When Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer was banned from visiting the United Kingdom last year, Newsnight didn't dispatch a reporter to get his side of the story. When French 'comedian' Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was banned from visiting the United Kingdom this week, however, Newsnight swiftly dispatched its very own Steve Smith to interview him and we duly heard his side of the story.
First we heard his lawyers' defence, as extracts from their letter to David Cameron were read out, also making his side of the argument.
Having chosen to give Dieudonné a UK platform (in spite of our Home Secretary's ban on him), how did Newsnight tackle him? Did it expose him? Did it make him sweat?
Well, Steve Smith gave him what might be described as a low-to-medium-intensity roasting, focusing on anti-Semitism and the 'quenelle'.
I say 'low-to-medium-intensity' because Steve is not a hard-hitting interviewer. He's much better suited to the lighter stuff.
He certainly tried his best though, but his best wasn't really good enough.
There he sat, seriously asking his pertinent list of pre-prepared questions, allowing the slippery Dieudonné to run rings round him.
He didn't press Dieudonné by deploying all the widely-cited evidence of open anti-Semitism in his own act, thus allowing him to disingenuously dissociate himself - and his gesture - from anti-Semitism.
Dieudonné then side-stepped his tougher questions by using the 'I'm only a comedian' ploy and twice pretended to get the hump at Steve Smith's questioning. At his second 'go' at Steve Smith, Steve gave way and asked Dieudonné to tell him a joke.
He may have appeared odious to us, but I can see from Twitter that Dieudonné's supporters think he did well on last night's Newsnight and, worse, his disingenuous statements about the 'quenelle' being merely anti-power are being taken by others as being the thing to tweet about.
Hopefully, that says more about the Twittersphere than about how the broader Newsnight audience might have reacted to the man, but I'm not so sure. The average Newsnight viewer isn't as clued up as we are about Dieudonné's past.
Not a good decision on Newsnight's part.
