News Watch: LA protests, Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and all sides of assisted dying
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Helena, tell me about your smear test. No. I just have the show agenda in front of me and it says, begin with HW, smear test story. Okay, hit me. You know how I will take every opportunity to promote MediaStorm? And try and get us new listeners. I just know where this is going. So...

I went to have my smear test recently. Very important, by the way, everybody, if you get your letter, please go to your cervical screening. I don't know if like this is a thing. It's sort of like sometimes when you get blood tests, when they chat to you because they think that you might be nervous or whatever. She was like, so, how busy day? And I was like, yeah, yeah. And she was like, oh, what do you do? It's like, oh, I'm a journalist. And at this point, you know, she's lubing up the speculum. Okay. And she was like, she

She was like, oh, that's really interesting. So do you write for lots of different people? And I was like, oh, I don't really write. I do podcasting. At this point, my cervix is fully open. And she's like, oh, so what's your podcast called? And I'm like, yeah, no, it's called Media Storm. And it's really important, actually, because it's elevating the voices missing from the news media. She's like rattling around in there.

And she's like, oh, that sounds very interesting. Very important. I'm going, yeah, yeah, I think it is. Just in today's media climate, it's particularly important. And I'm just like chatting about media storms. So thank you, Nurse Becky. Thank you, Nurse Becky. Do you know what...

Would have been even better was if we had actually named MediaStorm one of the name suggestions that we were given. Oh my God, is it time to tell this story? Is it really time to tell this story? So the context being that when we were naming MediaStorm, the podcast platform that we were on wanted to make it like a little bit more diverse. Yeah, like when we were launching MediaStorm, there was a bit of excitement within...

some of the podcast world that we were two female journalists, young female investigative journalists. And they really sort of wanted that to be the USP in the name. Yeah. So they were just throwing ideas around, you know, could it be like she investigates? She. Yeah. And then they were like, oh, I've got it. I've got it. It's like...

it's like the insider but instead of the insider it's the inside her and i was like i think that that might be a little bit rapey imagine if like i was getting my smear test and i was like yeah my focus is called the inside her oh my god i actually wish we had named it that just for the sake of this story oh my god really landed

Something else made us really laugh this week. Helena sent me an article in the Daily Mail. It was about some rock-solid figures that showed almost one million people in Britain cannot speak English. That was Tilda doing the capitalisation of the headline, in case anybody missed that. Yeah. But get this, the first line of the article said, almost one million people in England cannot English well or at all, new figures have shown. LAUGHTER

Like the irony is too good. Don't throw stones from glass houses, Daily Mail. Incredible.

And finally, before we kick off Newswatch, next week is Refugee Week. And we'll be doing an episode on this theme, so stay tuned for that. But also, we will both be at the Club and Grand on Thursday evening for a special comedy gig, which is called Stand Up for Refugees. The gig is organised by the wonderful Milo Edwards, who was our live show guest last month.

And every penny raised from ticket sales will support Refugee Action, which is a charity who work in welcoming and supporting refugees and campaigning for their rights. So come along. There's amazing comedians performing. Olga Koch, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Sakisa, Rajiv Kharia.

Don't know who that is. Rajiv Kharia. I've never heard of him, but, you know, definitely not like married him or anything. Definitely. That's Thursday, 19th of June at the Clapham Grand. Tickets available via Dice.

Now on with Newswatch. What are we covering? We'll cover the clashes between protesters and police in LA. Then, as the assisted dying bill comes back into Parliament, we'll look at how we can centre the marginalised groups with the highest stakes and the lowest say. And we'll end with eyes on Palestine, the Freedom Flotilla, or so-called selfie yacht, and what the media was too busy bashing Greta Thunberg to report. No fear, no hate!

Come after me, arrest me, let's just get it over with. Tough guy. If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters. The ship of fools, as I call it. TikTok yachts. People would be wrong to seek an assisted death if the law is changed. Frankly, it gives me the shivers.

Welcome to MediaStorms Newswatch, helping you get your head around the headlines. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's MediaStorms. LA protests, Gaza freedom flotilla, and solidarity across sides in the assisted dying debate.

What is going on in LA? What is going on in LA? So many things. The Trump administration ordered a wave of immigration raids. These are carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers or ICE officers. Trump is on a mass deportation campaign.

an aggressive and inhumane push to raise arrest and deportation numbers. We're talking about arrests of over 2,000 people a day with these treacherous aims to scale up to 3,000 arrests a day. Miller setting a new quota of 3,000 arrests per day to include more than just migrants with criminal records. Miller reportedly asked ICE officials, "Hey,

Why aren't you at Home Depot? The narrative coming out of it is almost like a game. There's massive pressure, basically, to deliver optics

of a crackdown. Exactly. The recent raids have affected garment district workers, day laborers, restaurant workers, and agents also arrested the president of a major California union who was serving as a community observer during the raids. The raids were also carried out in areas of the city with prominent Latino populations.

Some people who were arrested in the raids have already been deported. The Trump administration has not released a deportation count because the White House kind of stopped publishing this figure. But there is evidence that some of these deportations have already happened.

These raids mark a turning point. The focus has changed from detaining and deporting migrants with actual or alleged criminal histories to a broader deportation sweep of people who do not possess US citizenship. People from across LA took to the streets on Friday to demonstrate against the series of brutal crackdowns. And we're recording on Wednesday. It's still ongoing.

How did Donald Trump respond to these protests? Well, he deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to the city on Friday. And then on Monday, he ordered another 2,000 troops and 700 Marines to deploy to the city as well. To be fair, those are military bodies deployed to a protest.

And this is unprecedented. The National Guard is usually deployed by order of the state governor, in this case, California's governor, Gavin Newsom. But Trump just circumvented this step by invoking a rarely used federal law, arguing that the protests constituted a form of rebellion against the authority of the government in the United States. What you're witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order.

and a national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We're not going to let that happen. To put this in context, this is the first time the National Guard has been activated without request of the state's governor since 1965.

This is a real sign of authoritarianism. Gavin Newsom, California state governor, accused Trump of manufacturing chaos and violence, also of an illegal act that was putting fuel on this fire. This isn't just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes. This moment we have feared has arrived. Trump then called for the arrest of Gavin Newsom

in what has basically become an absurd political pantomime. And let's be clear, political campaigning built on what is, and we have to remember, a deeply personal, upsetting and existential crisis for millions of people in America. Yeah. But what has been a widely reported narrative? Trump described the protesters as violent insurrectionists hellbent on destroying the city. Generations of army heroes...

did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third world lawlessness. This is such a sinister narrative and also incredibly ironic given the events of January 6th, 2021. But let's be clear, okay? It was Trump, not the protesters, who escalated the situation in Los Angeles. It was peaceful until just a few minutes ago. Police have come out.

and started doing this. Trump's sitting there claiming he saved LA from being completely obliterated. By its own residents. By its own residents. But it was only on Sunday, after the National Guard troops were deployed, that the LA police chief observed that the protests were getting increasingly worse and more violent. Because bear in mind, these protests were largely peaceful.

Peaceful protest! They chant that, you know, peaceful protest, again and again and again. These demonstrators peacefully making their point those raids must stop. There wasn't a real crisis in LA until Trump intervened. But isn't that exactly what he wants?

And I want to make an observation here because you always see when legitimate protests become violent rioting, you always see the excuse or the explanation given that, oh, there were extremists piggybacking on this or people trying to sabotage it. You know, at the US Capitol riots, for example, people who defended those who were imprisoned for the riots, they were saying they didn't trigger the violence. The violence was triggered by Antifa, extremist left undercover who rolled things up.

up. You saw this with the racist summer riots in the UK last year, you know, accusations that there were anti-racist violent mobs. And while there always are in protests, small fringes, radical movements, and to be clear, violent disorder is not the same as legitimate protest. That is a distraction that is not the main story and that is not the same.

is when the antagonists, the violent antagonists are state agents, law enforcement, military. And I wanna point out that if this were Turkey or China, where the military was deployed to a protest, the media would have no hesitation using terms like authoritarian, anti-democratic, state violence,

but it's the US. With the cost of their deployment more than £100 million, the question once again is whether the presence of federalised National Guard and 700 active US Marines is necessary on the streets of LA. And ultimately, that's a really interesting point because these have been labelled as LA protests in the media, but is the focus on the wrong side? Like, surely the focus should be on the people who are attacking...

the citizens of L.A. Right, because the protests are sort of a defensive front that the community has built to keep ICE out of their community. Exactly, exactly. I just felt like protest wasn't quite the right word. And I want to draw attention to an interview on LBC with Zoe Gardner, who does policy research and campaigns often around refugee rights and who is also part of the Stop Trump Coalition movement.

group here in the UK. Just take a listen to this line of questioning. This line on LBC News. What do you make of what's happening, Zoe? Horrific scenes that we're seeing out of Los Angeles, this level of extreme violence perpetrated by the state and by immigration enforcement officers. It's the inevitable outcome of a programme of violent so-called mass deportations. It is normal. It is completely right that

that local people, Angelenos, are standing up to that, filming what the authorities are doing and the violence that they are perpetrating. I mean, you could also say that the protesters are just stopping the law enforcement agents, ICE agents, as they're known in the States, from carrying out their lawful work. When you watch these videos, you see parents screaming about, you know, my children are in school, who's going to go and pick them up? And they're being dragged away.

by force and packed into the back of vans. There is no justification that that is some kind of legitimate exercise of state power and state force. That is a fascist imagery. Finally, Zoe, would you accept that in the end in this current situation, the authorities have to win? Because what's the alternative? People can do whatever they want.

That's not at all the case. The state is not always right. What is right is to stand up for people's human rights, for the rule of law. And Angelenos are doing that and they must win. And it is the state that must retreat in this case because the state is wrong.

What a wild suggestion from the LBC presenter that in the end, the authorities have to win. Because what is the alternative lawlessness? You know, that, by the way, was exactly the excuse given by Nazi enablers and Nazi collaborators at the Nuremberg trials. I mean, this was literally a promotion of authoritarianism on mainstream media.

news and sorry isn't your job or at least part of your job as a media organization to hold power to account yeah why do we why do we exist actually because ultimately like if the state doesn't have its way then there's just going to be anarchy why else is this a media storm story well i particularly want to talk about an attack on the press no sorry multiple literal attacks on the press

So over the last few days, a CNN crew, including CNN reporter Jason Carroll, were removed by police from a protest zone in downtown L.A. with their hands behind their backs. Two security personnel working with a CNN crew were also briefly detained. An L.A. Daily News reporter, Rhiann Menah, was shot by Homeland Security agents with pepper balls.

What? This situation

The situation has now rapidly deteriorated. The LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters. You just f***ing shut the f*** up. A New York Post reporter was hit in the head. Nick Stern, a British news photographer, was hit in the thigh. I'll read you a couple of headlines from the BBC. British photographer hit by non-lethal bullet in LA. British photographer injured by plastic bullet in LA protests.

Firstly, it's the passive voice here that I have an issue with. Like, they were hit by a non-lethal bullet in LA. By who? It's just this bullet. It's just rogue bullets flying around. Goddamn plastic bullets flying around everywhere. Where did they come from? I don't know. He was hit by the police or he was hit by a National Guard agent. I mean, I don't know because you didn't tell me. Right. Yeah. Rubber bullet, non-lethal bullet. I get why you include that in the headline because it's non-lethal. And if you say that he was shot by the police, there's

there's quite a distinction there if it is lethal however it was not harmless right no these are not harmless in the case of nick stern he had to have emergency surgery to remove the bullet from his leg he lost a considerable amount of blood that is not conveyed by that headline that should be the headline these weapons carried by ice and lapd are dangerous and they can be lethal and by the way another thing that should be a headline is that this is a

This is a crime. This is a crime. The cops are committing criminal offenses, a lot of them on camera. All press have explicit legal protections in California.

So update your headlines accordingly to reflect that, that any member of the press being deliberately targeted is illegal. These people are standing there with press vests. They're marked microphones. We have such double standards for authorities to which we are aligned when they commit authoritarian acts.

offenses or international law offenses compared to states that are not our allies. It's honestly the geopolitical bias is like the most persistent in media. Israel can target journalists. America can target journalists. God forbid Turkey as a recent example doing the same thing. Can I end on something positive? Please. I think it's kind of

amazing to see the people of LA turning up to defend their community. They have such community spirit and they are defending the diversity of their city. It's nice to know that people care about their immigrant neighbors, that they don't see these people as strangers. They see them as their neighbors and thriving parts of the community that are worth defending. The footage of their solidarity is really, really moving and

And for anyone who is in LA or across America who is standing up against this state violence, we see you and thank you for what you're doing.

Assisted dying is in our news cycle these days. It's coming and going every few months due to legislation progressing uneasily through Parliament. Next Friday, UK MPs will vote for the final time on the Terminally Ill Adults or End of Life Bill, which would allow terminally ill patients with six months to live or less to end their lives with medical assistance.

A separate but similar bill in Scotland is at its second stage, also seeking to allow terminally ill adults to access medical assistance to end their own lives.

When we covered assisted dying on MediaStorm before, I was very surprised to learn that the UK is actually quite unusual for its policies on assisted dying compared to most of the Western world. It not only bans all kinds of medically assisted dying, but has some of the harshest penalties in place for what the law deems assisted suicide up to 14 years, was it? Yeah, 14 years. Yeah. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland...

Spain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Colombia, and quite a few American states, they all have legalization of medically assisted dying with varying regulations and restrictions. France just last week,

voted with an overwhelming majority to legalise assisted dying, progressing their bill closer to law. So yeah, the UK is a bit of an outlier culturally. And something that we have remarked on about the coverage is that despite the bill literally being called the terminally ill adults bill, we haven't heard very much from terminally ill adults themselves. So to start this segment, I therefore want to play listeners one of our interviews with a terminally ill adult. This is Kit.

speaking a few months before she died from breast cancer about why she spent her final months fighting for legal reform. I want to fall asleep in my husband's arms and not wake up. I don't want to die lying on a hospital bed. I don't want to die drugged out of my head, not really knowing what's going on. I don't want to be in a situation where...

where my husband is terrified to go to the toilet in case I stop breathing. I want the ability to just say goodbye to the people that I love and then just cuddle up and go to sleep. The fact is that's not allowed under our current system. I like to delude myself that I've got more rights than a dog in this country. If

If a dog was left to die of cancer, you give that dog a cuddle and let the vet give it an injection? I've been on a hospital ward. I actually lost my voice because I couldn't stop screaming from the amount of pain that I was in. I don't fully understand why.

why so many people would faint from horror at the thought of hearing a dog screaming in agony but have no real issue with the idea of a human doing that.

Kit, if you were speaking to someone who opposed your right to an assisted death, what would you say? When people say you can't have an assisted death, that goes against our system of beliefs. Many of them would say that I'm just suicidal, that I don't want to live. The reality is I'm so desperate to live that

that i sit there with a port in my chest having poison pumped into a vein right next to my heart in the desperate hope that it will buy me an extra few months of decent living i lived my life to the full even this year i went to wembley and i saw the lionesses win the european championships for me the difference is between living and existing if we don't own ourselves

then are we any better than slaves there's a poem that i absolutely love called invictus i am the master of my fate i am the captain of my soul who wouldn't want that

Why shouldn't people have that? I think it's going to be one of the defining battles of the 21st century. The sort of final clashes, so to speak, between the idea that the state or a church or another body can control you or the idea that you've got individual liberty and freedom. Oh, I sound like an American. That was Kit, whose words outlive her.

Terminally ill adults and their loved ones are not the only point of view and we will get into another vital missing voice in the reporting.

But first, I have a media storm criticism about the sidelining of these absolutely core perspectives in the media's never-ending search for both sides-ism. And remembering that the UK population is overwhelmingly in favour of reforming the law, my media storm radar was pinging at a persistent narrative coming through the media that the legalisation movement is losing support. Now one obvious example is this article from The Sun titled...

Look, there is a need for stories raising legitimate questions about this bill. But this headline smells to me like story making rather than storytelling. OK, explain.

The article gives no evidence to support the headline, right? The headline that MPs are braced for this bill to collapse. The entire exclusive, as it's peddled, appears to hang on just one source who's not even identified as an MP, just described to us as an anonymous insider who told the reporter, some MPs who voted for the bill only did so because they wanted it to have a fair hearing, not because they actually back it.

And then the final line reads, sources behind the bill said they had not picked up any significant loss of support. Yeah, sorry. This story sounds like it's just trying to write reality rather than reflect it. It's something the media does a lot. Historically, the Sun is pretty infamous for doing this during election periods. And you know what? It's something that often works. So look out for it. It does. It does often work. And so to me, this article is very disingenuous. Like, please report.

On the issues in the bill, the safeguarding concerns detail for me where the holes are if people are saying there are holes. But this barely touches that. An article based on one person saying they're losing the fight sounds to me more like trying to sabotage the fight than to explain the fight to me. One other example, a BBC News alert I got, which said, for, against, undecided.

Three GPs give their view on assisted dying. That is so BBC. For, against, undecided. That's the BBC. We are impartial. That's the BBC in three words. For, against, undecided. Like, it's pathological. So the BBC conducted research showing GPs in England were deeply divided. This is actually decent research and it's much more worthwhile reporting than the Sun piece, I will say. But...

It's limited in scope and it's unaware of its limits, or at least it does not disclose its limits. So the British Medical Association, which spans doctors of all specialties, not just GPs, has found over multiple surveys that a significantly higher share of doctors in the UK support a law change on assisted dying, about twice as many. This actually underpinned the BMA formally shifting their position from being against legalisation to being neutral today.

The BMA research also makes clear that while some specialties are more supportive of legalisation, like intensive care doctors and aesthetic doctors,

The most oppositional branch of doctors are GPs, and that is the only group that the BBC survey covers. In other words, the BBC surveyed the most opposed medical subspecialty and completely failed to mention this selective bias or to contextualise it within the overall medical opinion. And then they published multiple news alerts saying,

I got two in the space of a couple of hours about how medical opinion is deeply divided over plans to legalize assisted dying. That is very important media analysis that needs to be done. So thank you, Matilda. However, there is another side to this story that I do feel like deserves some space.

And that is the voices of disability campaigners who have very serious fears about how this legislation could endanger them. When we first started covering assisted dying on MediaStorm and when assisted dying came more into the news media daily, at first I was quite dismissive of disability voices on this topic because I

I felt like they were in opposition to terminally ill adults who this affected the most. And I thought, yeah, but there'll be rigorous legislation if assisted dying is made legal and therefore disabled people will be protected and it won't affect them. But then when I really sat down and thought about it more recently, I thought, actually, you know what?

I understand those fears so much more. And that's because if you look at the way the government, the state, treats the most vulnerable people in society, immigrants, refugees, transgender people,

What is to stop them treating another minority group, disabled people, badly? What is to stop them changing legislation nefariously to harm these people? If we don't trust the government to treat refugees well and transgender people well, the most marginalized groups, why would we trust them to treat disabled people well? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really, really good point. And I'm really glad and I'm really grateful that you came to me and expressed your concerns with us excluding those voices. And so before recording this episode, you and I, Helena and I, had a lot of back and forths about how to go about it because you felt disabled people needed support.

More platforming. Yeah. But you didn't think we could do an episode on terminally ill adults without speaking to terminally ill adults. Right. So we thought about having a two-way discussion and we floated the idea with some of our trusted community guides. But they were wary of something they've experienced and or seen other media outlets do. Which is...

to pit these two marginalised groups against each other when they're essentially both being failed by the same systems. And when pitting marginalised groups against each other is something authorities do so much of so well, it ultimately protects them from accountability and change.

So after talking it through with her, we recorded a separate interview with Rachel Charlton Daly, disability writer, freelance journalist, author and activist, about what the public needs to hear before making up our minds individually about this bill and legalisation.

In a perfect world, I think everybody should have the right to die. The issue is that people who've got terminal illnesses having the right to die is often a slippery slope so that disabled people are caught in the crosshairs and disabled people who have insecure housing, insecure benefits...

are being made to feel like if you can't contribute to society you don't deserve to have a space in society the worry is coercion what is stopping somebody who is already told that they are a burden on society and has been made to feel so downtrodden that they've got no other option than going to a doctor and going i want to kill myself because my life is not worth living anymore i suppose with the legislation that we're looking at in the uk and in scotland there is a

a strict terminal illness requirement. So the bill would only allow people who have hard proof from multiple medical signatories that they are at an advanced progressive stage of an illness that is killing them. Are those protections not enough?

Well, no, because it could easily be expanded from six months to a year, two years. What's stopping it from being expanded for people who've got lifelong conditions, you know? The thing with the slippery slope argument is that you could apply that to any debate, right? But we draw lines all the time in every single policy area. You could say that legalising abortion at X number of weeks is a slippery slope to just killing advanced pregnancy

stage fetuses. I don't know that we can make legislation on the basis of the slippery slope argument because then we would never make legislation. It's not just that it's a slippery slope, you know, it's the fact that this legislation has got so many holes in it. There's not going to be mandatory training to spot coercion. There's not going to be a requirement that the people who administer the lethal injection, that they have any training in palliative care or psychiatry. Like for all they say, there's going to be safeguards.

they've not really identified what the safeguards are and we see this a lot in politics you know we're seeing it a lot with the benefit stuff there'll be support there for people who need it but we're not being told what the support is and it's exactly the same in this case

It sounds like you just don't have trust in the authorities to protect people who need protecting. Is that right? It sounds like there's just no trust. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, if there'd been a meaningful consultation and if they'd allowed disabled people to be involved in this,

then I would have had more trust. It's, you know, it's not disabled people versus people who are dying because at the end of the day, disabled people could become terminally ill people. And for all intents and purposes, terminally ill people are part of the disabled community and we are all being let down by the state. Terminally ill people, as much as disabled people, are being let down. They're being let down by care, they're being let down by palliative care, they're being let down by the NHS more than anything because the NHS has been so broken already.

And this should be what a Labour government are pledging to fix. Can we talk now about the media coverage and any issues you've had with how the mainstream media has reported on the topic? We're just ignored from the media. And it's only been since people who aren't disabled have started speaking up for disabled people that the media has started caring about it. It's only since MPs have started talking about it more

that disabled people's side of the story is actually getting out there. And it's been really interesting to watch the papers that have the history of supporting the benefits courts, like the Telegraph. The Telegraph came out and was really against assisted dying. That was very bizarre to watch. I guess my sort of like cynical reaction when I see that the Telegraph is firmly against assisted dying is,

is if I'm thinking about the perspective of bodily autonomy and separation of church and state, then it doesn't surprise me that the telegraph takes a stance they do. It frustrates me to see the telegraph, who is so dismissive of...

disabled rights when it comes to the question of benefits in my view pretending to care about disabled people only when it serves their broader ideology that's been a case for there are there are a couple of charities who are involved in the against side and a lot of disabled people are really trying to distance themselves from it but it's things like the right to life charity is really really heavily involved in it

And the amount of people I've had to go, you can't be sharing their stuff because they're massively anti-abortion. And it does seem like they're really on our side because they've shared a lot to do with disability rights. But there's also the fact that they don't want anybody to have bodily autonomy, you know?

And there's also, on the other side, where being... Like, people who don't want this are being labelled as wanting to control bodies and were being labelled by certain members of the four side as being super religious and stuff like that. And it's like, that's just not the case. We just...

don't all want to be forced to die, you know? This says so much about our politics today is that every question is being forced to fit into this binary. You're in the left or you're in the right. But for me, I find this a really tricky question because I believe in bodily autonomy and I'm very disturbed by the testimonies I've heard of people who want this right.

But this is a really, really, really difficult predicament. It's a really hard discussion. When this all first came around, I was initially on the pro side until it was explained to me. This could mean so much for disabled people and so much that we could be forced into it. There's no yes and no answer to it. You know, there's no black and white answer to it because everybody should have the right to it. They should. Everybody should have the right to do what they want with their bodies, do what they want with their lives.

But at the same time, everybody should have the right to a good life. And that's what disabled people don't have at the moment. And until we can have the right to a good life, how are we supposed to have the right to a good death? That was Rachel Charlton-Daily, who has a new book coming out in July. It's called Ramping Up Rights, an unfinished history of British disability activism. And it's available for pre-order now. Link in the show notes.

Time for Eyes on Palestine. International media coverage of Gaza this week has been focused on the Freedom Flotilla, the Madeleine ship carrying aid and activists like Greta Thunberg to Gaza. It was intercepted by Israel on Monday and its crew have been detained with some already deported.

My first remark is about the limited coverage of this operation in the media last week before the interception by Israeli military on Monday. Now, last week when the flotilla set out, it appeared almost in no mainstream outlets, which is curious because this was trending on social media, so it would have surely made good clickbait. A quick overview of how many articles appeared last week.

Three in Sky News, two in The Guardian, eight in The Independent, one on the BBC just hours before the interception. The thing is, at that point, the only story was about why the activists set sail, which was to break a siege on Gaza that is starving its population. The ship earned Gaza a smattering of headlines last week. But the Freedom Flotilla, by the way, has continuously been trying to get aid into Gaza with anonymous volunteers.

and had no coverage even when last month one of their aid ships was bombed by Israel in international waters off the coast of Malta. I saw this on Instagram and I had to fact check it because I didn't see it in the news. This happened. If China like flies military planes over international waters, it makes world news. This wasn't mentioned.

And while our media didn't care about why the boat set sail last week, and indeed why celebrities were on it, maybe to prevent it being bombed again, they really ramped up reporting this week when there was drama and when the story could be not about Gaza, but about the drama on the ship itself.

Nailed it. And can we talk about the nature of that coverage, the nature of the drama? My jaw actually dropped at some of the headlines. I think probably one of the most shocking was LBC's Greta Thunberg selfie yacht stunt brought to an end as boat is intercepted. The phrase stuck.

selfie yacht, by the way, that came from the Israeli foreign ministry directly. So nice work, LBC, parroting lines directly from Israeli ministers and throwing the phrase selfie yacht into the mainstream instead of highlighting the fact that this was a humanitarian aid ship.

And it's not just the headlines, it's the pictures. Oh, I know exactly what you're referring to. The picture that was splashed across a thousand front pages. No, it wasn't of starving people in Gaza. It wasn't of bomb-destructed land in Palestine. It wasn't of the aid that the ship was carrying. It was of Greta Thunberg being offered a sandwich and a bottle of water by an Israeli army soldier. Apparently, this picture, according to The Telegraph, is postcard.

perfect because it exposes the hollowness of lefty activism. That awkward moment when the Israel Defence Forces spoil your Instagram story, writes Telegraph journalist Stephen Daisley. Oh, wait a second. I wonder where he got that line. Oh, yes. Once again from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who had said there are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. They do not involve Instagram selfies.

providing sandwiches on camera after spraying chemical substances on the ship and throwing the flotilla members' phones off the side of a boat is the definition of a publicity stunt, of an Instagram story and of a selfie yacht. And by the way, it wasn't just the right-wing press. I know I mentioned their LBC and The Telegraph, but here's AP, Associated Press, using an incredibly passive and parroting take once again.

A Gaza-bound aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists has been diverted to Israel, Israeli's foreign ministry says. Israel's foreign ministry says, yeah. A diversion is an inconvenience when you're driving down the motorway and you've got to get off. Like, this was not a diversion. This is a story about breaking international law.

And all of this talk about like so-called selfie yachts and Instagram stories. Well, OK, one, a large part of the point of this flotilla was to raise awareness about Israel deliberately starving an entire people. So, yeah, that is kind of the point of social media. But also there's been five flotillas before Israel.

The Madeleine. Israel used force against four of them. So it makes perfect sense to me to document this journey to protect yourself and provide evidence in case you are intercepted. And look, it's not that I don't get the question. Oh, is it a bit of a distraction? Is this celebrity activism at its best? Or is it a bit of an Insta PR win?

I say this because I have for a very long time had a bit of an allergic reaction to like celebrity fronted humanitarian work or Instagram curated humanitarian work. And this is due to celebrity visits to refugee camps I've worked in and sort of witnessing the dark side of it.

My instinct is that this is not that. I'm actually quite sick of hearing people like Stephen Daisy in The Telegraph calling this hollow activism and a stunt. They have literally put themselves on a boat that has been bombed. They are trying to be the shield to aid while also demonstrating what a siege looks like. So if you want to call that a stunt, then please show me what the fuck you have done. And also...

Some of us might have the right to ask that question about hollowness or vanity when it comes to humanitarian work. You do not have the right to ask that question and complain about celebs being self-centred when you have done literally no reporting on the story other than...

than that focused on the celebs. Yes, it does take Greta Thunberg posting selfies for you to pay attention, but that is on you. No one said it better than one of the people who's been working hardest to capitalize on the boat story to get the media actually talking about the suffering in Gaza. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is

She did 13 interviews in 11 hours, or 11 interviews in 13 hours. Here's her losing her temper on talk TV in an interview with Piers Morgan. All I can say for sure is that this stunt has done absolutely zero to help any of the people in Gaza. Zero. This is your opinion, Piers, and it counts zero. We will agree to disagree. Thank you very much indeed for joining me. I appreciate it.

with me about Gaza and the awful situation there and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. So you just wanted to talk about what you think it's a stunt. You called me for that. So I'm an international law expert and you called me on your program to talk about Greta Thunberg? If you wanted to talk about something else, talk about something else. However, I won't bother you further. Thank you very much. Bye-bye, Pierce. Bye-bye. I...

actually interviewed Albanese about this interview with Piers Morgan on Middle East Eye. Here's what she said. It was the insult against a young lady who's really doing something that Piers cannot even dream of doing, something out of self-interest.

just out of justice and humanity, getting out of the comfort zone of his or her chair and being judged this way with this mimicking, is the misogyny, is the patriarchy, is this alpha male attitude. I don't know, I get a bit frustrated about that.

It is the very media accusing Greta of making this all about her that are making it all about her. It's the media that is too busy publishing their nasty opinions about Greta to report on actual news about plausible genocide that are guilty of a vanity project. These shows calling it a stunt while their entire programming is stunt after stunt after stunt. They are the reason it takes a stunt to make the media do its job.

Yes, that interview on Piers Morgan's show on Talk TV with Francesca Albanese is so interesting because I think that it really clearly demonstrates that no matter if you are an international law expert or if you're a war crime expert or if you're an activist, you'll be treated as a brown blob there to be yelled at and interrupted while you try and advocate for Gaza. However, also on this note, and I think our views slightly differ here,

I actually have quite little sympathy for people who go on talk TV or GB news or anything hosted by Piers Morgan, because it's kind of like one, what do you expect from that interview? Like, what are you expecting when you go in there? But more than that, I feel like when you appear on shows like that, you're legitimizing these hate spewing programs as news programs. I,

feel differently but I do see what you're saying and I do agree like it does legitimize but the people watching these shows they don't question if it's legitimate or not they think it's legitimate and they're hard to reach through other outlets you might reach the people that you actually need to yeah I get that point too but listeners if you have any opinions on this on going on shows like TV news talk TV email in and let us know yeah should we do it no

Give me a call. You can go. Now, just to end this episode, the Freedom Flotilla's stated goal was spotlighting Gaza under siege. Here's our little update of what was overlooked. Israel's renewed assault on Gaza has entered its 87th day, intensifying a 615-day military campaign

that has killed at least 55,000 people in the enclave. That figure comes from Gaza's health ministry but is in line with UN reports which revealed last month that over 300 members of their own humanitarian staff had been killed in the attacks.

With Israel only allowing aid into Gaza in a trickle and via heavily militarised routes, over 76,000 children are registered as malnourished. The actual number is likely to be much higher. Speaking of heavily militarised aid...

Over 200 starving Palestinians have been shot dead at aid distribution sites managed by the US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private organisation where they have concentrated aid and taken it out of UN hands.

With the reality on the ground in Gaza intentionally being clouded by Israel from international view, one attempt to draw focus is that of the Freedom Flotilla. The media only has itself to blame for their persistent underreporting.

Thank you for listening. Next week is Refugee Week. We have two amazing guests, of course, with lived experience. The theme of this year's Refugee Week is community as a superpower. Very poignant with what's happening in LA at the moment. And one of our guests will also talk to us about the intersections of queer identity.

identity and displacement so definitely make sure you tune in next week if you want to support media storm you can do so on patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month the link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our patreon community already we appreciate you so much if

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