News Weakly with Sami Shah

NEWS WEAKLY 232 – Malala, Gaza, Conspiracies & the Collapse of Trust Why do people with perfectly good reasons to distrust governments sometimes end up distrusting the victim instead? This week on News Weakly , Sami Shah starts with the strange hostility towards Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan, then follows the same logic through Gaza, Trump’s “alternative facts”, Flydubai false-flag conspiracies...

NEWS WEAKLY 231 – October 7 Mourning, Flydubai Conspiracies, Coalition Migration Cuts & OpenAI’s Medicare Breach This week on News Weakly : three years after October 7, Israelis and Palestinians are still being told their grief needs the correct political disclaimer. Then a Flydubai attack becomes a false-flag conspiracy before investigators have finished working out what happened; Angus Taylo...

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...

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 P...

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 happe...

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 th...

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 po...

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...

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 dis...

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 pol...

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...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at how disasters become PR opportunities. Telstra somehow fixes a nationwide outage by creating another one, Narendra Modi gets the rock-star treatment in Melbourne while human rights concerns barely get a mention, and China reminds the Pacific what "friendly" military exercises look like. Plus, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism turns its atten...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah marks America's 250th birthday by asking what its greatest populist, Huey Long, can teach us about Donald Trump, democracy, and why every generation keeps looking for a king. Plus, Australia's aged care system discovers that maybe humans should assess human beings after all, and the debate over journalists killed in Gaza descends into another battle over...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah explains why Donald Trump's favourite movie might also explain his foreign policy. From Jean-Claude Van Damme's  Bloodsport  to the Iran war, this episode explores the dangers of confusing spectacle with strategy, humiliation with victory, and refusing to flinch with actual courage. How did America win every battle but still end up negotiating o...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah takes a deep dive into Pauline Hanson’s first National Press Club address and the global rise of populist politics. From multiculturalism and immigration to childcare, abortion, transgender rights, and the meaning of “Australian culture”, Hanson’s speech offers a masterclass in the political lessons democracies keep refusing to learn from Donald Trump. Wh...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at how every political problem somehow ends up being blamed on immigrants. Comedian Dave Hughes goes viral railing against Labor’s housing policies, permanent residents, and falling property values, accidentally arriving at the same talking points that have fuelled One Nation’s resurgence. Meanwhile, anti-immigration riots erupt in Belfast after a v...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah dives into the latest Australian culture war, where an autism podcast somehow becomes a referendum on Israel, Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, cancellation, and who should be allowed to work. The ABC finds itself under fire after commissioning a podcast hosted by Grace Tame, despite controversy surrounding her comments about October 7, Hamas sexual violen...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at what happens when political parties mistake nostalgia for strategy and spreadsheets for compassion. Tony Abbott returns as Liberal Party president, raising questions about whether the Coalition plans to solve its existential crisis or simply appoint it to a leadership role. Meanwhile, sweeping changes to the NDIS could see hundreds of thousands o...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at what happens when populism accidentally stumbles into good policy while everything else quietly catches fire. The federal government tweaks negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, triggering a media meltdown from a property-owning class suddenly discovering class warfare. Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson unveils a gas policy so interventioni...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at what happens when politics stops pretending to care equally about everyone. Labor’s latest budget is compared to the brutal Abbott-Hockey austerity budget of 2014, revealing how conservative outrage mysteriously only appears when wealthy Australians lose tax advantages. Meanwhile, the Albanese government finally responds to gambling reform recomm...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at the stories Australia keeps turning into culture wars instead of solving. The death of Kumanjayi Little Baby reignites debate around Indigenous communities, systemic neglect, Welcome to Country ceremonies, and the country’s ongoing inability to confront its own contradictions. Sami explores the idea of the “Pink Flamingo”: the national dysfunctio...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah takes on one of the most circular, exhausting debates in modern politics: how we talk about Israel and Palestine—and why the conversation keeps going nowhere. Using the comparison between Pakistan and Israel, this episode reframes the discussion away from slogans and toward something more useful: treating countries like countries, not symbols. From the le...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at power, money, and the systems that insist everything is working fine while clearly not working at all. The UAE exits OPEC, raising the prospect of cheaper oil and a full-blown Gulf power shuffle. Pauline Hanson receives a $1 million plane from Gina Rinehart, because nothing says anti-elite politics like private aviation funded by billionaires. Me...

This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah looks at what governments call “hard choices” and what they quietly refuse to choose. The federal government plans to remove 160,000 people from the NDIS, citing unsustainable costs, while economists and crossbench MPs push for higher taxes on gas companies making billions from public resources. Meanwhile, a children’s book is pulped after controversial c...

NEWS WEAKLY 208 – April 18, 2026 This week on  News Weakly , Sami Shah returns to a world that somehow got worse while he was away. The Middle East descends into a surreal loop of ceasefires, blockades, and immediate betrayals, with Trump now proposing to “blockade the blockade.” In Australia, Ben Roberts-Smith is granted bail on serious war crimes charges, raising questions about justice, po...