Epstein reportedly hoped to develop super-race of humans with his DNA
Registered sex offender hoped to seed human race with his DNA by impregnating 20 women at a time, New York Times reports
Though there is little evidence the scheme ever progressed beyond fantasy, prominent scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, regularly attended dinners, lunches and conferences held by Epstein, the Times reports. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
Thu 1 Aug 2019 16.58 BST
Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier accused of sex trafficking, planned to develop an improved super-race of humans using genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, according to the New York Times.
In the aftermath of his 2008 sex trafficking conviction, Epstein hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his ranch in New Mexico, one of his properties where young women, including minors, were allegedly abused, the newspaper reported in a major investigation.
Though there is little evidence the scheme ever progressed beyond fantasy, prominent scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, regularly attended dinners, lunches and conferences held by Epstein, the Times said.
Epstein has long been accused of sexually abusing underage girls. He also has purported connections to Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, and moved in elite social circles in New York, Florida and elsewhere.
He is currently in jail after being arrested on 6 July. He pleaded not guiltyseveral weeks ago.
Epstein’s plans around his own progeny began to be talked about in the early 2000s, according to three sources contacted by the Times.
“Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies … Mr Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-sq-ft Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe,” the Times said.
An aerial view of Zorro Ranch, near Stanley, New Mexico. Photograph: Drone Base/Reuters
Epstein’s field of study was labeled “transhumanism” but was an updated version of eugenics. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who defended Epstein in 2008 and has been named in a civil suit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, told the Times he was appalled by the financier’s interest in genetic manipulation, given the Nazis’ use of eugenics in the 1930s.
“Everyone speculated about whether these scientists were more interested in his views or more interested in his money,” Dershowitz told the Times.
According to the paper, Epstein’s circle included the molecular engineer George Church; Murray Gell-Mann, the discover of the quark; the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks; and the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek.
On one occasion, Epstein held a lunch at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a program he had helped fund with a $6.5m donation. In 2011, he gave $20,000 to the Worldwide Transhumanist Association, a project that now operates as Humanity Plus.
The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he considered Epstein as an “intellectual impostor”.
“He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack,” Pinker told the paper. The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier said Epstein’s ideas did not rise to science that could be subjected to critical analysis.
The scientific community, like Trump and much of New York and Palm Beach society, would sooner forget their association with Epstein.
Humanity Plus vice-chairman Ben Goertzel, whose salary was once paid by Epstein, told the Times: “I have no desire to talk about Epstein right now. The stuff I’m reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch.”
Revealed: Johnson ally’s firm secretly ran Facebook propaganda network
Sir Lynton Crosby’s firm CTF has built unbranded disinformation pages for Saudi Arabia and major polluters
Thu 1 Aug 2019 18.10 BST
Boris Johnson (r) has a longstanding personal relationship with Sir Lynton Crosby, who has played a key role in every Conservative election campaign since 2005. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock
The lobbying firm run by Boris Johnson’s close ally Sir Lynton Crosby has secretly built a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook for dozens of clients ranging from the Saudi government to major polluters, a Guardian investigation has found.
In the most complete account yet of CTF Partners’ outlook and strategy, current and former employees of the campaign consultancy have painted a picture of a business that appears to have professionalised online disinformation, taken on a series of controversial clients and faced incidents of misogynistic bullying in its headquarters.
They said that such was the culture of secrecy within the firm that staff working on online disinformation campaigns, which selectively promoted their clients’ viewpoints on anonymised Facebook pages that followed a common formula, used initials rather than full names on internal systems and often relied on personal email accounts to avoid their work being traced back to CTF and its clients.
The disclosures will raise pressure on the prime minister to distance himself from CTF, with former staff members warning that the company might wield substantial influence in the new administration. CTF gave Johnson an interest-free loan to cover office and staffing costs earlier this year, while Crosby’s partners in the business are Mark Textor and Mark Fullbrook, with Fullbrook taking a leave of absence to run Johnson’s campaign for the Tory party leadership along with David Canzini.
The news follows the Guardian’s April report that Crosby’s company was behind a series of hugely influential pro-Brexit Facebook groups, which spent as much as £1m seeding the idea of a no-deal exit from the EU in the minds of the British public.
But the latest revelations reveal that the company has pursued that approach more broadly, in the service of previously unreported corporate interests and foreign governments.
And they expose a major flaw in Facebook’s political transparency tools, which make it possible for Crosby’s company – which boasts on its website that it deploys “the latest tools in digital engagement” – to use the social network to run professional-looking “news” pages reaching tens of millions of people on highly contentious topics, without apparently disclosing that they are being overseen by CTF Partners on behalf of paying clients.
Based on discussions with the current and former employees and examination of a large number of internal documents, the Guardian can reveal the extent of the astroturfing campaign:
How the company took millions of pounds from the Saudi Arabian government in 2018 to burnish the reputation of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has subsequently been implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
How the company worked with the party of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who has since been implicated in one of the world’s biggest-ever corruption scandals, in the run-up to the country’s last general election. Razak has denied any wrongdoing.
CTF’s role in political campaigns in countries criticised for their human rights records, ranging from Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka to war-torn Yemen.
How CTF specialises in fighting regulation by seeking to influence key politicians, with campaigns in support of coal power, tobacco, and against cyclists.
CTF declined to comment on their methods or clients but said they operated within the law and accused the Guardian of relying on “false or distorted facts”. They dismissed the idea that the company or Crosby could exercise any influence on the prime minister.
The company’s approach is a sophisticated application of the well worn communications technique of astroturfing, where political campaigners attempt to create the perception of an upswell of grassroots support for a cause.
One former employee described how Crosby’s business created Facebook pages on specific topics to spread disinformation to interested members of the public in the UK and abroad. “It would all be anonymised and made to look as though they are a news aggregator with a specialist angle,” the employee said. “For instance, if we were working to promote the use of coal, it would be an anti-environmental page. You might make a page designed to attract pro-Trump types and get them revved up about green subsidies.”
Staff members said that they created websites and Facebook pages which appeared to be independent online news sources with names such as Why Electricity Matters, Reporting Yemen and Londoners for Transport, but instead could be used to distribute highly selective information which reached tens of millions of readers.
The astroturfed ‘news’ page Londoners for Transport linked to Sir Lynton Crosby’s CTF Partners. Photograph: web
Multiple supposedly independent pages on behalf of different clients could then be managed by Crosby employees through a single high-level “business manager” account, which sidesteps Facebook’s transparency tools. The connection between the pages is not visible to normal Facebook users.
Secrecy was a paramount consideration in the communications strategy, the staffers said, leading to instances of the careful use of initials instead of full names on Facebook’s internal systems and the occasional reliance on non-corporate email accounts. Some resorted to using ProtonMail, an encrypted email service, to avoid being traced.
The Guardian understands that CTF Partners earned millions of pounds representing the Saudi Arabian government, with the account headed by longtime Crosby associate Mark Domitrak – a former lobbying boss at British American Tobacco. The company helped coordinate press coverage around the arrival of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the UK for his state visit in early 2018, prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Sam Lyon, the head of CTF Partners’ London office who previously workedas Johnson’s director of communications, was a member of the team who worked with the party of Razak before he left his position as Malaysian prime minister. The Asian politician was later toppled amid ongoing accusations of involvement in a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal. He has always denied any wrongdoing.
The supposed news sources, which were liked by millions of users and reached tens of millions through the use of paid Facebook adverts, were grown using the social network’s promotional tools, with assistance from Facebook sales teams who encouraged the purchase of more promotions. Once CTF employees found a tactic that provoked a strong reaction, they would double down, according to one of the ex-employees: “If you’re after the MAGA crowd you just target people like this. Then once you’ve got an audience you just target people like that.”
One such news page – entitled GreenWatch – published repeated attacks against subsidies for “wasteful onshore wind farms” using the slogan “keeping the green lobby honest”, without any sign it was overseen by Crosby’s company, which had a contract with major coal miner Glencore. Other Facebook campaigns promoted the construction of coal power stations in India using pages with names such as Bright Bangla.
Pages purporting to be independent news pages on the war in Yemen did not disclose that CTF worked on behalf of the Saudi government. Photograph: web
Pages purporting to be independent news pages on the war in Yemen with names such as Middle East Diplomat and Iran in Focus did not disclose that CTF worked on behalf of the Saudi government, which is heavily involved in the destructive war. The disinformation network uncovered by the Guardian also included political pages in African nations with titles such as Inside Mauritania and Free & Fair Election Zimbabwe, which purported to provide fact-based information on what was going on in the two countries, without disclosing the source of funding or work on behalf of political campaigns.
Many of the Facebook pages were deleted after the Guardian began making enquiries. After being presented with the Guardian’s findings about the scale of the company’s online disinformation campaign, Facebook said it did not want to start regulating what constituted a legitimate news source.
A screengrab of the page for Free & Fair Zimbabwe Election. Photograph: web
It also said the network of pages pretending to be news sources on behalf of corporate and state clients did not break their rules on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, a term used to shut down disinformation networks overseen by foreign governments in Russia and Iran. This is because Crosby’s employees used their real names on internal Facebook administration tools – information that is not available to the general public. The Guardian has seen documents that suggest Facebook has been aware of the issue involving the network of CTF pages since late last year.
The company said: “Our review to-date suggests the majority of these pages to be operated by real people and do not currently violate our coordinated inauthentic behaviour policy. However, we take seriously the information shared by the Guardian and are continuing to review the activity of the pages mentioned.”
Existing Facebook rules on political transparency only require an individual to be put up as the public face of a campaign, without disclosing who is ultimately paying for it or overseeing the account, a tactic used in Crosby’s pro-Brexit campaigns. The company said it was looking to add additional disclosures but suggested that government regulation was needed: “These examples could highlight the case for new rules since internet platforms are not currently required to find out who is paying page admins or managers.”
CTF through their lawyers said any suggestion the company produced “fake news” or that Facebook has taken action against them or their clients was false and defamatory.
Johnson has a longstanding personal relationship with Crosby, who has played a key role in every Conservative election campaign since 2005. Last weekend the Sunday Times quoted a “source close to Crosby” claiming that Johnson had talked to him “frequently” since being elected.
Crosby’s lawyer said that any suggestion CTF or Crosby could exert influence “on account of their ‘relationship’ with Mr Johnson ignores the reality of the decision-making and policy process in Westminster and Whitehall.”
Although CTF declined to comment on their methods and which clients they had worked for, citing commercial confidentiality rules, they said employees always operate within the law and accused the Guardian’s journalists of relying “on false or distorted facts and improperly leaked documents as part of a political agenda”.
“That is not public-interest journalism: it is agenda-driven and irresponsible journalism,” they added.
1. This is a prime example, of how 21th century technology is systematically undermining - till the very level of destruction - our precious democracy by stealthily restoring medieval social power constructions on behalf of the leading financial and economic special interest-groups and their political representatives.
2. For all those who might be inclined to reject such a conclusion and do rely on the authorities - with the assistance of national security services - to protect our democracy, I would ask to contemplate that the very same electioneering firms (such as the now defunct Cambridge Analytica) are regularly used by those very security services themselves and used to our disadvantage rather than to our democratic advantage.
3. It is ironic to consider, that the 2016 UK-EU referendum result might easily have been conclusively determined by those shady electioneering firms and Johnson might have been highly dependent on those firms as well, to have succeeded to be elected as head of the recently formed no-Deal Brexit cabinet, and will furthermore be heavily assisted by those firms (ie. CTF) to finalise the cliff-edge ejection of the UK from the EU.
4. I do suppose it is permitted to consider the employment of these tools of deception as (another characteristic of) New Fascism, since fascism historically has always been about about destroying democracy and does advertise in stead for parachuting charismatic leaders into the public political orbit.
boat dangerously overloaded with refugees lands near Molyvos on the Greek island of Lesbos, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein
How the media framed the way we see the migrant crisis
Disaster reporting plays to set ideas about people from ‘over there’. By Daniel Trilling
Thu 1 Aug 2019 06.00 BST
When did you notice the word “migrant” start to take precedence over the many other terms applied to people on the move? For me it was in 2015, as the refugee crisis in Europe reached its peak. While debate raged over whether people crossing the Mediterranean via unofficial routes should be regarded as deserving candidates for European sympathy and protection, it seemed as if that word came to crowd out all others. Unlike the other terms, well-meaning or malicious, that might be applied to people in similar situations, this one word appears shorn of context; without even an im- or an em- attached to it to indicate that the people it describes have histories or futures. Instead, it implies an endless present: they are migrants, they move, it’s what they do. It’s a form of description that, until 2015, I might have expected to see more often in nature documentaries, applied to animals rather than human beings.
But only certain kinds of human beings. The professional who moves to a neighbouring city for work is not usually described as a migrant, and neither is the wealthy businessman who acquires new passports as easily as he moves his money around the world. It is most often applied to those people who fall foul of border control at the frontiers of the rich world, whether that’s in Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa or elsewhere. That’s because the terms that surround migration are inextricably bound up with power, as is the way in which our media organisations choose to disseminate them.
The people I met during the years I spent reporting on the experiences of refugees at Europe’s borders, for my book Lights in the Distance, were as keenly aware of this as any of us. There was the fixer I was introduced to in Bulgaria, a refugee himself, who was offering TV news crews a “menu” of stories of suffering, with a price range that corresponded with the value the media placed on them.
Caesar, a young man from Mali I met in Sicily, told me he was shocked to find that Italian television would usually only show images of Africa in reports about war or poverty. Some refugees’ stories, he felt, were treated with more urgency than others because of what country they came from. Or there was Hakima, an Afghan woman who lived with her family in Athens, who confronted me directly: “We keep having journalists visit, and they want to hear our stories, but, tell me, what can you do?” Often, people I met were surprised at the lack of understanding, even indifference, they felt was being shown to them. Didn’t Europe know why people like them were forced to make these journeys? Hadn’t Europe played an intimate role in the histories and conflicts of their own countries?
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urope’s refugee crisis, or more properly, a disaster partly caused by European border policies, rather than simply the movement of refugees towards Europe, was one of the most heavily mediated world events of the past decade. It unfolded around the edges of a wealthy and technologically developed region, home to several major centres of the global media industry. Scenes of desperation, suffering and rescue that might normally be gathered by foreign correspondents in harder-to-access parts of the world were now readily available to reporters, news crews, filmmakers and artists at relatively low cost.
The people at the centre of the crisis were, at least for a time, relatively free to move around once they had reached safety and to speak to whoever they pleased. This gave certain advantages to the kind of media coverage that was produced. Most of all, it allowed quick and clear reporting on emergency situations as they developed. Throughout 2015, the crisis narrative was developed via a series of flashpoints at different locations within and around the European Union. In April, for example, attention focused on the smuggler boat route from Libya, after the deadliest shipwreck ever recorded in the Mediterranean. A month or so later focus shifted to Calais, where French and British policies of discouraging irregular migrants from attempting to cross the Channel had led to a growing spectacle of mass destitution. By the summer, the number of boat crossings from Turkey to Greece had dramatically increased, and images and stories of people stepping on to Aegean shores, or of piles of orange lifejackets, came to dominate. Then came the scenes of people moving through the Balkans, and so on, and so on.
Kara Tepe refugee camp on Lesbos in Greece. The men, mostly Syrians, are anxiously waiting for registration papers, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein
In all of these situations the news media were able to do their basic job in emergency situations, which is to communicate what’s happening, who’s affected, what’s needed the most. But this is usually more than a matter of relaying dry facts and figures. “Human stories” have the greatest currency among journalists, although it’s an odd term if you think about it.
What stories aren’t human? In fact, it’s most commonly used to denote a particular kind of human story; one that gives individual experience the greatest prominence, that tells you what an event felt like, both physically and emotionally. It rests on the assumption that this is what connects most strongly with audiences: either because it hooks them in and keeps them watching or reading, or because it helps them identify with the protagonist, perhaps in a way that encourages empathy, or a particular course of action in response. As a result, the public was able to easily and quickly access vivid accounts and images of people’s experiences as they attempted to cross the EU’s external borders, or to find shelter and welcome within Europe.
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he trade-off was that this often fit into predetermined ideas about what disasters look like, who needs protection, who is innocent and who is deserving of blame. Think, for example, about the most recognisable image of the refugee crisis in 2015: the picture of a Turkish police officer carrying the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi away from the water’s edge on a beach near Bodrum.
As the Dutch documentary Een zee van beelden – A Sea of Images – (Medialogica, 2016) asked: why did this image in particular strike such a chord? After all, many news editors see images of death on a daily basis, yet for the most part decide to exclude them. The documentary showed how the apparently viral spread of the Alan Kurdi photograph on social media was in large part the result of a series of decisions taken by senior journalists and NGO workers.
Refugees after landing on Lesbos, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein
First, a local photo agency in Turkey decided to release the image to the wires because they were so fed up with the lack of political response to the crisis on their shores. The image was shared by an official at a global human rights NGO with a large Twitter following, and retweeted by several prominent correspondents for large news organisations. Picture editors at several newspapers then decided, independently of one another, to place the photo on the front pages of their next editions; only after that point did it reach its widest circulation online. The image gained the status it did for a mix of reasons – political, commercial, but also aesthetic. One of the picture editors interviewed in the documentary commented on how the position of the figures in the photo resembled that of Michelangelo’s Pietà , an iconography of suffering and sacrifice that runs deep in European culture.
But if this way of working has its advantages, it also has its dark side. News media that rush from one crisis point to another are not so good at filling in the gaps, at explaining the obscured systems and long-term failures that might be behind a series of seemingly unconnected events. To return to the idea of a “refugee crisis”, for example, this is an accurate description in one sense, as it involved a sharp increase in the number of people claiming asylum in the European Union; from around 430,000 in 2013, according to the EU statistics agency Eurostat, to well over a million in 2015 and 2016 each. In global terms this was a relatively small number of refugees: the EU has a population of over 500 million, while most of the world’s 68.5 million forcibly displaced people are hosted in poorer parts of the world. But the manner of people’s arrival was chaotic and often deadly, while there was a widespread institutional failure to ensure that their needs – for basic necessities, for legal and political rights – were met. To stop there, however, risks giving the false impression that the crisis was a problem from elsewhere that landed unexpectedly on European shores.
T
his impression is false on two counts. First, Europe has played a key role, historically, in the shaping of a world where power and wealth are unequally distributed, and European powers continue to pursue military and arms trading policies that have caused or contributed to the conflicts and instability from which many people flee. Second, the crisis of 2015 was a direct effect of the complex and often violent system of policing immigration from outside the EU that has been constructed in the last few decades.
In short, this has involved the EU and its members signing treaties with countries outside its borders to control immigration on its behalf; an increasingly militarised frontier at the geographical edges of the EU; and an internal system for regulating the movement of asylum seekers that aims to force them to stay in the first EU country they enter. This, cumulatively, had the effect of forcing desperate people to take narrower and more dangerous routes by land and sea, while the prioritising of border control over safe and dignified reception conditions compounded the disaster. How well, really, did media organisations explain all this to their audiences?
The effect, all too often, was to frame these newly arrived people as others; people from “over there”, who had little to do with Europe itself and were strangers, antagonistic even, to its traditions and culture. This was true at times, of both well-meaning and hostile media coverage. A sympathetic portrayal of the displaced might focus on some of those images and stories that matched stereotypes of innocence and vulnerability: children, women, families; the vulnerable, the sick, the elderly.
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Negative coverage, meanwhile, might focus more on the men, the able-bodied, nameless and sometimes faceless people massed at fences or gates. Or people from particular countries would be focused on to suit a political agenda. The Sun, one of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, for example, led with a picture of Alan Kurdi on its front page in September 2015, telling its readers that the refugee crisis was a matter of life and death, and that the immediate action required was further British military intervention in Syria. A few weeks later it gave another refugee boat story the front page, but in contrast to the earlier one the language was about “illegals” who were seeking a “back door”. This time, the refugees were from Iraq, and they had landed on the territory of a British air force base in Cyprus, which legally made them the responsibility of the UK.
The fragmented and contradictory media coverage of the crisis left room for questions to go unanswered and myths to circulate: who are these people and what do they want from us? Why don’t they stop in the first safe country they reach? Why don’t the men stay behind and fight? How can we make room for everyone? Are they bringing their problems to our shores? Do they threaten our culture and values? The problem is made worse by those media outlets that have an active desire to stoke hostility and misunderstanding.
I went back to meet Azad several times over the next two years, as he and his family made their way across Bulgaria, and then central Europe, to Germany. During that time, the backlash against refugees grew stronger, a fact Azad was keenly aware of. In Sofia, in the spring of 2014, he pointed out places in the city centre where homeless Syrians had been attacked by street gangs. Later that year, in eastern Germany, we walked through a town where lampposts were festooned with posters for a far-right political party.
An Afghan refugee, Hassan, who collapsed after landing with his family near Skala, Lesbos, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein
By the autumn of 2015, Azad and his family were settled in Germany’s Ruhr area, and he was much warier of me than he had been in our early meetings. He could see that hostility ran alongside the curiosity and welcome that had greeted the new arrivals to Europe; and he knew how giving too many details away to journalists could threaten what stability people in his situation had managed to find. Within a few months, a series of events – the Islamic State attack in Paris in November 2015, the robberies and sexual assaults in Cologne that New Year’s Eve – had provided the excuse for some media outlets to tie well-worn stereotypes about savage, dark foreigners and their alleged threat to white European purity to the refugees of today.
The most brazen of these claims – such as the Polish magazine wSieci, which featured a white woman draped in the EU flag being groped at by the arms of dark-skinned men, under the headline The Islamic Rape of Europe – directly echoed the Nazi and fascist propaganda of Europe’s 20th century. But racist stereotyping was present in more liberal outlets too. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, in its coverage of the Cologne attacks, prominently featured an illustration of a woman’s legs silhouetted in white, with the space in between taken up by a black arm and hand. Racism is buried so deep in European history that at times like these it can remain unspoken yet still make its presence clear.
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ow, several years on from the peak of the refugee crisis, we are faced with a series of uncomfortable facts. The EU has tried to restore and strengthen the border system that existed before 2015 by extending migration control deep into Africa and Asia. The human rights of the people this affects, not least the many migrants trapped in horrendous conditions in Libya, are taking a back seat. Far right and nationalist movements have made electoral gains in many countries within the EU, and they have done this partly by promising to crack down on migration, to punish refugees for daring to ask for shelter from disasters that Europe was all too often the midwife to. Politicians of the centre are being pulled to the right by these developments, and a dangerous narrative threatens to push out all others: that European culture and identity are threatened by intrusions from outside. If we come to view culture in this way – as something fixed and tightly bounded by the ideologies of race and religion, or as a means for wealthy parts of the world to defend their privilege – then we are headed for further, greater disasters.
The irony is that you can only believe in this vision if you ignore not only Europe’s history, but its present too. Movement, exchange, new connections, the making and remaking of tradition – these things are happening all around us, and already involve people who have been drawn here from other parts of the world by ties not just of conflict but of economics, history, language and technology. By the same token, displacement is not just a feature of the lives of people from elsewhere in the world; it’s been a major and recent part of Europe’s history too. And what has kept people alive, what has preserved traditions and allowed people to build identities and realise their potential, is solidarity: the desire to defend one another and work towards common goals.
If there is a failure to recognise this, then the way people are represented by our media and cultural institutions has to be at fault, and setting this right is an urgent challenge. This isn’t only in terms of how people are represented and when, but who gets to participate in the decision-making; who gets to speak with authority, or with political intent, or with a collective voice rather than simply as an individual.
All too often, the voices of refugees and other marginalised people are reduced to pure testimony, which is then interpreted and contextualised on their behalf. One thing that constantly surprised me about the reporting on refugees in Europe, for instance, was how little we heard from journalists who had connections to already settled diaspora communities. Immigration from Africa, Asia or the Middle East is hardly new to Europe, and this seems like a missed opportunity to strengthen bridges we have already built. Though it’s never too late.
Any meaningful response to this has to address the question of who gets to tell stories, as well as what kinds of stories are told. The Refugee Journalism Project, a mentoring scheme for displaced journalists, based at London College of Communication – disclosure: I’m on the steering committee, and it is supported by the Guardian Foundation – focuses not only on providing people with a media platform, but helping them develop the skills and contacts necessary for getting jobs.
All too often the second part is forgotten about. But although initiatives like these are encouraging, we also need to rethink the way our media organisations are run: who owns them, who makes the decisions, who does the work. This reminds me of what I heard Fatima, a women’s rights activist originally from Nigeria, tell an audience of NGO workers in Italy in 2016: “Don’t just come and ask me questions and sell my story or sell my voice; we need a change.”
The more those of us who work in media can help develop the connections that already exist between us, the more I think we can break down the idea of irreconcilable conflict over migration. Because, really, there is no “over there” – just where we are.
Though there is little evidence the scheme ever progressed beyond fantasy, prominent scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, regularly attended dinners, lunches and conferences held by Epstein, the Times reports. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
