It’s 2024 and headlines about ‘illegal immigrants’ are a dime a dozen.

We’ve heard every conceivable opinion on crossing the Channel (and a few inconceivable ones). We know Suella Braverman dreams of deportation. We’ve heard from more folks in the Cabinet and Commons and Lords on this subject than should frankly exist.

We know what charity workers think, we know what macroeconomists think, we know what Bob from Dover thinks, we know what Bob’s granny’s dog’s left testicle thinks.

What we weirdly don’t know is what so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ think (we won’t call them ‘people’, as an editor once told us – that would confuse readers). Why is this? Probably because in all the articles now making bombastic fish and chip wrapping, almost zero actually quoted one.

So here’s a question: is that good journalism?

We asked a non-binary journalist on our Media Storm podcast how they felt about the fact that zero out of 300 articles on trans ‘issues’ published by The Times and Sunday Times in 2020 bylined a trans person. They joked that they weren’t sure they could comment: they had been banned from covering LGBTQ+ news at their previous employer as they were ‘part of that community’. Apparently, they couldn’t be ‘objective’. 

So trans people can’t cover trans issues, because to be trans is to be biased (at least when it comes to your own human rights).

‘Objectivity’ is the exclusive reserve of the white, Western, wealthy worldview. The tabula rasa onto which others superimpose their subjective ‘poor-me’ interpretation of events. Identity politics. Whereas white male politics is just politics. Thank goodness the majority of editors are MOWERs (male, oldish, white, educated, rich, and probably with lawns to mow). Otherwise imagine how biased our media would be.

This arbitrary wielding of ‘objectivity’ in the newsroom is like saying black journalists can’t report on racism against their communities. Or people raised singing God Save The Queen can’t report on the monarchy. And yet, our royal correspondents have names like ‘Rebecca English’, ‘Jonny Dymond’ and ‘Jennie Bond’ (not making this up). Boris Johnson can tumble between Parliament and the Telegraph. Nigel Farage can wrap his ramblings in the journalistic banner of GB News.

But homeless people, sex workers, prisoners, rape victims, Travellers, addicts (scroll through our podcast: the list goes on)… they can’t get a word in edgeways on the stories actually about them.

It’s peculiar how accustomed we are to this deafening silence.

Perhaps that’s because news outlets brandish ‘both sides’. We hear from those who are for, and those who are against. And what else is there?

The BBC has successfully earned the disdain of lefties and rightists while sustaining a global audience of almost a billion— it must be doing something right. But ‘both sides’ does not equal ‘all relevant sides’. Not every debate is 50:50; not every view is equal. Only some people are genuinely impacted, others think their ‘right to an opinion’ is an equally worthy stake. It’s not.

“You would never put a heart surgeon up in a debate against someone who's literally never opened a medical textbook – and yet, that is what happens constantly [in the news],” Renée Bracey Sherman, an American abortion activist speaking on Media Storm after the overturning of Roe v Wade, told us.

As a woman who’d had an abortion, she was invited onto morning television to debate another woman who had regretted hers. “I want to be clear, I believe that people who have abortions, whether they regret them or not, are able to share their stories,” she told the podcast – she runs a platform called WeTestify where people can safely do so. But where she takes issue is framing the debate as if it’s 50:50 when research places it closer to 97:3 (in favour of those who don’t regret abortions).

“That's actually just bad journalism.”

It’s bad journalism because the absence of a voice is the denial of ‘right of reply’. It’s dehumanising. It allows you and your kind to be dubbed a ‘brainwashing cult’ (the Telegraph on transgender people) or a ‘doomed mindset’ (The Times on Travellers) or a ‘swarm’ (the Daily Mail – and several high-ranking ministers – on refugees). You couldn’t very well warn the public of a ‘swarm’ and then quote one of the entities within it! 

If you did, you might get something like this: “One of the most pervasive, effective, and ignorant ways of uniting people is creating a common enemy,” a silversmith, writer, and Syrian refugee told Media Storm. “It's all about creating this fear that those ‘dangerous creatures’ are ‘invading us’.”

They identify a cynical reason for this exclusionary practice (beyond the inevitable and relatively innocent oversights of overworked, underpaid journalists): nothing sells like fear, and fear is cheap.

Those are pretty good profit margins – for politicians and the press. And so a marriage of convenience unfolds between the two, with 'culture wars’ as their lovechild. Politicians conceive them, papers cover them. And boy, do they cover them. Or is it totally appropriate to call for moral panic because a shop in Cumbria stops selling golliwogs, and sexual deviants could be crossdressing in toilets to catch us on the sly?

Evidence-based policy and debate, on the other hand, are expensive. And boring. We could barely get through that sentence! Are you still with us?

If so, that’s where Media Storm comes in: on your podcast provider, and now, happily, every Friday in Byline Times.

In this column, we will pick apart the week’s hilarious headlines and try to find the facts behind the fearmongering. We will do so with the help of the most important and overlooked voices in the story: the people actually living it.

Like our new editors at Byline Times, we challenge media gatekeepers where they have fallen into step with the brokers of power. Media Storm is news that starts with the people who are normally asked last. And now, you know where to find us.

India, regarded as a friendly nation by Australia, operated what is being called a “nest of spies” in this country, the ABC reports, adding that the group was kicked out in 2020 after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation discovered what they were up to. The ABC report came on the same day that the Washington Continue reading »

Rupert Murdoch's company used criminal methods to hack MPs’ phones for "political and commercial espionage" and deleted nearly 31 million emails as civil and criminal suits threatened to expose their behaviour, a new report suggests.

The claims, which have featured in numerous court actions against the publishers of the now defunct News of the World and The Sun, have been pulled together for the first time in June's edition of Prospect magazine.

Journalist Nick Davies, who first broke the phone-hacking allegations in 2009, sorted through thousands of pages of evidence, according to Prospect, to "piece together a narrative of how the company employed numerous private investigators to hack private individuals, and also MPs – including Cabinet ministers". 

The allegations against Rupert Murdoch's company feature in the June edition of Prospect magazine. Photo: Prospect magazine

Phone-hacking has cost the Murdoch organisation an estimated £1 billion to date, and the ongoing court cases have exposed a cache of new evidence – including documents, invoices, call logs and emails – which weren't available when the story broke.

More than 1,600 cases have been settled by the company, Prospect noted.

Davies, Prospect said, has found evidence that the Murdoch company was using criminal means to target politicians of every rank – including the Attorney General, Business Secretary and Chancellor – and that "some" of the hacking appears to have been done for commercial or political "aims rather than trying to get stories".

Further claims in the Prospect articles include:

Rupert Murdoch's company used criminal methods to hack MPs’ phones for "political and commercial espionage" and deleted nearly 31 million emails as civil and criminal suits threatened to expose their behaviour, a new report suggests.

The claims, which have featured in numerous court actions against the publishers of the now defunct News of the World and The Sun, have been pulled together for the first time in June's edition of Prospect magazine.

Journalist Nick Davies, who first broke the phone-hacking allegations in 2009, sorted through thousands of pages of evidence, according to Prospect, to "piece together a narrative of how the company employed numerous private investigators to hack private individuals, and also MPs – including Cabinet ministers". 

The allegations against Rupert Murdoch's company feature in the June edition of Prospect magazine. Photo: Prospect magazine

Phone-hacking has cost the Murdoch organisation an estimated £1 billion to date, and the ongoing court cases have exposed a cache of new evidence – including documents, invoices, call logs and emails – which weren't available when the story broke.

More than 1,600 cases have been settled by the company, Prospect noted.

Davies, Prospect said, has found evidence that the Murdoch company was using criminal means to target politicians of every rank – including the Attorney General, Business Secretary and Chancellor – and that "some" of the hacking appears to have been done for commercial or political "aims rather than trying to get stories".

Further claims in the Prospect articles include:

• Sixteen Liberal Democrat MPs, then in the Conservative Coalition Government, received more than 1,500 suspicious calls. 

• There were also hundreds of suspect calls to MPs from other parties opposed to Murdoch business interests. Claimants argue this was "political and commercial espionage". 

• Gordon Brown, while Chancellor and Prime Minister, was allegedly targeted 24 times from the Wapping "hub” – a central phone number located where Murdoch’s newspapers were based.

• There were suspicious calls to Dominic Grieve, then Attorney General, at a time when the Director of Public Prosecution was considering possible prosecutions against journalists, and when there was the threat of contempt proceedings against newspapers.  

• Five members of the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, perceived to be hostile to Murdoch’s commercial interests, received hundreds of “inexplicable” calls. The Murdoch company claims that there may be innocent explanations, but settled a number of claims, Prospect noted.

• John Whittingdale, then DCMS Committee chair, was contacted by the NewsCorp lobbyist Fred Michel by phone call or text no fewer than 431 times during a 22-month period while his committee investigated phone-hacking.

• One MP who was hacked told the High Court that the pattern of behaviour was a “cynical and outrageous attempt to subvert the legitimate process of parliamentary scrutiny”.

• After a threat of legal action by the actor Sienna Miller in autumn 2010, the Murdoch company began email deletions which saw some 30.7 million Sun and News of the World emails wiped, along with those from top executives. The claimants say that this was a deliberate attempt to destroy incriminating material. The company says there may be an innocent explanation.

• Journalists or investigators who might have blown the whistle were rewarded with jobs, or cash payments, and required to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

• Police seized 125 items after arresting News International’s CEO, Rebekah Brooks, in July 2011. They were placed in a secure area under the supervision of two Murdoch executives, Simon Greenberg and Will Lewis, now publisher and CEO of the Washington Post. It was several weeks before detectives completed a detailed search of all the equipment, at which point they discovered that only 117 of the items were still there. Eight filing cabinets that they had seized from the offices of the Editor and the Managing Editor had been removed. They have not been recovered.

• Police found an under-floor safe in Brooks’ private dressing room which was “filled with hard drives and computers” with thousands of emails from key executives, editors and journalists.

• Of the 30.7 million missing emails, only 21.7 million were recovered, leaving more than a quarter of the archive – around 9 million emails – lost for ever.

Read more Byline Times stories about Rupert Murdoch:

Rishi to the Rescue: How the Prime Minister ‘Moved Heaven and Earth to Help the Conservative Press’

Princess Diana ‘Phone Pest’ Story Links Both Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan to the ‘Criminal-Media Nexus’ of Police Corruption

‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’

The Western world (18 % of the whole world) believe HAMAS is the terrorist of Gaza. That’s a result of mainstream media conflating HAMAS terrorism with legitimate aspirations for self-determination. It disregards the observation that one man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter in the Gaza strip. Most Westerners would also likely reject the Continue reading »