News Weakly

This week on News Weakly: Tony Burke tells international students to leave the family at home, while British backpackers discover the migration system has a loyalty program.Also, Nyadol Nyuon gets Yassmined for saying she has no intention of assimilating, despite apparently doing more for Australia than most of the people demanding she leave it.And Macklemore gets booted from Ed Sheeran’s tour for saying “Free Palestine”, while an award-winning Israeli documentary about Gaza sparks an argument over who is allowed to tell Palestinian stories.Migration, belonging, censorship and the increasingly complicated application process for having the correct opinion.News Weakly is independent, ad-free and supported by listeners through Patreon.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, everyone knows where Ground Zero was. But where did the blast radius end?This special edition of News Weakly follows one country through the aftermath: Pakistan. From the CIA-backed Afghan jihad and the rise of the Taliban, through Musharraf’s alliance with George W. Bush, suicide bombings, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, drone warfare and the growth of Pakistani television news, all the way to the night Osama bin Laden was found living in Abbottabad.Pakistan didn’t carry out 9/11. No Pakistani was among the nineteen hijackers. Yet its modern history became almost impossible to separate from what happened that morning.The physical blast lasted seconds. The political blast radius is still expanding.News Weakly is independent, ad-free and supported by listeners through Patreon.

This week on News Weakly, Sami Shah revisits a 2022 argument about the Sydney Festival boycott after The Shot brands him a “liberal Zionist coward” for criticising two of its headlines as demonstrations of antisemitism.From Israel and Gaza to Mossad-payroll conspiracies, white saviour politics, audience capture and the invisible damage of online pile-ons, this episode asks what happens when political disagreement becomes a test of whether you are still allowed to belong.Criticising Israel and recognising antisemitism are not rival positions. So why does saying both increasingly get treated as evidence of betrayal?News Weakly is independent, completely ad-free and supported by listeners through Patreon.

Everyone agrees the world is ending. The only disagreement is which catastrophe gets top billing.Starting with Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech, Sami Shah travels through Bangladesh, Munich, Chile, Watergate, oil shocks, coups, terrorism, information overload and nuclear panic to ask whether the present is uniquely doomed—or whether every generation mistakes its own crisis for the final shape of history.This is not a cheerful TED Talk claiming everything is secretly better. Gaza, democratic decline, antisemitism, climate change and AI-generated misinformation are real dangers.But helplessness is the con.News Weakly is independent, completely ad-free and supported by listeners through Patreon.

NEWS WEAKLY 226 – What Is The Sentence?Last week, News Weakly opened with Jason Arday. This week, after his sudden death, Sami Shah asks a harder question: what is public accountability actually supposed to achieve?From Arday to Louis C.K., Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman, this documentary looks at public shame, misconduct, cancellation, comeback and whether punishment without an end point eventually becomes something closer to appetite than justice.When should someone be allowed back? Who gets to decide? And if suffering itself isn’t the point, what is?Content note: this episode discusses death, possible suicide, sexual misconduct and public shaming.News Weakly is independent, ad-free and listener-supported through Patreon.

This week on News Weakly, Sami Shah goes long on artificial intelligence, authenticity and the increasingly difficult question: how was this thing actually made?From Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s disputed biography and Mahmood Fazal’s anonymous-source scandal at the ABC, to novelist Jerry Falade’s collapsed $2 million publishing deal and Hank Green reconsidering his own use of AI, The Story Machine asks what journalism, academia, publishing and creativity are really selling us.Is AI the problem—or has it simply exposed how willing institutions already were to reward compelling outputs without checking their provenance?News Weakly is completely ad-free and listener-supported through Patreon.

This week on News Weakly, Sami Shah watches Victorian Labor replace Jacinta Allan with her own deputy and announce a fresh start from inside the same government.Meanwhile, tens of thousands cross from Morocco into Spain’s African enclave of Ceuta, producing a humanitarian emergency, unstable statistics and some highly selective European geography.Plus, Trump announces Hamas’s complete disarmament—while Hamas, Israel and the English language remain less certain.News Weakly is ad-free and listener-supported through Patreon.

This week on News Weakly, Sami Shah follows India’s Cockroach Janta Party from a Supreme Court insult and viral meme to mass youth protests over examination leaks, unemployment and corruption.How did a cockroach holding a mobile phone become the symbol of a generation losing faith in education, employment and government? And why might satire be better at organising political anger than political parties are?Plus: India’s crackdown on comedians, the youth movements spreading across South Asia, and why Australians should understand the politics shaping the people they live and work alongside.News Weakly is completely ad-free and listener-supported through Patreon.

This week on News Weakly, Sami Shah follows two news stories through the online outrage machine.An ABC report about climate disasters increasing the risk of child marriage becomes “the ABC defends Muslim child brides”. Meanwhile, a review of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Gaza casualty database becomes both “all Palestinian journalists are terrorists” and “CPJ erased twenty murdered reporters”.It’s an episode about missing qualifiers, invented context, tense laundering, viral screenshots and why reading beyond the headline may now qualify as civic service.All that, and more.