Our journalists pick their top stories of 2025 • FRANCE 24 English

It’s time now for scoop, our weekly conversation on international media. This is our final show of the year and we’re taking a look back at 2025. [Music] Well, I asked three colleagues to each choose just two, maybe three works of journalism from the whole year that resonated with them. There are many crucial pieces that we will not be looking at today. From Donald Trump’s assault on the press to Sudan’s civil war. Now joining me from France 24’s flagship debate program is Franis Picard. Hello to you France. Also have a senior reporter Katherine Norris TR alongside him. And across the table is Leela Jento, senior reporter and senior editor. Um we’re going to begin uh with Ellen Lamong’s documentary inside Gaza. Take a look at this clip. [Music] AFP. Catherine, this was your choice. What struck you when you watch first watch this? Oh, there’s been so much powerful um horrendous um stuff coming out of Gaza, but this documentary really hit through. Um it follows the stories of the AP journalists stuck inside Gaza as they are under fire, as they are losing family members as they’re starving and struggling to work and they’re trying to cover this, you know, this death that’s falling down from the sky that, you know, people being killed under these Israeli bombs for months and months and months. Um, and it shows it really I guess it really helps humanize it and personalize it and you really relate to them and I just would really recommend people to watch this. Right. In France over 220 by some counts 300 journalists killed by Israeli attacks since this war began. Question about sometimes when we hear that foreign journalists aren’t being allowed in Gaza. Does that undermine the work that the Palestinian journalists are doing? Yes, it does because uh it puts them even more in danger. uh we know they’re being tracked and uh also it makes it more difficult to see the kind of reporting that Katherine is alluding to human reporting. Instead, we’re just fed the same old agency pictures which show death and destruction which are rather impersonal. That’s right. That’s right. Um I want to look at the the next element in in this list. It’s uh two uh pieces chosen by Leela. Uh one of them is from the Empire podcast which says to understand modern Gaza, you must first learn about ancient Gaza. Take a listen. And this is a part of the world that dominates our front pages. Yet we do not know this early history and we should know it. It’s absolutely crucial to understand current events to know what preceded it in detail going really into the minuti. This is the first time that people have attempted to put into broadcast form a deep dive into the history of Gaza. And that’s such an interesting project. Leela, what did you glean from listening? History. I mean, for me, you know, knowing your history is what separates a hack from a good journalist and especially with a conflict now that dates back the current conflict a century and and you know, this is a very fair balanced deep dive into history and it’s so critical because in this particular conflict it divides the world and it divides also the visions of history. There is what the global south has long been said a euroentric vision of history and a lot of people come at this at this conflict from different historic milestones and this really goes back from the start from the time of the Greeks uh and and you and you come all the way here and of course this is critical in trying to solve this conflict. Yeah. And that long format really does something that we can’t do here on TV also perhaps in in the the the newspapers. Um, your other piece for the subject, it comes from the intelligencer website on life in Gaza under Israel’s all-encompassing surveillance regime. Leela, the most haunting line for me from this report was, quote, “It is the culmination of decades of monitored occupation, a totalitarian nightmare spliced with genocidal terror, a system that is already evolving and growing for whatever comes next.” I mean, this piece really caught me because it is so gripping. it. First and foremost, it is written by a journalist in Gaza. He has since managed to come out and I literally broke out into a cold sweat uh because it’s a first person account and you enter the terror of being surveiled and what we are seeing right now in Gaza in addition to the mass killing is as uh this this journalist put it, Palestinians in Gaza are living in a matrix of constant surveillance. You not only have constantly drones overhead, you have quadcopters entering into into into rooms and it is terrorizing the psyche of gazins and what we really seeing which we haven’t really put our finger on is a mass psychological scaring of a populace. I could not recommend this more. And of course, you know, a very important uh issue that we are uh dealing with now with AI generated hit list. You know, this is from the Israeli media on on how technology is terrorizing populacees. Now, Katherine, you’ve covered this conflict a number of times. Um, from a distance. Exactly. From a distance. Um, frustratingly, are Israelis aware of all this high tech that’s being used in Gaza? No, I’m sure they’re not aware of of the half of it. Um, it’s a very tech-savvy society, lots of high-tech companies. Um, we know they’ve been at the leading edge of facial recognition technology, things like that. They are using this militarily and yet they’re they’re using it on the on the people of Gaza and the people of Gaza of course have no choice because they can’t get in or out as things stand. Neither can the international press. So it’s absolutely chilling and it’s something I think in various societies we should be quite concerned about how our images are being used, how surveillance is, but in this context yeah it’s even more chilling. Yeah. Technology also plays a role in this next story. Uh it’s widely recognized as a world’s first drone war. the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. A lot of great reporting on Ukraine recently from the Trump administration’s first draft on its proposed peace plan to the corruption scandal that rocked Vlimir Zolinsk’s uh government. Franwell, you were fascinated by a piece from our correspondent Gver Craig about the terrestrial drones. Let’s take a look at that report real quick. loading up an unmanned ground vehicle or land drone to take food and ammunition to an infantry position further ahead. With a top speed of only 10 km an hour and along muddy paths, it’s a journey that can take more than 3 hours. The danger from above is the very reason that the land drones, which can carry far heavier loads than even the biggest airborne ones, are needed. Yeah. Frol, what did you like most about that piece? Well, first of all, it hits home just how dangerous it is at the front. If you can’t even have a human beings bring you supplies, but instead unmanned vehicles. That’s that’s one aspect of it. Secondly, and this relates to uh what you just described inside of the Gaza Strip, this sort of gamification of conflict that we’re seeing uh that uh it’s now all about how you use a joystick and you forget there are actual human beings on the other side. In that very same piece, uh, one soldier hesitant about getting evacuated by one of those land drones, right? And the third and final thing which is important to mention is our correspondent, Goliver Craig. He’s been out there. He’s been out there going everywhere, the four corners of Ukraine, and his reporting is very balanced because he gets an earful from all sides whenever he’s out there. That’s right. Katherine, you want to say something? Yeah, I wanted to come in. I’ve been um not recently as Goliver, but I’ve been in these near frontline positions in Ukraine and just the saturation of the drones. Okay, we all talk about drones the whole time in this conflict, but since I started going there um when it was right on the the full scale invasion in 2022 to now, the quantity of drones, the sheer quantity is huge. I mean, the the skies near the front lines are completely saturated. So, it’s really hard actually to get embedded with these Ukrainian army units because they’re terrified about the journeys in and outs to these positions because you are being watched at all times and you are a target at all times, especially more so if your press and and the army as well. That’s a bonus prize for the the Russian drone pilot. So, the Ukrainians have innovated a lot with their drone technology. They’re still constantly innovating and the Russians are seeing or picking up bits of those drones and then mass- prodducing them in huge factories on their side and now it it’s just incredibly dangerous pretty much anywhere you go. Yeah, Leela, your take. No, I I absolutely agree with you and and you know with drone technology how how low-key it is and how affordable it is. So, we have so many players getting into this. Iran, Turkey, it’s changing the game and we’re we’re back to how technology is conducting war now. And they do it in basement, sorry, with 3D printers. They’re printing these things out. Sometimes they’re costing like $1,000 for these pieces of war machinery. It’s amazing. Um, technology also relevant probably in this next subject. It’s commonly referred to as Havana syndrome. Mysterious health ailments impacting spies, soldiers, and diplomats around the world. But first reported at the US Embassy in Havana. Take a look. America’s best men and women in national security are being targeted and neutralized in a global campaign. It just felt like I was in like a pressure cooker and the pressure is just slowly like crushing your head. Ahis have been reported in every continent. It’s time to hit back in the shadows because that’s the only way to get our adversaries to stop. Katherine, this was the piece you chose. It’s a multiart. It’s a fourpart documentary series and I really recommend everyone to watch it. Um it’s called the threat against America. It’s on Canad and it is really revealing. I learned things about Havana syndrome that I had never uh heard of before even though it’s been rumbling on since about 2016. There are now more than a thousand reported cases. Someone was targeted with it. Says they were targeted with it just outside the White House in a dozen different countries across the world. And this is a really superbly um produced documentary as you can see there uh for Canard PL. I know there’s a 60 minutes on it as well, but actually I think this this one is better. Sorry to our our friends at 60 minutes. Um it actually won a a big journalism prize in France this year, the Belandra. And I just really recommend it to everyone. I’m watching. I mean, it’s got spies. It’s got this mysterious. We were hearing these reports and we you know, we shouldn’t we couldn’t patch it all together. They were so weird. This really helps you put it all together. Thank you. All right. Well, let’s let’s move on to a fashion faux paw. We’re looking at you, Francois. This is a story you wanted to talk about. Curveball coming in know in November. Um the online retailer Shien opened its first physical store in the world here in Paris. Long cues to get in. Ride police were deployed. French reporting mainly focusing on Sheen’s working conditions, environmental impact of fast fashion. Um it’s selling counterfeit luxury goods. That’s an accusation on this platform. But then also the political lobbying France which I find most fascinating in the story. Yeah. The the this was the uh investigative unit of public broadcaster radio France uh which uh put together um how there’s a whole host uh of big names that have been recruited former government ministers including a former right-hand man of France’s president the former interior minister Kristoff Castanire to do the lobbying. Now, this is nothing new. Uh, uh, politicians going into private life, Nick Kle working for Facebook and and the such. Uh, but this is, uh, quite a story because it sort of encapsulates everything that’s wrong right now with globalization. This isn’t it’s not so much the fact that it’s a Chinese brand. It’s the fact that we’re we’re accelerating our own destruction. The French buy five times more clothes today than they did 20 years ago. Do you need all this stuff? And do you need people lobbying for it? They pay influencers to say how great they are. By the way, among those taking money, the current head of the FBI, he’s got more than $5 million in stock in the parent company of Shien. Conflicts of interest. You got to wonder. I have to press on. I want to get to all the stories we have on our list. Um, we’re going to rush through these last two. Uh Leela, you chose a piece from scroll about the death of an 80-year-old man, bedridden, immobile, um who died while trying to cross a border from India to Pakistan. Tell us about this piece. So this uh is a story of a man uh and it’s a story about a subcontinent divided uh and how that affects the lives of ordinary people. Basically this man was told to evacuate uh 4 days after there was a terror attack in Kashmir in Indian administered Kashmir that was blamed on Pakistan. uh and how you know this this enmity between these these two countries and this was before the two countries went into war which we saw this year uh and how this extremely sick man caught in the bureaucracy of nationalities and passports uh gets stuck and ultimately is being evacuated to Pakistan he’s a Kashmiri and he dies at the border uh because he’s he he’s paralyzed uh and the you know the cruelty of the bureaucracy a tragic story that um Katherine, we’re going to end with a book, Don’t Let It Break You, Honey, a memoir about saving yourself. But can you tell us? Yeah, this is actually, full disclosure, this was written by a friend of mine, but that’s not why I chose it. I think this is one of the most remarkable pieces of reporting, not just this year, but in in a a lot of recent years. Um Jenny Evans is the author, and she was raped um quite a few years ago now by a famous man who she’s not allowed to name. We’re not allowed to name. Um and then that wasn’t the end of it. She was caught up in the UK’s phone hacking scandal and her personal details were sold um to the tabloid press. It got splashed across there. She was part of the big Levvenson inquiry into that and she actually became an investigative journalist because she wanted to understand how her details had been leaked by the police and what on earth was going on. And this is a real deep dive into a very very murky underworld which explores a lot of issues about British society, about phone hacking, about corruption, about the police. I really recommend everyone. Yeah, a lot of stories we’re leaving out here, but I want to thank all of you for coming in, Katherine, Francois, and Leela. That brings us to our quote of the week, and it comes from the recently deceased Tom Stoppper, the brilliant playwright who was a journalist before he found his calling. And he once said, quote, I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate, short-term weapon. That’s it for this edition of Scoop. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you next year. [Music]

It’s the final episode of the year for FRANCE 24’s media show Scoop. Choosing the top stories of 2025 is nearly impossible, but that was the task at hand. Three FRANCE 24 journalists had to whittle down their choices to just two or three pieces of journalism produced outside of FRANCE 24, and preferably in the English language. Our guests are senior anchor François Picard, award-winning reporter Catherine Norris-Trent and senior editor Leela Jacinto.
#Gaza #Ukraine #India

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