Media Storm
The Spontaneity Shop
- 49 minutes 43 secondsBlame, shame and pain: Maternity, midwives and the media
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Warning: this episode mentions baby loss and birth trauma.
How many times have you read a headline that tells you UK maternity services are in ‘crisis’? And how many times have you really understood why they're in crisis?
A recent interim report into England's maternity and neonatal care had some brutal findings: hospital mistake 'cover-ups', negligent care from frontline workers, lack of staff and poorer maternal outcomes for ethnic minority women. But identifying the problems is just the beginning – understanding their root cause is harder, and something our press repeatedly fails to do.
Financial incentive schemes that reward units whose data meets certain 'safety' targets put the lives of pregnant people on the line – but midwives with low morale, burnout, unsustainable working hours and stress take the brunt of the blame in the media, even when their voices are notably missing from the coverage about them.
What's really behind headlines about a lack of staff? Is there really a woo-woo 'normal birth ideology' killing mothers and babies? And why are outcomes so different depending on skin colour?
Here to answer all those questions is Leah Hazard, NHS midwife and author of 'Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Story', and Illiyin Morrison, perinatal trauma specialist midwife and author of 'The Birth Debrief'.
You can sign Leah's petition for legal limits on midwives working hours here.
This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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2 April 2026, 4:00 am - 48 minutes 12 secondsGlobal debt crisis: How bankers and billionaires keep countries poor
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Sri Lanka, Ukraine, South Sudan, Haiti, Greece, Zambia, The Latin America Lost Decade… prepare yourselves for a lesson in history . And in geography. And in (ew) economics! Today, we’re talking about debt.
You might not know it, but the world is in a spiralling global debt crisis. On average, low-income countries spend about a fifth of their entire national budget paying off foreign debt. To put that number into perspective, in 2014, it was just 5%. 3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than education or health.
And who are these interest payments going to? Bankers, billionaires, and the world’s wealthiest countries — incidentally, often former colonisers.
This is not the story we get told in the media. So to tell us the first-hand human impact of global debt – which is inextricably linked to the climate crisis – we are joined by one of Zambia’s most prominent debt cancellation and climate activists, Precious Kolbwana. Plus, spitting cold hard facts, Lead Economist at the NGO CAFOD, Maria Finnerty.
This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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26 March 2026, 5:00 am - 48 minutes 37 secondsNews Watch: Owen Jones vs the BBC, and what's really behind the move to cut jury trials?
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Warning: this episode mentions rape, sexual assault and suicide.
The UK government is moving to cut jury trials, a right that traces back to the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta.. It’s a sharp U-turn for Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Justice Secretary David Lammy, who spent years arguing juries were a cornerstone of democracy.
Labour say they’re acting in the interests of women – lucky us! They say cutting juries will ease court delays for victims of misogynistic violence. The thing is… fewer than 3% of reported rapes lead to a trial in the UK. So are juries really the problem here? Is this anything to do with gender justice at all? Or are women being used – yet again – to whitewash political agendas? What is the government (and media) not telling us about why Starmer and Lammy have changed their minds on juries? Side note: Palestine Action activists got acquitted by a jury who went against the judge’s order...
Plus, Owen Jones has won the first battle in an ongoing libel suit filed against him by BBC Middle East editor, Raffi Berg. The court has ruled Jones’ piece was a piece of reasoned opinion, not factual reporting, making it easier to defend. But wait until you hear who’s representing Berg in a libel suit that’s airing a lot of the BBC’s dirty linen.
We also look at Trump’s bid to use national security laws to control news coverage of the war on Iran, and the impact of Brexit on international couples.
This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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If you have been affected by sexual violence, you can contact: Rape Crisis (England & Wales) on 0808 500 2222
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19 March 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 52 secondsModern slavery is thriving: the media just isn’t telling you
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There are at least 49 million enslaved people worldwide… and very little knowledge about how directly connected we are to them through supply chains (take the terrifying Slavery Footprint survey like Mathilda makes Helena do in this episode!)
Over 100,000 are enslaved inside the UK, and that number is growing. This is no surprise, if we look at the data through a Media Storm lens. It correlates with government and media efforts to criminalise asylum seekers and irregular migrants, whether or not they have been trafficked here.
Britain credits itself with pioneering the abolition of slavery. Yet it has a thriving underground labour market and imports billions of pounds-worth of goods every year produced with forced labour. British legislation is called “toothless” by activists. Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and Waitrose all sell tomato products that would be barred from America under anti-slavery import controls.
In this deep dive, we look at modern slavery at home and in overseas supply chains, buried in mainstream media despite underpinning almost every aspect of UK life. We’re joined by trafficking survivor and podcaster Ilja Abbattista, and migrant worker rights activist Andy Hall, who has fought for years to see Dyson to pay a settlement fee to workers who say they were enslaved, beaten and tortured in a Malaysian factory producing parts for the company. Dyson says the settlement is not an admission of liability. Stay tuned to hear how the media is silenced by threats from multinational corporations, and how hysteria over immigration is helping human trafficking to thrive.
This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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12 March 2026, 5:00 am - 53 minutes 3 secondsNews Watch: How the Green Party beat Reform, and is war on Iran legal?
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Last week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton saw massive losses for Labour and a massive win for Hannah Spencer of the Green Party, despite Reform's overconfidence. So did the Greens cheat, as Reform claim… or are Reform just really bad losers? They seem to think abusive Muslim husbands stole their vote, and that the definition of sectarianism is brown people voting for a white woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man. And perhaps worse - the mainstream media think these ideas are worth multiple headlines, articles and broadcast discussions.
Also: remember when Trump said he’d achieved 'everlasting peace' in the Middle East? Since he joined Israel in bombing Iran on Saturday; Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Oman are caught in the crossfires. Trump insisted the attack was an act of self-defence, and now US officials are scrambling to justify exactly how that’s true. Has the media learned from its devastating mistakes in 2003, when it circulated false intelligence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq? Or are they doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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5 March 2026, 5:00 am - 56 minutes 41 secondsThe Epstein Files: Survivors in their own words
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CONTENT WARNING: Details about sexual violence.
Last week, we broke apart the Epstein Files following the US justice department’s dumping of three million documents about a man once described “the most dangerous sexual predator in the world”: Jeffrey Epstein. Survivors have been exposed and re-traumatised, their testimonies have been redacted and buried, and their justice has been continually denied.
So today, we put survivors back at the centre of this story.
It’s a story we probably wouldn’t even know about, were it not for their persistence and bravery in coming forwards despite terrifying efforts to silence them. So we’re honoured to be joined by two of them: artist and author Rina Oh, and educator and mum Teresa J. Helm. They tell us sides of the story the mainstream media is missing.
We also put sexual violence back at the centre of the story, by including a comprehensive outline of the abuse that victims have said was inflicted on them, as well as the names of men they have accused. It may be difficult to listen to, but we believe it is important to detail the sexual violence without burying in politics or euphemistic language — because that is what the legacy media has done for much too long.
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
Follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok
If you have been affected by sexual violence, you can contact:
Rape Crisis (England & Wales) 0808 500 2222
RAINN (USA) 800.656.4673
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26 February 2026, 5:00 am - 57 minutes 19 secondsNews Watch: Making sense of the Epstein Files, and will Reform rollback women’s rights?
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Next week on Media Storm, we will be speaking to survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse, following weeks of coverage that has often focused on this as a political and financial scandal. Survivors have been too lost in the media storm. But there has been a hell of a lot to process - so for Part One of this week’s news watch, we break down the key geopolitical, financial and political you need to understand.
Then after the break: you've probably seen headlines about Nigel Farage talking about divorce rates, birth rates, tax rates, abortion rates, working from home rates, and the root of all evil according to Reform: child-free women. But what links all these sensationalist splashes? There's something much darker, deeper and scarier going on here, and it's an attack on women's bodily autonomy. We draw the parallels between Reform's potential policies and the policies of the Nazi's. Think we're being too dramatic? Just listen.
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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19 February 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 1 minuteShould the UK ban social media for under 16s?
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In December, Australia enforced a world-first, nationwide ban prohibiting children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and YouTube. And now, the UK could be following suit.
But are concerns over "child safety" really behind the ban, or is this a smokescreen for state surveillance and control?
For many teenagers, social media is where they first encounter global news, social justice movements, and political debate - especially if they don’t have access to formal education or traditional news environments. Is the social media ban a blessing for traditional media gatekeepers?
Will it even work, or will the digital native generation simply find a way around it? Shouldn't we be regulating content, not children? Will the government ever stand up to Big Tech? And is the legacy media completely out of touch with young people?
To discuss the perspectives missing from the mainstream, we're joined by two Gen Z's with big voices. Fiona Lali is the youth organiser for the Revolutionary Communist Party, delivering political analysis and explainers to hundreds of thousands of people across her social media platforms. Tamara Himani is journalist and analyst reporting on politics in the US and the Middle East for Middle East Eye, an outlet built on social media.
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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12 February 2026, 5:00 am - 33 minutes 46 secondsNews Watch pt.2: Trump's 'new' world order, and who is behind Grok AI deepfakes?
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In January alone, Donald Trump abducted the Venezuelan President, listed himself as President of Venezuela on Wikipedia, almost launched another tariff war after demanding Greenland, directly threatened Colombia, Mexico and Cuba, told Honduran vote counters there’d be “hell to pay” if his favourite candidate didn’t win, and dropped bombs on Caribbean boats that killed more than a hundred people. Yet at the World Economic Forum in Davos the same month, he launched his ‘Board of Peace’. Make it make sense!
But is Trump's new world order really that new? In a postwar world of covert regime change, privatised ownership of natural resources, and sanctions designed to strangle uncooperative economies, was the international rules-based order just a lie all along?
Plus: headlines told us that "Non-consensual sexualised deepfakes were created by the AI chatbot Grok" and that "Grok AI made sexualised images of children". But who gave Grok the prompt to do it? Missing from the headlines, as is so often the case when it comes to stories about sexual abuse against women and girls, is MEN. We discuss why no one can seem to name the problem - so much so, our government used a SNAKE to represent male violence in a recent advert (end snake violence against women and girls!)
And we end with our new segment: Holding Onto Hope.
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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6 February 2026, 5:00 am - 48 minutes 13 secondsNews Watch pt.1: The ICE killings you didn't see, and how do we help Iran?
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Content warning: sexual assault, mentions of suicide, gunshots
Welcome back! Since we were last here, presidents have been abducted, Greenland became the pride of Europe and millions of Epstein Files flooded the matrix.
Believe it or not, we’re only one month into 2026! But we simply couldn’t fit it into a single episode. So here’s part one of a double-whammy News Watch, in which we round up the looniest headlines of the longest January ever.
We start with the deadly ICE circus unfolding in the US: if the government tells you not to believe your own eyes, should the newspapers reprint their orders? Plus: there’s two ICE-related deaths you’ve surely heard of… but did you read about the other seven? Or do only white citizens deserve headlines?
Over to Iran where the flailing government’s brutal repression and internet blackout has made it difficult to hear the voices on the ground - at a time when Iranians urgently need the international community. But others are also doing a good job at drowning them out: some very loud and very polarising pundits dominating the debate. We do our best to navigate the world’s moral dilemma of How To Help Iranians, by tuning into the quieter voices. And just listening.
To end: our new segment, Holding Onto Hope.
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia)
The music is by @soundofsamfire
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5 February 2026, 6:00 am - 47 minutes 23 secondsQ&A Special pt.2: Ask your hosts anything!
This week Media Storm hosts Mathilda and Helena answer all your questions - from tattoo regrets to the meaning of truth to who was shagging who in the newsroom. Variety.
Join our supporters to ask your questions (and give us essential Media Storm funds) via Patreon!
The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia).
The music is by @soundofsamfire.
Follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok.
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