this is bbc news. the headlines: investigators in the united states say that 19 schoolchildren murdered by a teenage gunman in texas were in the same classroom. minutes before the killings, he'd posted that he was going to attack an elementary school. president biden has pleaded with americans to support reforms to gun laws. ukrainian officials are collecting and burying the bodies of russian soldiers left behind by the invading forces. others have been exhumed and stacked—up in refrigerated train carriages. and some remains have even been found lying on the roadside. ukraine says russia shows no interest in getting its bodies back. and britain's prime minister, borisjohnson, rejects calls for his resignation, after a highly—critical report into lockdown parties

at downing street. at the height of coronavirus lockdowns, people in the uk were banned from socialising, or even attending funerals because of the pandemic. now on bbc news, the media show. hello. on the show today we have gotjohn micklethwait, editor in chief at bloomberg. we are taking a look at a new podcast that charts the rise of reality tv with one of the co—hosts, pandora sykes. and, wagatha christie — how can we not talk about it? and we have got one of the key players here in the whole drama, simon boyle, who is the executive editor of the sun and their bizarre column, which is a0 this weekend. he faced significant pressure to stand as a witness. simon, i have got to ask, who would play you in the movie? it's funny, we actually had this conversation in the office... what is the answer? well, my hairline is going rather quickly,

probably from the stress of thisjob, so ross kemp was mooted. that is harsh. martin compston would suit me. great. and the other person we have got here isjim waterson, the guardian's media editor, and you have been at the royal court ofjustice every day since the trial began, i believe. there is a whole lot of interest in this case, how long is the queue for the press box each morning? it is quite extraordinary. there is a sort of queueing system and people have to get there very early, there are 20 or 30 photographers outside and it has been so popular they have had to open up another courtroom just to try and make space for the journalists that want to cover it. what that says about our industry and all the other court cases going on, well, you can make up your own mind on that. absolutely. well, more from both of you in a moment and indeed from pandora, but let us start the show with john micklethwait, editor in chief of bloomberg, because bloomberg, famous for its financial coverage, is on a mission to become a major presence in uk news. it has launched a new subscription website and wants to rival the likes of the sunday times and the ft

for business stories. john micklethwait, welcome to the media show. what have you launched then, exactly? how much does it cost and what do we get for our money? well, two things, to some extent, we are just using i what we have, we have been hiding in plain sight, - there is a newsroom behind me, somewhere, 500 people, - it is one of the biggest - newsrooms in london already. we cover 400 british companies, we have long been a massive - sort of force in - the city of london. we have got a television station, radio station, i podcasts, everything, - and what we are doing now is we are targeting that| at a consumer audience and our aim is to become - the main business and finance destination for. people in britain. and we have started our- consumer subscription business four years ago and we have already got 400,000 - subscribers, which is quite big by british standards. - we are now targeting the uk, because it is| our second—biggest market. and who are the target audience, sorry for interrupting, but is it more

than just financial news and who are you aiming it at? it is finance and business and broader in politics. l we do global news more l perhaps than anyone else, we have 2700 journalists right the way around the world, - 120 countries, - we cover the globe. we also are pushing things deliberately in the british i market — westminister. podcast starts tomorrow, we have got some individual things aimed at british - business and we have events here, a big office right - in the middle of the city, in an iconic building - and we think there are a lot of things that we can - do from here. and add to british media. 0k, and why now? your boss, michael bloomberg, has been claiming that the uk media is following the us path to becoming what he termed "hyper partisan and highly sensationalised", so are you saying that there is a gap in the market for essentially more impartial, fact—based news? we think there is a bit, yes, i i think what he actually wrote was, he said that he feared that it was going in-

the same direction. in america, we prospered by being absolutely- in the middle, and the things that we do, you need - to be very factual. you need to be on the ground and when you do analysis - and commentary, you need to really back it up - with numbers, and with facts. and we look at britain - and i think there are divisions over things like brexit. one of the first reasons why i thought this could work- in britain, i came from being at the economist before, - was that i sat and saw that when we launched a brexit newsletter, what was . interesting was people, both from one side of- the brexit debate and then from the other, were - subscribing to it really very quickly. and i think that ability- at the moment to be able to cut through and say what really matters, there was a piecel a couple of days ago about levelling up and we looked at all the constituencies . of britain and went around adding up all the places that had gone forward and sadly, there were not very many of them. - nobody accused us of bias i in that, whilst i think in many cases in britain, almost- automatically, when people read things, they imagine which side they are coming from, - and we are not. in that category.

ok, interesting. jim watterson, media editor at the guardian, let mejust bring you in, what do you make of the bloomberg proposition? well, there isjust this enormous amount of competition for high—end news readers who will pay a lot of money for sort of quality news. you have got the ft, you have got ben smith, my former boss at buzzfeed launching a new project, you have got the economist and you have obviously got this bloomberg offering now among many others. the real challenge is, is there enough interest to sustain all of these places, because advertisers love these readers, but are there enough people, with enough time in the world, to read all of this news being produced for them? and what does it mean for all the people who cannot afford a paywall, because they are just left with stuff that is made on the cheap? john, just picking up on that — is the idea that people would give up their digital subscription to something like the sunday times, and switch to bloomberg or are you proposing this as yet another subscription for people to pay for? i think we would make -

the argument that we should be the main one, we do more coverage than anyone else when you are looking . at business and finance around the world. that is what we do, and i think within britain we should be - able to get into that position . and make the same argument. even then, i think there - is a large market for people who have more, i suppose, more money than time. - if you are in business, - the amount of money that subscribers, the different. competitors that you talked about, it is not that much- compared with the advantage you get from knowing things ahead of other people, - and that is why i think there is more room. i and what has happened, and i remember back- at the economist when we were only about 400,000 people, i people talked about there being a limit then. - somebody from the guardian making that point. _ |the economist i think it is now| 1.6 million under a much better editor now and you look - at bloomberg, we have reached 400,000 people — 400,000 people are paying for us in only four- years on a consumer basis. and we think that has a lot to grow and i don't think. all the evidence at - the moment is the same... jim, i am sorry to interrupt. i was just going to say, jim,

quickly you wanted to come back in on that. i just want to say, this is what we are trying to solve at the guardian by having that model, which is outside a paywall, but still doing qualityjournalism, because the rest of the market is really going into different directions, either behind a paywall orfree and done on a tight budget. ok, both of you, please stay with us, as we do very much change direction. i mentioned at the top of the programme that we were going to take a look at the new podcast for bbc sounds about the history of reality tv, have a listen. big brother house, this is davina. reality tv created an entirely new category of celebrity and revolutionised our viewing habits. it created a genre predicated on a single, shining moral imperative — the authentic above all else. all the problems that would plague the genre were there from the start — confrontainment, the effects of surveillance and the spectre of the producer, and puppet master.

that was a clip from unreal, a critical history of reality tv. pandora sykes is the podcast co—presenter — pandora, welcome to the media show, it is ten parts, your show, you have got 60 interviews, i understand, in it. what did you find? ooh, that is a big question. it is indeed, i am asking for an answer and it is tough. we found that what people have been looking for since the start really, because we chart it from big brother to love island with 14 other shows in between, in the states and in the uk, and what people are looking for now is what they loved about big brother then, which is authenticity. but the tension reality tv exploits is that who you are, who you think you are is not who others often see you to be. once you're on tv? once you're on tv, which is where a lot of that "oh, the producers edited me badly" comes from. and we wanted to look at increasing ethical concerns about the format. we want to look at who

the responsibility lies with, the people who go on television, a matter of self—regulation or does it lie with the commissioners and the producers? what was the answer? well, it depends who you are asking. one producer pointed out to me, phil edgarjones, who was the creative director of big brother for ten years, he pointed out that the only people who said they had been edited badly are the unpopular ones. they ones who come across well never have any problem with the editing. so you could say it is only ever an issue... but that kind of makes sense, doesn't it? crosstalk. does the unpopularity come after your editing or before i suppose? in a bit, we're going to take a look at wagatha christie and what it tells us about celebrities and how they interact with the media. do you think reality tv invented the idea of the normal person as celebrity? presumably it did.

jade goody is largely seen as the first demotic celebrity, a celebrity famous for simply being themselves. of course there has been a lot of controversy about how reality tv has changed the nature of celebrity and fame, the ordinary person without talent becoming famous. but actually it goes way back to candid camera in the 50s. in the 1970s, american family, in the 1990s, you had the real world. it is not really as new as we like to think it is. though what we have now is a surfeit of reality stars, it's an entire ecosystem. you start on something like love island, you go on to celebs go dating, then ex on the beach, then you might graduate to strictly, i'm a celebrity get me out of here, then if you are lucky, you could be like alison hammond and be a presenter. many don't know she came from big brother now. so the really successful can graduate out of it, but most of them stay on the same endless loop.

do you think the genre has exploited ordinary people's desires to be famous? that is a good question, and not one i think i could answer completely either way because the problem is, people who want to go on reality tv by and large are the people who do not fare well on it. because the people who would fare well on reality tv are the people who have a solid sense of self, and are not really bothered by attention. but they are not the sort of people who want to go on reality tv. certainly, there has been a lot around the duty of care recently, not least the four suicides that are connected to love island, including the presenter caroline flack. and a lot of reality stars have come forward in the last few years saying "i have made a deal with the devil, "the producers did not look after me, and these "are all the problems that i faced". but then you could argue, is that the producers�* fault for casting them, or — it is hard to imagine how being on reality tv would impact your life

and the ramifications of everyone thinking you are public property. simon paul, i'd love to bring you in. you're the executive editor of showbiz at the sun, the paper's celebrity goddip column bizarre will have charted the rise of lots of these reality tv stars in the last decades. did you treat, do you treat them differently to other celebrities? you are absolutely right. we have covered huge amounts of reality stars, and you start to forget that some of them started out as reality stars, it is true. the successful one started as reality stars, it is true. both in music and conventionally with big brother and love island and things like that. i think people who come through the reality route generally speaking are seeking out fame and fortune ideally on the back of it at every possible opportunity, generally speaking they have been more accessible, quite prepared to bare their souljust for the sake of being more famous and more popular, and potentially making a few quid on the way. does that make them fair game

in your mind, though, people you are more willing to — i do not want to use the word hound, but you know what i mean? i would object to the word hound, because the symbiotic relationship we have developed with these people over the last 10—15 years, which has a real golden age and boom for reality television, probably started with big brother, and the only way is essex is another show that moved the dial on that sort of model. it has been completely relationship—based. a lot of my career, at the sun and in showbiz generally, lots of these people i have come to know really quite well, you become friendly, in fairly regular contact. i guarantee the phone rings more frequently from them asking if you can write something than the other way around, there's lots of people seeking attention and publicity. sometimes it works well for us and our readers, other times perhaps i'm slightly more dismissive. it definitely goes both ways. pandora, you were nodding

earlier to what simon was saying, what's your reaction? it wasjust reminding me of a contestant from love island who we interviewed called rachel finney. i cannot remember if it made the final episode because we had a lot of footage. but she was saying when you come out of love island it is very normal to call the paparazzi, and that anyone who says otherwise is lying. i do not know if that is true but certainly if you look under the line on on tabloid websites, there's often a lot of caught by the paps. — they called the paps. so i would agree that there's much more...unlike an a—list celebrity, who i would have thought is very rarely calling the paps, i think with reality stars certainly there is much more of a synergy. your show, unreal, a critical history of reality tv, out now on bbc sounds app. i'll bring simon back in. i was interested in what you were saying about you being a top show biz journalist and your relationship with these people. how do you maintain

the relationship to keep the stories flowing? or are you effectively saying you don't need to really because they are always calling you? it is a damn sight easier with the likes of love islanders and the proper reality stars than with the a—listers. we'd like to think we can do it across the board, i can think of some examples to point to say the way we do things generally speaking is we try to get ourselves into the mix of people at all levels. if our readers are interested, we are interested. something like love island, has a successful series, absolutely i want to know the people on it, get to know them and stay with them. some, with varying degrees of success, have maintained a career long beyond. a friend of mine who won love island several years ago, amber davis, has gone on to be successful on the west end a talented young woman, now the lead in two shows, another one coming. i have stayed friendly with her throughout. others less so. there are definitely occasions in the reality sphere where people continue to call long after their expiry has rather run out.

if you can be polite and gentle about it, say sorry, we are no longer too interested in that story, thanks for calling. that's a fair thing to say. let's bring it to the wagatha christie trial, maybe not everyone realises quite how heavily implicated you and your paper are in that case. for those listening, this is the big libel case playing out in the high court, between two wives of famous footballers, rebekah vardy who says coleen rooney libelled her when she accused her of passing stories about rooney to your newspaper, the sun. and one was under your byline about the rooney's basement flooding, coleen rooney says she planted the story as part of a sting operation to catch the leaker. for our listeners, the obvious question will be who gave you that story? the only answer i can give and ever would give is the same one that we gave in the high court a week or so ago.

so as you alluded to a short while ago we had been at the centre of this to some degree. certainly we were at the very beginning of it. the case between the two of them relates directly to stories we carried. that is definitely true. stories that turned out not to be true. stories that certainly were presented as fact online, as you say, they were presented as fact directly from coleen rooney, online and then in each case and they play out in court to this effect as well, each case we contacted the rooney's representatives who said, "we will not comment on that. no problem with us if you want to run that." plainly, we now know there was a vested interest in us running it and there was a frustration, perhaps, of sorts but journalistically we went to the proper levels of checking it out. we operated with integrity. and there is no great secret in this. i don't apologise. my face is in the newspaper six days a week with a little line that says "have you got a story? give me a shout." i can't apologise forthat, per se. that is basically the business i'm in. and we tell stories

to our readers. in terms of who gave us the story, which is a very direct question we would never reveal it. and never will reveal it. and we went to extraordinary lengths and extraordinary expense in the high court a week or so ago after being pushed by both sides, actually, to come to court to both hand over some documents and take the witness stand and that is simply not something that we would do or would ever do, and on a wider basis it would have set dreadful precedents forjournalism across the board both for newspapers and broadcasters. how did it feel to be put in that position, to be asked to reveal your sources but presumably they were asking if they wanted to search your phone, for example. what was that like as a journalist? my first thought was, like everybody else, oh, my god what is on my phone? i was quite happy to take some advice at our end, i knew it was not something we were going to immediately back down on because we have always taken that stance with a source, it is very important and as i reiterate, not just for us but for journalism as a whole and the president set if we back down and done that it would have been

generally catastrophic across the industry. it was uncomfortable. it was. i was lucky that as an organisation, and this is an important point, as an organisation we are large and well funded, relatively speaking, and we were in a position to take some legal advice. i was given some legal representation and we were able to go to court, myself and a colleague, and present an argument as to why we shouldn't and fortunately the judge agreed with us. i worry that if i had been put in that position perhaps as a freelance journalist you see it, the potential expense and losing that money perhaps i would not have been able to go at all. how much does it cost? many tens of thousands, i would have thought. but people listening might think if rebekah vardy was not your source, why not go to court, say that and protect the actual source? it is not as simple as that. you get into a jigsaw identification process. once you are on a stand there is no getting away from it. a barrister in court, and anybody worth their salt, let's be honest, they are using the most expensive barristers in the business. he will be pushing hard and hard and hard and fast and i would like to think,

with all myjournalistic experience i hope i am a relatively articulate and reasonably intelligent man. but the speed at which you can be tied in knots and tripped up by a barrister on a stand under the pressure of that occasion, and anyone who has been in court will know it is not a pleasant place to be, it is very intimidating. i simply did not want to be there. as presumably...as coleen rooney said, she didn't want to be there and it's looking like rebekah vardy may not want to be their either at the moment. people whose lives have been dragged through the dirt like those two in this trial, i guess you could have ended it before it began. i have not got a horse in this race. there is absolutely no doubt in my mind these are two women who plainly do not before like each other, don't now and won't in the future. this started out and we were the genesis of this case and perhaps we were used as a bit of a tool in part. for me our involvement stopped there. we have behaved with integrity by protecting anyone we have ever spoken to and i will continue to do that

indefinitely at almost any cost. beyond that, if they want to tear strips off each other in a slightly ungodly soap opera, who am i to stop them? they have both had any number of ample opportunities, and i do mean both of them, to come to the table and discuss this. we are talking about millions of pounds. well in excess of £2 million. it has been suggested online by onlookers perhaps that money could have been better spent. only rich people can do libel cases, i think. a lot of the details that came out have revealed pretty unseemly relationship, it looks like, between celebrities, agents, papers like yours. do you see what is coming out as damaging to your profession? let's start with the very basics. would i prefer this had never come to where? absolutely. it is not something i would ever have tried to orchestrate myself. what it does demonstrate is that any notion that what appears in tabloid newspapers is not very often

very well sourced and very well put together, if the suggestion is, and i am not... this will play out in court anyway... if the suggestion is if people believe we are talking directly to people intimately involved in football, music, other sports, film, whatever else, i would like to think that we are. i do not feel the suggestion that we speak to people intimately involved in any of the creative arts or sports that our readers are interested in, again, i make no secret about what i do, i am an entertainment journalist, showbizjournalist, i go out frequently, go to parties, events, concerts, i like to meet people. if i can get on well with them and form a relationship i always will. i hope the vast majority of the journalism we do is not tawdry or voyeuristic but positive, engaging with our readers and the industry we are talking about. i do not think there is any shame in that. jim waterson, media editor

at the sun, what is your reaction to what simon has been saying? sorry, the guardian. i do apologise. well, not apologise. maybe you want to work at the sun next. maybe they will give you a job after your brilliant coverage of the wagatha christie trial. what is your reaction to what simon has been saying? simon who is from the sun. he has found himself in the position where no journalist wants to be where he is the story. it has been an extraordinary exposure of howjournalism works and it is rare that you want to see how that sausage is made. it is not a pleasant sausage in this case. i think there is one particular thing to take away from the trial, though there have been lots of salacious details, this is an example of millions of pounds being spent on something i do not think anyone could really argue is particularly good use of every one's time. in the same way our libel laws can be used by rich people to fight on small things, who leaked a story or not, they can also be used to keep

the secrets of russian oligarchs out of places, be used... our courts are increasingly making it harderfor journalists to work and libel cases favour the rich who can afford to fight these cases. it does favour the rich and powerful and it is important journalistically. i said this before and i will say it again, if any of us as journalists found ourselves in a position to challenge some of that status quo and pressure from wealthy people, in my case, to reveal our source, or pressure in the case ofjohn and many others to keep their identity anonymous amongst something perhaps unpleasant or a reader should be aware of, we need to take that every opportunity. the great shame is the huge expensive involved. i spent one day in court and a couple of days beforehand speaking with lawyers and as i said earlier, it would not surprise me of our total bill ran into many

tens of thousands of pounds because that is simply the sort of market you are in with this sort of stuff and that is dangerous. ifjustice is not available to most people and openjustice is not available to most people we get into murky territory. the case this week is a good example of constituents who have no idea that their mp is not accessible to them and not in a position to help them with anything if they have a problem and could still be continuing to engage with that very mp expecting something to be done and whether or not they would be told at the time i cannot help you at the moment, who knows? it is a very murky position for me and i think is a journalistic industry, tabloids broadsheets, broadcasters and otherwise, it is one we need to club together on and stick to. do you agree with that point? libel laws are made for celebrity? it's a slightly strange situation. we have the issues affecting the sun that could also affect bloomberg. ironically could also affect

coleen rooney's instagram account when she makes a journalistic allegation. because she bypassed the media. we all have to deal with the same issues and we all end up being held to the same standards. i think libel law in the uk is in need of another look, the extent to which it can be used to bully people around the edges. where in—house lawyers say we may not want to take the story on because of potential risk. it is important places like bloomberg fought to the supreme court on that one even though they lost because they at least managed to make a stand on that. that is it for today. thanks tojohn micklethwait, editor in chief at bloomberg, jim waterson, the guardian's media editor, pandora sykes, co—host of unreal reality tv podcast on bbc sounds. simon boyle, executive editor of showbiz at the sun. thanks for watching, goodbye.

hello, again. eastern england had the best of wednesday's weather, i think it's fair to say. eight hours of sunshine recorded in durham, the sunniest spot in the whole of the country, and holbeach in lincolnshire had the highest temperature, up to 20 degrees. meanwhile, through the midlands, a fine end to the day. lovely sunset sent in by one of our weather watcher pictures. right now, the cloud is starting to thicken up across northern ireland with outbreaks of rain starting to move its way in. for the most part, it's going to be a mild start to thursday morning, the exception scotland, where we'll have temperatures down into quite low single figures in the countryside. this rain is going to be pushing across from northern ireland into northern england, perhaps southern scotland, the north midlands, north wales, and through the day, that front weakens as it slowly slides towards lincolnshire. now, to the southeast

of the front, quite a bit of cloud, but some sunny spells and feeling warm — 21 degrees for the highest temperature. but it gets colder and colder further north. for scotland, blustery showers, and for northern areas, as well as those strong winds, we'll only have temperatures of around 11 degrees.

welcome to bbc news, i'm rich preston. our top stories: it's been revealed that 19 schoolchildren and two teachers murdered by a teenage gunman in texas were in the same classroom. moments before the killings, he'd posted that he was going to attack an elementary school. as families in the town of uvalde try to come to terms with what took place, president biden says he's sick of the carnage caused by gun violence. the idea that an 18—year—old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war, designed and marketed to kill, is, i think, just wrong. in other news, britain's prime minister, borisjohnson, rejects calls for his resignation, after a highly—critical report into lockdown parties at downing street.