in the news now and again, but I've never really had it fully explained. That probably pretty much captures most Brits' relationships.

with the Chagos Islands, which is one of the things that makes it so weird that it's our government deciding their fate. So you probably saw it in the news a few months ago when Keir Starmer agreed to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, and I say back in inverted commas. It's in the news this week because the former prime minister of Mauritius, with whom Starmer made that deal, has been arrested on money laundering charges. And so this has basically revived a heated debate with Mauritius

Lots of MPs all disagreeing about whether or not this is a good arrangement for Britain. Okay, but I feel like there's a bit of a backstory here.

Okay. It all began in 1965. Start of any good story. When Mauritius, which was then a British colony, sacrificed the Chagos Islands to the UK in exchange for its own independence. The UK proceeded to expel all Chagossians from the 60 Island archipelago to clear way for a military base, which at least to the US for 50 years in exchange for discounts on missiles. Well,

Welcome to colonial history. Human rights groups basically believe that the US also used this as a torture center for terrorist suspects. And meanwhile, Chagossians, who originally descended from Southeast Africans that had been forcibly taken to work the islands in the first place, once again dispelled

all over Mauritius, the Seychelles, and eventually the UK. And they've remained so ever since. That was a really fun story. Yeah. Well, now Starmer has, you know, generously agreed to give the Chagos to Mauritius and allow Chagossians to begin to return to all the islands except for the biggest one, which will continue to be a US military base for the next 99 years for a price. Anyway, lots of people seem really unhappy about this. Like,

The US complained, the Tories have complained, even Mauritius has complained because they want more money. And all the meanwhile, the Chagossians don't get an inch of sovereignty over their own territory. And this is really what it comes down to. We're objectively excluded from pretty much all of the discussions and consultations.

Now, one Chagossian man, Frankie Bontemp, who's chair of the Chagossian Voices organization, he's determinedly been pushing Chagossian Voices onto the media. And I want to commend, you know, journalists and outlets who have platformed their voices. Here's him speaking on Sky News with another Chagos Islander living in the UK called Jenny.

For us, I feel like today is a day of mourning, mourning for the Checosian people, like myself, like the vast majority, because we've been excluded from those negotiations and they decided the fate of the island, the future of the island, without even consulting the population. The Checosian people who are at the heart of this tragedy, they should be aware of that. So if talking about historic, historic for who? We are voiceless.

I don't know what else to say, you know, because we feel betrayed again. Mauritius is not my home. The UK is not my home. Chagos is my home. They're saying they want to take us back. Then take us back. If you put me on a ship tomorrow and tell me to go back to the Chagos Islands, I will go. We've been fighting against all odds to become...

somebody and we still haven't but that is because we do not have our feet planted on our homeland. We can't fight for something that we are not attached to anymore but we are, our heart, our soul, our blood is there.

But something else that really stood out to me about this story is that while it might feel quite niche or remote to a lot of us, it's actually a very resounding theme in geopolitics, right? Where the people most affected by a geopolitical arrangement are completely left out of the decision making. Look at

Gazans, who we've been told by Trump would just love to be ethnically cleansed from their territory. Look at Ukraine, who this week were excluded from talks between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia. That one, Europe and our media actually got pretty upset about because guess who else was excluded from those talks? Europe? Europe. Yeah, bang on.

But this is the thing, we think it's a problem when we're excluded by extrapolation. It is a problem when others are excluded, when it is them affected. So yeah, I just want us to remember that when we next think it's okay to leave others out of their own stories.

More than 65,000 people have reportedly complained to Ofcom over a GB News broadcast. Now, when I first saw this story, I thought, eye roll, here we go again. Another story about something outrageous being said on GB News. Like, should we even give this airtime? What's new? But then I looked at the numbers. So, first of all, I'll take it back to the beginning. Let's see what sparked the complaints. A warning, this clip that we are going to play is homophobic. It's queerphobic.

The segment happened on the 22nd of January and it was in reference to a sermon by a US bishop at Trump's inauguration. And if you didn't see this, a bishop gave the sermon at the inauguration and within it essentially implored Trump to have mercy upon immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals. Here's what she said. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country

We're scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families. Some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation.

But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

So good. So it was, I mean, it was brave, right? Yeah, and it's incontestable, you know, when it is put like that. Absolutely. That's religion at its best. Now, after this, on a GB News segment, three shockingly all-white and all-male presenters sat on GB News and discussed this event during Josh Howey's headliner show. Also, genuinely shocking is that they are apparently all comedians. What?

Anyway, here's what happened. Yeah, and also, by the way, the type of church that she belongs to, the diocese, it talks about the full inclusion of LGBTQ plus persons. I just want to say that includes those. Yeah. The full inclusion. How did she get the gig, Josh? Well, nothing like that, I'm sure. But I don't know what you're saying. All right, Mel next. Steve.

Did he just say pedos? Yeah, on a news program. Like, first of all... Why? Okay, this is ridiculous, which we'll get into. But second of all, like, how is this supposedly news...

I mean, a very good point. Like shouting pedos on the television is not news. Let's just apply that to the title GB News as a whole. So for a bit of context and history, during the fight for LGBT rights in the UK and beyond, opponents to the queer community falsely linked homosexuality to paedophilia and

and exploited moral panic to resist equal rights and to push back against, for example, gay marriage being legalized or even being gay, you know, being decriminalized.

It was notably seen in the 70s and 80s with media and political figures using the trope to attack the community. And we have seen those same tropes being used against the transgender community in more recent years. You know, they're indoctrinating children, etc, etc. Yeah, it's such a go-to weapon to demonize minorities. You see it also about migrants, right? You see it about Yasmin Benoit, a sexual activist who was on our podcast last week, said,

She'd been accused of grooming by critics. So you said that this had a huge number of complaints and something about the number caught your eye. Why is that? Okay, well, as I mentioned, more than 65,000 people have complained about this segment to Ofcom, which is nearly as many complaints as Ofcom had all last year. Wow.

Wow. Last year in total, Ofcom received just over 69,000 complaints and the most complaints about single programme received 17,366 individual complaints. And I think this just shows us the power of community and the power of social media when it's being used for good because part of the reason that this rhetoric on GB News has received complaints is because the advocacy group

The Good Law Project, who have been on MediaStorm before Series 1, check out our fourth ever episode about trans rights, well, they set up a portal to collect complaints. And they presented the complaints to Ofcom on Monday. And Ofcom had already received about another thousand complaints about the broadcast directly. Okay. Has GB News responded? Yes. Yes.

By essentially doubling down on their message. Okay. Well, that should make Ofcom's job easy, at least. You would hope. So Josh Howey, who made the comment, has since argued on GB News that he did not say LGB people are paedophiles, trans people are paedophiles, or intersex people are paedophiles. What I said was

What I am saying is that for some people, the full inclusion of the LGBTQ plus includes paedophiles. Which people? You look confused. Which people? I know. And also it's just doubling down, right? Well, in response to which people, Mr Howie says that some paedophile advocacy organisations have argued that they fit in within the Q in the acronym and therefore his comments

that the full inclusion of LGBTQ plus persons includes pedos is like factually accurate. Wow. That is honestly like saying that because ISIS

say that they represent Muslims, that, you know, there should be no Muslims. Right. That's kind of the false equivalence he's making, right? Yeah, false equivalence. He also, by the way, in his defence of his comment, says that trans people aren't born trans. They choose to be trans and nobody knows what's included within the Q+. It's deliberately open-ended so anybody can identify it, including paedophiles. Like, this is just queerphobia at its most blatant. Even if this context was...

appropriate. It's context that you would have to include if you are planning on just throwing out the claim that LGBTQIA plus includes paedophiles. Right, exactly. And what it points to for me is just how emboldened GB News is to make this comment in the first place and not expect a backlash, like just think that it's completely fine. And then to double down on

when they do receive a backlash, signals to me that they just believe they're above the law. Also, bearing in mind, Ofcom has fined GB News before a significant amount of £100,000 last year for breaking due impartiality rules when the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given an uncontested platform to promote his government just before the general election.

So also to like not be worried about another fine just signals to me that they believe it is acceptable, normal, to spread dangerous rhetoric in this way. And while I would love

would love to ignore GB News. We have to accept that it is having an effect on the media landscape. You know, I think when this kind of rhetoric is as profitable as it is, fines like that just don't faze these companies. So they got fined for being a mouthpiece to Rishi Sunak. They basically are doing the same for reform right now. There was actually a

a piece of research in Byline Times this week that basically showed how the Reform Party has been artificially inflated by particular media outlets, right, who've been giving it a share of media coverage so not in keeping with its 5C share of the UK Parliament. I mean, I'm talking like 200 mentions per seat compared to one per seat for the Conservatives. It was something like that. And guess which outlet is...

is the biggest culprit? Well, it's not going to be a media storm. Actually, it might be. It might be actually at this point, yeah. No, GB News, I guess. GB News. Right. GB News. GB News.

I have an update from a previous Newswatch, which is that the victims of the Orebro shooting have been identified. This was Sweden's biggest mass shooting, in which 11 people were killed on the 4th of February. I mentioned it last week, right, how it wasn't stated anywhere in words that the shooter, Rickard Andersson, was white, he was a white man.

how it received proportionally quite little coverage for the scale of the event. And at the time when I was talking about that, that was just an exercise in comparison. But I do think that it

it is particularly stark now that the identities of the victims have been revealed. The victims were mainly immigrants from nations like Syria, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan, Somalia. And let's add to those profiles. 28-year-old Salim Iskef from Syria, training to become a care assistant. Nursing home employee and mother of four Elsa Tekle from Eritrea.

Syrian baker Bassam Aishaleh, 68-year-old maths teacher Aziza H. from Kurdistan, Niloufar Debaneh, 46, another nursing assistant from Iran. I read the news pretty widely and I did not realise that this shooter targeted people of colour, migrants. Was this a deliberate targeting of migrants? Well...

The thing is, Swedish police say they have still not been able to identify a motive. They describe the shooter as a lone wolf. They flag mental health issues. But look, this man targeted a school that taught adults the Swedish language. And almost all of the victims were of foreign background and they were people of color. But even as this felt inevitable to witnesses who mentioned it at the start,

police suppressed information, not just about the shooter, which is quite standard, but about the victims. And it came down to journalists...

and community members of the victims to say, hi, like, what is happening here? When are you going to see us? So I want to commend BBC journalists Joel Gunter and Paul Kirby and Swedish journalists who revealed these identities a week before the police even confirmed them. And the police are yet to say that there was any ideological motive. Wow. The thing is, of course...

the media doesn't want to spotlight this type of crime because if their job is to ask questions, the obvious question is, why did this happen? And they don't have to look far to allocate blame for demonising and dehumanising refugees and migrants. Completely. And, you know, this also contradicts the narrative that media has been insisting on and that politicians are policymaking on, which is migrants are the villains, not the victims. But in this case...

The biggest incident of mass violence, the biggest gun crime in Sweden, it was not caused by migrants, it was caused by anti-migrant sentiment. So as we did in our first ever episode, I want to ask a question. In its alarmist coverage of migration, is the media reporting on a crisis or creating one?

Okay, we need to wrap up, but can we just take one minute to have a laugh at some of the... Please. Yeah, please let's laugh at the Home Office's latest tactic of deterring migrants from Albania. Have you seen these videos? These are the, like...

black and white shots of a really run down UK with graffiti and like bins overflowing. Yeah. There are these like videos that have been put out on Facebook and targeted at Albanian people who are, I guess, thinking of coming over to the UK. Or being trafficked to the UK. Or possibly being trafficked to the UK. And yeah, these sort of like dramatic black and white shots are meant to be deterring them from coming. But it...

What they say in the video, it just really made me laugh. Because the video is essentially saying like, hey, don't come here. Like Brexit doesn't work and life is too expensive. And I'm like, yeah, we've been trying to say that. Like we've been trying to tell you. So all these things we don't admit to ourselves. Like, oh yeah, like Brexit might have some responsibility for the cost of living crisis. Or I also saw loads of them saying it's really racist here. We get discriminated against. Yeah, it's like, hello, I've been trying to say that.

Yeah, we won't admit it to ourselves, but we're like falling over ourselves to admit it to Albanians. Honestly, the irony. Time for eyes on Palestine, keeping up the media attention or pointing to the lack of it when it comes to the ongoing onslaught in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. Helena, what's on our radar? Journalism can be a dangerous job. While there are and always have been risks associated with covering the news, in recent years, those risks have escalated.

And this week I saw that the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, they began keeping records of journalist deaths in 1992. And in 2024, last year, a record 124 journalists and media workers were killed. And that's the most in any year since their records began. The Israeli military accounted for 85 of the deaths.

The CPJ believes that in 10 cases, there is evidence journalists were deliberately targeted by Israeli fighters. And of course, Palestinian freelance journalists, including those kind of people who essentially just became journalists overnight,

have been the primary source of on-the-ground coverage in Gaza since October 2023 because Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza. Now, this news from the CPJ broke on February 12th, so quite recently, and...

We searched the coverage and found that the story was covered in the Press Gazette and in CNN. But it was not covered in the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press. I mean, you know, I could go on, but it just feels like do some of the world's most well-known news agencies not think that this is news?

Thank you for listening. Tune in tomorrow where, for our deep dive, we will be looking at anti-Semitism, a topic we've wanted to do for a really long time. We'll be joined by two guests, one from the UK, Andrew Feinstein.

and another from the US. His name's Alex Kane. See you tomorrow. 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 spread 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. Recent years, those risks have escalated.

And this week I saw that the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, they began keeping records of journalist deaths in 1992. And in 2024, last year, a record 124 journalists and media workers were killed. And that's the most in any year since their records began. The Israeli military accounted for 85 of the deaths.

The CPJ believes that in 10 cases, there is evidence journalists were deliberately targeted by Israeli fighters.

And of course, Palestinian freelance journalists, including those kind of people who essentially just became journalists overnight, have been the primary source of on the ground coverage in Gaza since October 2023, because Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza. Now, this news from the CPJ broke on February 12th, so quite recently, and

We searched the coverage and found that the story was covered in the Press Gazette and in CNN. But it was not covered in the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press. I mean, you know, I could go on, but it just feels like do some of the world's most well-known news agencies not think that this is news?

Thank you for listening. Tune in tomorrow where, for our deep dive, we will be looking at anti-Semitism, a topic we've wanted to do for a really long time. We'll be joined by two guests, one from the UK, Andrew Feinstein.

And another from the US. His name's Alex Kane. See you tomorrow. 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 spread a podcast.

so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at MatildaMal, at HelenaWadier, and follow the show via at MediaStormPod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadier and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Sam Fire.