To celebrate fifty years of All the President's Men, Tom sits down with Professor Jon Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at Oregon State University, who has been teaching and writing about Hollywood for over forty years.

Jon traces Alan Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy from Klute through The Parallax View to All the President's Men, explaining what made that era of New Hollywood so obsessed with surveillance, institutional rot and the fragility of truth. He also reflects on what it was like to live through Watergate as a young man, and what was genuinely lost when the blockbuster era arrived and Hollywood stopped asking hard questions.

Then Steven Renderos, Executive Director of Media Justice, brings the conversation into the present. The journalism, he argues, is still happening, the Panama Papers, the Pegasus Project, ProPublica's reporting on Clarence Thomas. What's broken isn't the press. It's the institutional willingness to act on what journalists find. And with Jeff Bezos, a key Donald Trump ally, now owning the same Washington Post that Katharine Graham used to back Woodward and Bernstein at enormous personal risk, the contrast could not be starker.

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Sidd and Tom analyse Parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, and local elections in England.

Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales) have become the largest party in Wales, followed by Reform in second place and Welsh Labour a distant third.

The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) have won a 5th straight parliamentary election but are well short of a majority.

Reform have made big gains in Scotland and have also stormed across English councils winning 14 in total and gaining close to 1,500 councillors.

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To get connected with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati.

For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork.

Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.

Over a million children in England have an Education, Health and Care Plan. Councils are projected to hold £6 billion in SEND deficits by the end of this year. And a system designed to protect the most vulnerable children has become, for many families, an exhausting legal battle just to access basic support.

In this episode, Tom sits down with Caitlin Webb, chief reporter at the Local Government Chronicle, to examine the UK's SEND crisis and whether the government's long-awaited reforms can fix a system that has been breaking for over a decade.

They explore the legal weight of Education, Health and Care Plans and why so many families have come to rely on them not as a support tool but as a last resort. Caitlin unpacks the financial pressures bearing down on local authorities, the rise of private equity in specialist education, and the difficult question of whether proposed reforms will genuinely improve outcomes for children or simply remove the protections parents depend on most.

The episode closes with two voices that bring the statistics to life. Troy Njenje-Mbanga, who has lived experience of SEND, reflects on what it means to be neurodivergent in a system not designed for you. Eden Byrne speaks about her experience of caring for her brother with SEND, and what society still gets wrong about disability.

Further reading from Caitlin Webb at the Local Government Chronicle:

SEND reforms — key issues for the Schools White Paper: https://www.lgcplus.com/services/children/send-reforms-key-issues-for-schools-white-paper-19-02-2026/

Will SEND finally be sent in the right direction?: https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/lgc-briefing/will-send-finally-been-sent-in-the-right-direction-23-02-2026/

No guarantee SEND reforms will reduce EHCPs: https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/empowering-communities/no-guarantee-send-reforms-will-reduce-ehcps-15-04-2026/

Listen to related episodes:

The Forgotten Generation with Troy Njenje-Mbanga: https://theforgottengenerationpodcast.podbean.com/

Sports For All with Eden Byrne: https://sportsforallpodcast.podbean.com/

Please leave a rating, share a comment, and subscribe!

To get connected with Tom, Lily or Sidd, please find them on Instagram: @sparetom, @lilymott3, and @siddkurapati.

For more information about the show, please find Be the Change. Media Network on Instagram: @bethechangemedianetwork.

Opinions shared by the guests and hosts of this show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Be the Change. Media Network.