War on Truth: 9. Roddy: 'We don’t trust the media, so we became it'
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BBC
2.8 • 947 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
Citizen journalism – reporting by self-taught people, often on the ground - can play a vital role in the coverage of conflict. However, not everyone who contributes to this coverage is as 'independent'’ as they’d like their followers to believe. Roddy’s distrust of the media led him to start his own podcast. He also follows self-styled citizen journalists who are roaming around inside Ukraine. In this episode of War On Truth, the BBC’s specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring investigates some of their work. She speaks with an expert who has analysed some of their coverage, tries to understand how it gets made, what might be influencing it - and why it spreads to people like Roddy. Producer: Joseph Martin Editor: Ant Adeane
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Savings, credit cards, car finance, reclaiming, insurance, investing, power of attorney, decision, |
| 0:06.2 | indecision, analysis, paralysis. |
| 0:09.4 | Don't panic. |
| 0:10.4 | The Martin Lewis podcast is twice weekly, helping you navigate our complex consumer world. |
| 0:15.2 | I'll walk you through a big money saving topic step by step. |
| 0:18.4 | Then in question time, you set the agenda and ask whatever's on your mind. |
| 0:22.5 | Would you rather be locked in an empty shopping centre with a thousand snakes or just one gorilla? |
| 0:27.6 | Within reason. |
| 0:28.6 | The Martin Lewis podcast, listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.8 | I'm Roddy McLeod. I am a.k.a. Barhead boy. I'm 70 years young. I'm originally from the |
| 0:43.6 | great city of Glasgow. And I now live most my life in between Catalonia, Scotland and Dubai. |
| 0:51.0 | Roddy is speaking to me from his current home near Barcelona. He's very courteous and |
| 0:56.2 | polite, but it's safe to say he doesn't trust the media very much at all. You can't trust it |
| 1:01.6 | to tell the truth about anything. And that's happened again and again and again and it's happening |
| 1:06.2 | to this day. In fact, his is a distrust that seems to run particularly deep. |
| 1:11.6 | When I count my money in the morning, I stand in front of a mirror because I don't even trust myself. |
| 1:15.6 | His aversion to what he calls mainstream media compelled him to start his own brand of journalism. |
| 1:22.6 | A lot of people at myself sort of said, well, you know, let's become the media because you can't trust it. |
| 1:28.3 | And so I decided to become a citizen journalist, if you like. |
| 1:31.3 | So set up a podcast and a blog. |
| 1:34.3 | We've watched people on the ground in Ukraine doing similar things, |
... |
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