The week in radio and podcasts: The Tip Off; The Bellingcat Podcast – review

The Tip Off
The Bellingcat Podcast

Investigative journalism has been a quiet stalwart of podcasting for some time now, ticking over quite nicely thank you, despite its brasher subgenre true crime generating more of the headlines. The best true crime podcasts are, of course, a version of investigative journalism, driven by curiosity and dogged reportage; it’s just that much of the donkey work – the hours following online threads or sifting through reports or interviewing witnesses – is kept away from the listener, in favour of more salacious details.

So if you really want to find out how complicated, well-hidden public interest stories are brought into the light, then your best bet is The Tip Off podcast. Winner of best new podcast at the British Journalism awards in 2018, this week it started its fifth series. It has a wide remit: in one episode it will describe the tracking down of the Isis jihadist “John the Beatle”, the next tell the tale of how British women fleeing domestic violence are being let down because of a lack of refuges. The new series promises the behind-the-scenes story of the Windrush exposé; the tale of a Northern Irish journalist who exposed police collusion; and how a cross-border, open-source investigation tracked down the perpetrators of a massacre.

Presenter Maeve McClenaghan is an investigative reporter herself, and when I interviewed her a year ago she told me three things that stuck in my mind. First, that LinkedIn is a great way to find disgruntled ex-employees willing to talk about their previous workplace. Second, that there are a lot of female investigative journalists. (The first series of The Tip Off barely featured any male reporters at all.) And third, that no one can predict how a story will land.

Sometimes investigations result in a big media splash; sometimes they make barely a ripple. The opening episode of the new series, which started this week, features one story that did both. In it, we meet Chicago Sun-Times journalist Jim DeRogatis, who, with another reporter, Abdon Pallasch, first reported on R&B megastar R Kelly’s alleged sexual abuse of young women. Their front-page story was published way back in 2000, to deafening silence. Over the next 17 years, DeRogatis reported on 48 women who alleged that Kelly had raped or sexually abused them. But these stories – backed up, corroborated, evidenced – were ignored by other media outlets. Even a “crystal-clear” video of Kelly abusing an underage girl, sent to DeRogatis anonymously and resulting in a legal case (Kelly was acquitted), was joked about as a “pee tape”. Only in post-#MeToo 2017, when Buzzfeed ran with DeRogatis’s story of women being held against their will at Kelly’s home, did the wider world take notice.

Kelly has recently been indicted on 18 charges including child sexual exploitation, child pornography, kidnapping and obstruction of justice. But, as yet, he’s not been found guilty. You have to wonder, as DeRogatis points out, if this story would have attracted more attention if just one of Kelly’s alleged victims had been white.

A new investigative journalism offering is The Bellingcat Podcast. Bellingcat is an independent investigative website that uses open-source journalism and social media to probe a variety of international stories. This is its first podcast and it concerns Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down in Ukraine in 2014. Presented by Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, this is detailed stuff, with any number of informed interviewees, from reporters on the scene (the opening episode is disturbing in its eerie detail), to experienced analysts of Russian and Ukrainian politics. We’re three episodes in. In episode 2, I was struck by political expert Mark Galeotti, talking about Russian online counterintelligence. “It’s easy to attack each individual lie… and prove it isn’t so, but in the process it creates this sense that truth is entirely subjective and negotiable.” Bellingcat is all about non-negotiable truth. The podcast goes in deep, but for those who wish to join in, it’s definitely worth the effort.

Three shows celebrating their Rajar ratings

Ken Bruce
BBC Radio 2
With a proportion of Radio 2 listeners following Chris Evans to Virgin (where Evans’s breakfast show has increased listeners to a steady 1.1 million), and others migrating to 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne, Zoe Ball has done well to keep Radio 2’s breakfast show above 8 million listeners. That means, though, that Ken Bruce now has the biggest show in the UK, with 8.5 million listeners tuning in to his genial mix of well-known tunes and even more well-known jokes. Even the sniffy (like me) are fans of Bruce’s PopMaster quiz. Retaining a Wogan-esque relaxed charm, he is the antidote to the bad news world.

Nick Ferrari
LBC
LBC’s long-standing breakfast-show provocateur has posted his highest ever figures, with 1.4 million listeners, an increase of 240,000. Ferrari is one of the best out there at dealing with both politicians and voters, adept at playing devil’s advocate without making his interviewees feel foolish or unacknowledged. In London, his show is the No 1 commercial radio show for “hours and share”: meaning people listen longer to him than most other hosts. Elsewhere on LBC, Eddie Mair’s teatime show has added 119,000 listeners, with 804,000 tuning in every week.

Union Jack
Jack Radio
Not shows, but stations without traditional DJs, this is one of the Oxfordshire-based Jack FM network’s two stations. Union Jack, which plays British pop music, has had a 74% increase in listeners year-on-year, up to 153,000. Jack Radio, which plays only female artists, got a smaller listenership of 32,000, but both stations are perhaps a forecast of what is to come. Geoff Lloyd’s Hometown Glory, an interview show, is played on the network and there is live comedy too, but commercial DJs may well be quaking in their boots.