News Watch: ‘Two-tiered justice’ lies, Bournemouth femicide, and blame it on the migrants
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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. 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. Two-tier justice lies. Bournemouth femicide. And blame it on the migrants. Hi, Helena. Hello, Matilda. Happy Thursday. You look almost as shattered as I do. I don't know. This week's been crazy. I'm so tired. I know.

Also, it's like a crazy news cycle. For me, this week, I've just been completely shattered by one particular story. I literally can't stop thinking about Rameza Ozturk. She's a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University in the US, studying on an academic visa. And she was literally abducted off the street by six masked men.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officers. I mean, have you seen the video footage? It's chilling. Someone on the street filming can be heard asking, is this a kidnapping? Call the police. And then one of the masked men is like, we are the police. As federal agents converged on 30-year-old Turkish national Rumesa Ozturk Tuesday night and wrestled her phone from her hands... What is this?

the Tufts University Ph.D. student cried out in distress. They appeared to be in plain clothes, wearing masks and driving unmarked vehicles. Prompting questions from Ozturk and concerned neighbors. Is this a kidnapping?

So you would assume watching something like this that she is at least suspected of an incredibly dangerous, violent crime. Well, yeah. Her crime, apparently, is that she co-authored an op-ed

in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide in Gaza and...

This is what the U.S. Homeland Security Department called engaging in activities in support of Hamas. It's the same old story, but it's actually terrified that you can be like disappeared off the streets for co-authoring a student op-ed. We've talked about the weaponization of the term terrorism. We've talked about the weaponization of anti-Semitism to serve authoritarian agendas, etc.

But we need to do this properly. This total 180 of the free speech absolutism of the MAGA movement that is becoming a state in which, you know, words are banned by lists and lists and people are detained and abducted off the street without charge, without trial and deported from the country. We need to do this properly. Free speech, what it even means, how it's been perverted in modern politics.

Next week's Deep Dive.

Let's do that. I agree. I feel like I want to share a happy headline I woke up to on the theme of democracy winning in America. Okay. Which is, I don't know if you saw that Wisconsin was having a local Supreme Court election and Musk was giving out million dollar checks again to get people to vote for the Republican conservative candidate because it was seen as like a real poll on Trump's success and power in the

the Supreme Court. Anyway, the liberal judge Susan Crawford just won. Oh, great. So people didn't take the million dollar checks. Maybe people aren't so happy with Trump turning the US into a terror state oligarchy. I don't know. Maybe. Thank you. Before we start, also to listener Joe, who...

who notified us of a government consultation about media literacy. We will be sending in our submission. I also learned reading the call for submissions that 90% of teachers in the UK want to see media literacy explicitly incorporated into the national curriculum. Maybe we should start doing media storm live shows in schools. I actually think that's genius. ♪

First Story is a story of a democratic crisis, a practical coup d'état by the courts of law, spun from little to nothing by the rage manufacturers at GB News. They

And frankly, far more reasonable right-wing media have taken a pretty inoffensive routine occurrence and have told it as a scandal just so that they can invite on some pseudo-expert to have a good rant and then clip up lots of red-faced, blood-boiling, gammon-spitting viral content. Okay, so what actually happened?

The story centres around new sentencing guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council, which is an independent body including members of the judiciary and non-judicial members who put together guidelines for judges giving out sentences based on evidence and public consultations. So this is about new guidelines they've written to cater to a growing list of criminal offences introduced by the government to lock up irregular parties.

including legitimate refugees, but that's not even the media storm today. OK. So in the legislation passed by Parliament, the maximum sentence set is four years. GB News claims that the new sentencing guidelines overrule this by instead setting just nine months. Parliament says four years and they've said nine months. Well,

Well, who on earth are they? And that's the politest way I can put that, Martin. But who on earth are they to think that they can overrule Parliament? A faceless group of non-entities that none of us have heard of, none of us know and none of us can hold to account. Get rid of them.

Now, before we get into the actual legal facts. Oh, yeah, just boring nitty gritty stuff, probably not even relevant for a good news story these days. Yeah. Well, allow me first to introduce you to our speakers. Our presenter, Martin Daubnett, journalist by grace of a career at Lads Mags and Page Three of the Sun. Okay.

Okay, so the porno pages, basically. Remember those? He was also deputy leader of the Reclaim Party. Oh, for goodness sake. Okay, so for any non-UK listeners, the Reclaim Party was launched to push Brexit, I think? Yeah.

funded by a single multimillionaire led by Lawrence Fox, by now an out-of-work actor. It doesn't believe in climate change and it won precisely zero seats in Parliament. That was a good summary. I don't think...

I don't think you're going to be as knowledgeable about the expert guest, Stephen Barrett, who's introduced as a barrister and a writer. Okay. Barrister of what? Not immigration law. Not criminal law either. He is a lawyer of commercial disputes. Sorry. All I can think about right now, this might be a bit niche, but it reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development. What kind of law do you practice?

where Michael Bluth essentially pretends to be a maritime lawyer because once he played one in a school play called The Trial of Captain Hook. Do we remember this? You're a crook, Captain Hook. In order to satisfy an English requirement, Michael appeared in the drama club's production of an original play, The Trial of Captain Hook. You're a crook.

Truck, Captain Hook, Judge, won't you throw the book? That's all I'm thinking about right now. Luckily, his interview on GB News was savagely torn apart by King's Council and actual criminal lawyer, Jamie Hamilton, or at View From The North on X, for anyone wanting to follow.

Lots of this is word for word what he wrote because he explains it very clearly. But yes, I did actually fact check all of it with the original sentencing guidelines which are available online. Take us down the rabbit hole. Point one.

The proposition that the Sentencing Council have overruled Parliament when Parliament have said four years and they have said nine months, this is just plain nonsense. It misrepresents how sentencing works and can only be sustained if you do not understand the word maximum.

Parliament have set the maximum sentence for certain immigration offences at four years. Absolutely no one that understands criminal sentencing thinks that this means all offenders should receive the maximum sentence. There will always be a range of sentences passed. That is how it works. The vast majority of sentences will be passed at...

lower than the maximum. The original guidelines, by the way, still state the maximum for your sentence at the very top of the guidelines. Okay, so to suggest that this is overruling Parliament is just wrong. Yes, and it gets worse. Oh God. Point two, this is where a lie becomes a conspiracy.

Martin, the journalist, the Lads Mag expert, Martin, the Lads Mag expert, goes on to say that the sentencing council have deliberately set the sentence at nine months so as to avoid the deportation requirement.

for sentences over 12 months. But the 12-month threshold is one that will really get the antennae twitching to people like yourself because that's the threshold where you can be deported upon serving your sentence. This is legal tools for lawyers who are licking their lips.

are the prospects of using this loophole of keeping illegal immigrants in the country at British taxpayers' expense. They want it under 12 months for one reason and one reason only is that they don't want these people deported because that is their personal political opinion. Now, what is incredibly misleading about this is that

The Sentencing Council recommends a range of sentences and nine months is the lowest figure. So the range they recommend is nine months to two years. And the starting point from which judges should begin their assessment is not just over 12 months, it's a year and six months. So it's above the deportation threshold. If they were trying to like avoid deportation, they would have set the starting point as below 12 months. They've said it is above that.

GB News has taken the lower end and implied that they've set this as the maximum. It's just completely, completely misleading. That is ridiculous. And by the way, the reasons that the sentencing guidelines give to consider a lighter sentence are if the offender, and I hate calling it offender because these are refugees, if the offender fled persecution or serious danger and if they were involved due to coercion or pressure. Okay, so yeah, fair enough maybe. Yeah.

And that brings me on to point three, which is the failure of the wider media to understand basic law or fact check at all. Now, obviously, GB News is not exactly mainstream media. Like, do we expect any better? No. But a sign of how mainstream media is descending to their level in a bid to catch up, The Times, The Telegraph, Talk TV. God, we're really giving the letter T a bad name.

bad name. They all reported the same misleading claims in the same misleading way. The Telegraph headline was two-tiered justice quango letting hundreds of illegal migrants dodge deportation. What? Wait, was that an opinion piece? No, this was a news piece, i.e. supposed to be reporting plain facts, no commentary. Talk TV made several rant sessions about it and the Times wrote this outrageously pointed headline also for a news piece.

Sentence guidelines would allow illegal immigrants to avoid deportation. So angry. Either they do not understand law...

or they are spinning a narrative. Neither option is great. I honestly don't think that they read the sentencing guidelines themselves, comparing what they reported to what the guidelines actually say. For example, they all expressed outrage that the sentencing guidelines include as a mitigating factor no previous convictions in the UK. They're all like, oh, well, they just arrived in the UK, so obviously they don't have any previous convictions. But look, I'm reading the sentencing guidelines right now. They say...

What? So they've just made that up? Yeah. Clearly their priority in reporting this story then just isn't accuracy. Right. Which brings us on to my final point. If the priority isn't accuracy, what is the priority in this reporting? What agenda?

are these stirred up scandals serving. The anti-migrant agenda. Check. But also undermining faiths in the courts. And this is at a time when human rights law is being presented as a barrier to the far right and right wing agenda. Here's one more clip, OK? For the final time, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Stephen Barrett on GB News.

It's anti-democratic. And what we're seeing now is the apex of these anti-democratic manoeuvres. Effectively, what you have in the sentencing council is a political body which is not accountable to voters. So your listeners and your viewers, they are not accountable to them. This is not democratic.

Quite the opposite. It is a core principle of democracy to have an independent judiciary. The three core pillars of democracy are an independent legislature, i.e. parliament in the UK, an independent executive, that would be our cabinet, and an independent judiciary, the courts. These are not supposed to step on each other's territory. Now, sentencing guidelines that are based on public consultations and guidelines do not do that. But the government mandating, presupposing,

predetermined sentences that don't take in the specific circumstances of a crime and don't take in anything that is heard during the criminal trial, well, that is overstepping.

To quote our trusty criminal lawyer fact checker, Jamie Hamilton, once more, he said, why am I bothered about this? It's because the public are being wholly misled about the criminal justice system. There is every reason to debate the rights and wrongs of policy and procedure, but to actively mislead in this way undermines the system in which we work and which is absolutely essential to democracy.

I couldn't agree more. But I do also have another question, which is how did the media even fall upon this story in the first place? Yeah, that's a good question. As far as I can gauge, it all started with Robert Jenrick. Oh, great. He is the shadow justice secretary, although he tweets about everything. And to be honest, reading those tweets...

He's either an idiot or a pathological liar based on like the stream of inaccuracies coming from them. He commented on the sentencing guidelines warning that we're heading towards a quote two tiered justice system. That is you're

You're going to love this. Go on. Biased against Christians and straight white men. Oh, yeah. You know, all you see in prison are straight white men. You know what I'm just realising? Yeah. That this is the same comment by Robert Jenrick that has led to the reversal of sentencing reforms that we discussed in our episode about pregnancy in prison. Which...

Wait, what? Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, right, we had Janie Starling on from the campaign group Level Up, who've been running a campaign for No Births Behind Bars. And if you remember, they were celebrating a recent campaign win. Yeah.

which would have required magistrates and judges to consult a pre-sentence report before deciding whether to imprison pregnant women. Because as we heard on the episode, if you sentence a pregnant woman to prison, you sentence her to a high risk pregnancy. So this was in the new sentencing guidelines and it was a common sense, evidence-led policy led by criminal justice experts saying,

But instead now it has fallen once again to the bottom of the pile because of culture wars and because of this comment about two-tier policing. And we have to remember that the two-tier policing slogan was created by Tommy Robinson from last year's summer riots, which claimed that white far-right protesters were treated more harshly than ethnic minorities. It is so...

pathetic how the Labour government is capitulating to clickbait cultural politics rather than standing by, as you've just described, evidence-backed, long-awaited reforms that God knows how many people with lived experience, experts, charities have campaigned and developed for years. And it also just shows how counterproductive clickbait media can be to actual evidence-based progress in social policy. Yeah.

Talking about the strength of the anti-migrant agenda, did you see that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a US Republican House representative and well-known MAGA defender, told a British Sky News journalist during a press conference last Wednesday, we don't care about the UK and to go back to the UK. Hashtag go back to where you came from. Right.

Anybody else? What country are you from? Okay, we don't give a crap about your opinion and your reporting. Why don't you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem? No, no, no, no, you should care about your own borders. No, no, no, let me tell you something. Do you care about people from your country? What about all the women that are raped by migrants? No, do you care? Okay, you're done. Do you care about American lives being put

You know what I don't care about your fake news. Do you have a relevant question? Yeah, this is an American journalist. Thank you.

Now, listen, what I found interesting about this was that everyone and the media focused on the whole the US doesn't care about the UK thing. But can we talk about the fact that the reason Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to not care about the UK is because we have too many migrants and they're all rapists and criminals? Honestly, I know that this is something so many people now genuinely fear. And I know this partly because I actually...

get repeatedly accused on social media of not caring about women being raped because I stand up for like male refugees. And yes, people's fears need to be heard. But I have done this fact check so many times. I did it on MediaStorm some weeks ago, looking at the global data on migrant crime and showing how deliberate and false a narrative this is. By now, I just find it

Honestly, so upsetting to talk about because every time it's mentioned, it hurts good men who have been through way too much shit already. No, and I absolutely agree with you. But also bear with me because she honestly goes on to just totally undermine her own arguments.

Okay, I'm listening. So the clip continues and she tries to pass on to an American journalist. But then this American journalist is like, hi, I also want to know the answer to the question that the Sky News British journalist asked, which is a question about Signalgate.

Right. The colossal cock up when elite U.S. security personnel added a journalist to a group chat about how they were going to top secretly bomb Yemen. Oopsie daisy. So the journalists asked Marjorie Taylor Greene about, you know, the massive holes that this points to in national security protocol.

I'm an American and I would like to hear your answer to what she's asking. I'm not answering her question because I don't care about her network. If you would like to ask, I can answer. Do you have any concerns whatsoever about the complete disregard of operational security from the top level of this administration?

You want to know about complete disregard about operational security? You should talk about the Biden administration, how they ripped our borders open to terrorists, cartel, child sex trafficking, human trafficking and drug trafficking across our borders for four years.

Surprise! That's also migrants' fault. Oh my God, it's also migrants' fault. Why did no one say this before? It's so simple. It's their fault for coming here, so we send them away, but then it's their fault for being there, so we bomb them over there, even though that'll probably make them come here to avoid the bombs. But it's fine, it'll make sense, because it's just all migrants' fault. Total sense. But it really just shows how strong the far-right anti-migrant narrative is. That's what I took away from this, that...

This is the thing, the anti-migrant narrative is the thing that a US representative chose to sum up the UK with. How weak does a political leadership need to be to scapegoat, especially vulnerable people, for all their errors? And pointing the finger to the point of piss-taking has been the post-Signalgate playbook.

One final story before the break. Wrapping up a hefty section on scapegoating ethnic minorities for all the world's problems. Sky News' Sophie Ridge interviewed Jeremy Corbyn last week. Here's a question she asked. You say that anti-Semitism is evil, that it's wrong. You are also a member of the Independent Alliance Party. It's a group. A group, yes. Apologies, a group. Yeah.

Just to look at some of the examples of people in the grouping, Ayub Khan resigned from the Lib Dems after being ordered to undertake anti-Semitism training, which he disagreed with. Adnan Hussein, at a rally in 2014, claimed Israel's military operation was a holocaust. Mohammad Iqbal was suspended from Labour after allegedly making anti-Semitic comments at a meeting. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you feel it is wrong,

that you have been expelled from Labour for these reasons, you're not really helping the case for the defence here, are you?

Sophie Ridge claims that Corbyn's co-runner, Iqbal Mohammed, was a Labour councillor who resigned over anti-Semitism allegations. So, yes, Corbyn is running with Iqbal Mohammed. But Iqbal Mohammed was not a Labour councillor and he has never resigned over anti-Semitism allegations. But it appears Sophie Ridge has confused him with a...

totally different but also brown also Muslim MP called Muhammad Iqbal. Stop it.

No, no, you're actually joking. I'm not joking. That is horrendous. So embarrassing. That is horrendous. Sky has removed that clip from the interview and apparently issued an apology. But here's what the real Iqbal Mohammed had to say. Can the real Iqbal Mohammed please stand up? Iqbal Mohammed, who is running alongside Jeremy Corbyn as an independent MP, told Middle East Eye...

Right, because this is not just a case of all brown people look alike and have the same names. This is also calling Muslims anti-Semitic, basically.

basically painting Muslims as inherently incompatible with Western values, which is something we talked about in our episode on Islamophobia with Rizwana Hamid from the Centre for Media Monitoring, which promotes fair, accurate and responsible reporting about Muslims and Islam. And here's what she said about the media's complicity in these stereotypes. When it comes to online reporting,

news, almost 60% of the stories around Muslims and Islam are negative. In broadcast, it's almost 50%, you know, over a third misrepresent or generalize about Muslims and Islam. You know, tropes like Islam is a threat to the West, that Islamic values aren't compatible with Western values, that Muslims are terrorists, you know, Muslims are misogynistic. And so it's a very distorted narrative

image of who Muslims are and what the religion is. The drip-drip narratives that come out, not just of the press, but what politicians spout over the years has given carte blanche to people to be Islamophobic and not be held to account.

And whereas they existed on the dark corners of the web, maybe a decade ago on far-right platforms, we've seen those slowly being mainstreamed. They're Islamophobic, but they're mainstream. Let's take a break.

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My next Newswatch story is about the apparent random attacks on Bournemouth Beach. A man has been jailed for attacking two women in a horrendous stabbing on Bournemouth Beach last May. Amy Gray, who was 34, was murdered. She died at the scene. And Leanne Miles, her friend, was seriously injured in the attack but managed to survive despite having 20 knife wounds.

What we know now is that the murder was premeditated. So the perpetrator did not know these two women, but his desire to carry out a murder was backed up by extensive planning. He had travelled from South London to Bournemouth. On his laptop, investigators found internet searches for deadliest knife, for why is it harder for a criminal to be caught if he does it in another town, and what hotels don't have CCTV in the UK.

He'd also looked up Bournemouth CCTV, Bournemouth Pier CCTV just days before the murder took place. Obviously not very well because his attack was literally caught on CCTV. He had a fascination with and a collection of knives. He used the name Ninja Killer on his Snapchat account.

And he was a criminology student at the University of Greenwich. And he actually asked a course lecturer how to get away with murder. And this course lecturer said to him, you're not planning a murder, are you? So this is how much we know now. You just also know someone's already writing the screenplay for this. This man had also carried out multiple online searches about other murders.

but specific murders, such as Millie Dowler, a 13-year-old who was murdered by a notorious serial killer. And more recently, he had searched for details about the murder of Brianna Jai. The judge's words during the sentencing of this man were very clear, and I want to read them out.

The judge said: "It seems you have felt humiliated and rejected for any advances you have made towards girls, which has led over time to a deeply suppressed rage towards society and women in particular." This defendant seems to have wanted to know what it would be like to take life. Perhaps he wanted to know what it would be like to make women feel afraid. Perhaps he thought it would make him feel powerful, make him interesting to others.

The prosecuting lawyer also said the murder was premeditated with the defendant's misogyny as a possible motive and she added there was clear evidence of this man's difficulties with women and misogyny. Now I'll read some of the media headlines about the attack. True crime fan guilty of random beach murders. Student killer guilty of senseless beach murder.

Man who brutally murdered woman on Bournemouth Beach in random attack is convicted. Okay, I see the issue. After everything you've just laid out about this man, this attack doesn't seem random at all. In fact, it's so far from random, it's textbook. What I don't understand is that the judge set out very clearly what motivated this man to pick two women to attack

So why are the media still saying it's random? Right. And look, I understand that his choice of victims were random in the sense that he did not personally know these two women, but he literally asked a university professor how to murder and get away with it. So the fact he was murdering was not random. And he deliberately selected his victims based on the fact they were women. So his choice of victim is not random. Right.

And this phrasing is dangerous. Once again, depicting these well-documented pathways to femicide as out of the blue and reducing the severity of the crime by suggesting it was not a deliberate decision.

By the way, we saw the exact same thing when Bieber Henry and Nicole Smallman were murdered. Two sisters murdered in London in 2020. The perpetrator who killed them had been explicitly plotting to murder six women and the media reported the murders of these two sisters to be at random. These are crimes motivated by misogyny.

And no headlines are identifying the gendered element of the crime. In fact, a lot of them are sensationalising the story, playing into the true crime narrative that this man was so obsessed with in the first place. A lot of headlines focus on this man as a true crime fan or the fact he was a criminology student. Details which are...

in no way as important as the gendered nature of this crime or the life of the victim, Amy Gray. But details which I'm sure media outlets will know were real readers in to click on. Yeah, like as I pointed out when you were describing the details, there's a screenplay in that. We have a massive culture of dramatising exactly those details of this social problem. And by doing that, the media are giving this man exactly what he wants.

This man who murdered Amy Gray, who critically injured Leanne Miles, wants notoriety. OK, how do we know this? He had searched for previous cases of femicide and famous serial killers.

The court was also told that he touched himself sexually in his prison cell before the trial after he asked a female prison officer how much publicity the case was getting. Oh, this is nauseating. So as well as craving the power to kill a woman, he craved notoriety. He literally wanted to be known for this. Mm-hmm.

And so then I'm left asking, you know, how do journalists, how do we report on this? Because it is in the public interest as an event. But how do we do it without giving him exactly what he wants, giving him the attention he so desperately craves? Well, I've just given you the whole story, but do you know his name?

You're so clever. No. Okay. Well, there you go. Look, there are ways for the media to give the public the details they need and to hold this perpetrator to account without repeatedly giving his name. I understand, obviously, at some point they will report his name.

but they do not have to repeatedly do so. And they do not have to splash his image all over the front pages like he so desperately and clearly wants. No, like if he's behind bars, then we don't need to know what he looks like. Exactly. These points are all in Level Up's guidelines for the media. And once again, if you're a journalist or an editor listening, please contact me to get Level Up to come and deliver a free one-hour training on providing dignity for dead women when reporting.

Or if you're a listener and you've got a favourite news outlet, please email the outlet and ask them to reach out to Level Up for training. But to round up this story and this section, here's what Janie Starling, co-founder of Level Up, had to say on a previous episode of MediaStorm about cases just like this one. I think one of the most disturbing things that I've heard throughout the course of working with families is I work closely with brothers called Luke and Ryan Hart.

whose mum Claire and sister Charlotte were murdered by their father in 2016. Now, when the police seized their father's computer, they found preceding the murders, he had been searching for articles online of men who had killed their families. He was seeking justification for what he was about to do and he wanted to know how he would be reported on. And he found a lot of validation. He found a lot of, you know, what he was feeling actually being justified in the press.

So it is really important to remember that there could be future perpetrators reading your report and finding sympathy for their cause in your reporting. And I don't think any journalist would ever intend that or want that. But without sensitivity and without understanding, it happens. While we are on the topic of murders motivated by misogyny,

Let me tell you something I learnt yesterday. What's that? Adolescence is a true story. Actually, it's lots of true stories. I learnt this reading an interview feature with the show's writer, Jack Thorne, in the New York Times. He said he started working on adolescence about two and a half years ago when Stephen Graham, who's the actor who plays the dad, contacted him to say that he'd been shocked by a series of murders in the UK in which boys and young men had stabbed girls to death.

Do you remember this? I mean, not explicitly, but I can think of many cases reading about where a boy killed a girl and watching adolescence reminded me of a lot of those cases. I guess not a stream of them back to back. Yeah. And to connect the dots, you have to do lots of individual searches, you know, filter through various local news sites. But it turns out he's right. Around that period, there was Ava White, age 12, stabbed by a 15-year-old boy and

Eliane Andam, aged 15, stabbed by a 17-year-old boy. Lilia Valuti, 9, stabbed by a 24-year-old male. By the way, not migrant men, Marjorie Taylor Greene. It continues. I mean, need we remind ourselves of the Southport stabbing in which an 18-year-old male teen stabbed a number of girls and women?

Just a couple of weeks ago, a 15-year-old boy was guilty of attempted murder of a 14-year-old girl after stabbing her 10 times with a samurai-style sword near her hull. Ugh, this is painful to hear. I just don't know why the dots are not connected for us. Hmm, because these aren't isolated incidents, they're a social endemic.

And as long as we paint them as freak crimes committed by freak individuals, we fail to look at social culpability. Totally. So I want to share a quote from the New York Times interview feature that has stayed with me. Jack Thorne said that while adolescence highlights the role of social media in radicalizing young boys, it doesn't point to it as a single cause.

He says in adolescence, the boys' school is underfunded and teachers are too stressed and overworked to stop bullying. The police are ignorant of how teenagers talk to each other and the boys' family and friends were oblivious to what he was capable of. There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to destroy a child. He just wanted adolescents to persuade that village to help these kids.

This is telling and this is exactly why so many educators and workshop facilitators are against simply showing adolescents in schools.

Jack Thorne said it there, right? He wants to persuade the village. This is a show made for adults, not for kids. Also, I'm all for elevating Jack Thorne's voice, but we need to elevate the voices of educators. And like, I'm actually a little bit fucked off about this because people who have been working in this space for decades are still being ignored. But then it's like some men make a TV show and now they're getting all the attention. It's just not very media storm, okay? I'm not happy with it. Sorry, sorry. But also like...

on that note, if there are people listening and they're wondering who to listen to on this issue, I just want to throw out a few names. So please go and check out the work of Beyond Equality, of Nathaniel Cole, of Lewis Wedlock, of Gina Martin, of Laura Bates, of Eliza Hatch from Cheer Up Love, of David Challen, of This Ends Now,

And please check out an open letter started by Dr. Jessica Taylor from Victim Focus, urging the government to understand that this knee-jerk reaction of just showing adolescents in schools and expecting teachers to cope with it is not a holistic and well-thought-out response. We'll put the open letter in the show notes.

Time for Eyes on Palestine. Today we bring you the grim story of the discovery of a mass grave in southern Gaza, which indicates the potentially targeted mass killing by Israel of Palestinian doctors. The intentional targeting of medical personnel is a war crime under international law. How much evidence is there that this has happened? You could say it's damning. On Sunday, the mass grave was discovered by

by UN humanitarian workers in Rafah after an eight-day search for 15 missing humanitarian workers who disappeared on a rescue mission last week. Yeah, I read about their disappearance. They were medics with the Red Crescent Society and Palestinian Civil Defence. What happened to them? Well, after days of being blocked from reaching the place they had seemingly disappeared by Israeli forces, the UN eventually negotiated entry

They found that ambulances crashed near a burial site where the bodies were recovered. The excavation of the site was captured on camera by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Oh God, did they find out what happened?

From the states of their bodies, what they pieced together was shared by traumatised family members with Middle East Eye, who said their loved ones had been seized unarmed while carrying medical supplies to civilians under attack. They were then taken to a bunker where they were blindfolded, had their hands tied, were interrogated and shot in cold blood before being buried in the unmarked mass grave. I can't believe that this is just...

something that happens and it's not front page news or even that it's even happening in the first place. Look, if Israeli forces were then blocking rescue groups from the site, then

Doesn't that indicate a cover up? I mean, there are accusations of that by multiple international humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, who lost members here. The Red Crescent is part of the Red Cross. But notably, these condemnations are not being echoed by our political leaders.

Has Israel responded? Honestly, not really. They certainly have not denied what's happened. Although the Israeli army has, of course, claimed that among the humanitarian workers killed were terrorists. Sometimes I feel like covering the news is just saying the same old stories over and over again.

Thank you for listening. Tomorrow we are looking at the topic of revenge porn, or as our guests argue, it should be called image-based sexual abuse. Make sure you tune in for our Friday deep dive. 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 MatildaMal, at HelenaWardia, and follow the show via at MediaStormPod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wardia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Sam Fire.