Episode 225

At long last, there are early signs of introspection emerging in the more rarified edges of the mainstream media. Lindsey Hilsum, a distinguished foreign editor on Channel 4 News, for example, sought this week to find an answer to the erupting question of why so many people now prefer the reportage of alternative reporters to that of people like her who think themselves to be the real thing. Hala Jaber is a significant figure on the journalistic landscape; a celebrated award-winning writer on the Sunday Times, one of the world’s most important newspapers, a war correspondent of considerable bravery, as well as being an author of note; so we invited her into the Sputnik studio to ask why there appears to be a growing move away from “real” journalists to alt-media.

And there was yet another strange death in Kuala Lumpur this week when the Palestinian scientist and engineer Dr. Fadi Mohammed Al-Batsh was gunned down by two European men on powerful motorcycles. The assassination is not just a blow to the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, it is a blow to the prestige of Malaysia with a second high-profile killing coming just over a year after Kim Jong-nam was assassinated at KL’s international airport by a deadly nerve agent. Fingers have also pointed in Israel’s direction too, which has denied any involvement in the crime, describing the killing as a ‘settling of scores within the Palestinian factions’. So, we invited Nedka Babliku, a commentator and writer on Middle East affairs, into the studio to untangle the many geopolitical threads.

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