Well, there were no celebs and no musicians this week, only politicians and political pundits.
The pundits reviewing the papers were Gaby Hinsliff of The Guardian and Matthew Parris of The Times. Andrew Marr made a point of pointing out that Matthew is a former Conservative MP.
(I suspect that was because there was no Conservative politician up for interview on this final pre-election edition of the programme.)
The three interviewees were Yvette Cooper for Labour, Nigel Farage for UKIP and Nick Clegg for the Lib Dems.
The social media reaction, whether using the hashtag #bbc bias on Twitter or commenting on blogs, was entirely (and depressingly) typical: Left-wingers accused Andrew Marr of giving Nigel Farage a soft and cosy interview while being hostile to Yvette Cooper, right-wingers accused Andrew Marr of giving Yvette Cooper a soft and cosy interview whilst being hostile to Nigel Farage...and, well, er, no one cared what happened to Nick Clegg.
My take is that this week, to my great surprise, the lefties are closer to the truth.
Though nowhere near as hostile as his George Osborne interview - or even his David Cameron interview - Andrew Marr's interview with Yvette Cooper did contain a fair few "That's a slightly different point" and "I'm trying to get an answer"-type comments, and I counted 21 interruptions in the course of some 10 minutes. I don't think it can fairly be called 'soft'.
The other areas discussed were where the cuts would fall regarding her Home Office brief and the deficit more generally. He did also ask her a probably unwelcome personal question:
Reflect very briefly on how it feels to have your husband now the kind of main figure being used by the Conservatives as the image of what went wrong in the past - big spending, big borrowing, and no apologies.
Most interestingly, Andrew Marr focused for more than half of the entire length of the interview on a most unwelcome area for Labour - Labour's likely post-election dealings with the SNP.
Nigel Farage received less than half the number of interruptions in a similar-length interview. I counted 9 or 10 (couldn't quite decide if one constituted a proper interruption), and the opening minutes of the interview - which began with some mutual discussion of their health problems - was surprisingly good-natured and interruption-free. The interruptions began when Nigel was asked for his views on the "obsolete BBC".
These, incidentally, have subsequently been widely misreported - including at the Telegraph and Mail, whose journalists took Andrew Marr's words about Doctor Who and Strictly and reported them as if they were Nigel Farage's. In fairness to them though, Nigel didn't exactly do much to forestall such a misinterpretation during his interview. His comments about the BBC's effects in crushing the life out of local journalism were telling though.
The other topics put to the UKIP leader were whether leaving the EU would bring quite the dividend his party say it will, where he trusts the Tories over a fair referendum, and whether he'd work with the Lib Dems in a three-way coalition with the Conservatives....and, in the one bit where 'BBCthink' may have come into play - a section on the 'Christian manifesto', which Nigel Farage endorsed, and what it means by "reasonable accommodation" for people who oppose gay marriage - a somewhat left-field question, accompanied by the question, "Can I ask you, first of all, are you yourself a Christian?"
Still, all in all, Nigel Farage fared surprisingly gently at the hands of Andrew Marr.
Nick Clegg, for anyone who cares, fell closer to the Yvette Cooper end of the 'scale of hostility'. I counted 19 interruptions, and he also received a few 'we're not getting very far' and 'you're avoiding the very straight question I'm asking you'-type questions. He was questioned for nearly half the interview on the question of an EU referendum and any post-election deal. He was also questioned on public sector pay, Scotland, whether his party would have any "legitimacy" if it came 4th in the election, why his party is in such a bad shape, and, of course, tuition fees...
...and it was here that Andrew Marr went most clearly for the Lib Dem leader's jugular:
AM: The tuition fee thing still sits around your shoulders. Whatever you do you can't quite get rid of it. And there's been quite a bit of commentary recently by people who were either there at the time or close to people there at the time who say that the real...that the story you have told is not the true story, which is you actually looked at your policy which you'd had in the election campaign and thought it was the wrong policy, and you look at the Conservatives and you were intellectually convinced by the change. You changed policy on tuition fees because you actually thought personally this was the right thing to do. Now, that's true isn't it?
Let me read you James O’Shaughnessy, who says he was there in the room at the time. He says, "Clegg is talking...sorry about this...crap on tuition fees. He wasn't between a rock and a hard place. I was in the room when he decided to vote for it. He was keen." That true, isn't it?
NC: Well, I don't even know who this chap is and he certainly wasn't in the room I can tell you.
Given Foxhuntingisyourfavouritesportgate, I thought I'd better check who was telling the truth here, Andrew Marr or Nick Clegg - especially given how damaging this could be to the Lib Dems. Who was this James O’Shaughnessy, whose name was strangely familiar to me?
And yet Nick Clegg claimed to have never heard of him!
I'm with The Andrew Marr Show on that one then.
*****
Well, this is how I saw it. Did you see it differently?
Marr appeared tough on Cooper only because he was obliged to try and get her to confirm or deny a deal with the SNP. It was stupid, because anyone with any brains knows that the Tories and Labour have to lie about it, and the other parties have to shade their language so that they can say, "Of course everyone must work together" without admitting what's going to happen. Cooper was never going to admit it, and, quite frankly, it's a waste of time trying to get them to slip up again. They've firmly denied it a number of times by now, so the media idiots should just move on and wait to cry, "Aha!" when there is some sort of coalition formed next weekend. So because Marr was obliged to ask, and Cooper was obliged to waffle, there were more interruptions. He didn't even press her on over-spending or immigration.
ReplyDeleteAs for Clegg, Marr's question about tuition fees really shows that that's all the media or critics have against them. It's always about that now, never asking if, in fact, the Lib Dems weren't such a great restraint on Tory extremism after all, so their whole campaign platform to remain in power somehow - which is really what it is - falls apart. Nope, it's all about tuition fees because the media is filled with superficial idiots, and most Lib Dem supporters are simply on the other side of the spectrum from the Tories, and don't care about anything else but keeping them out of government, on which Clegg betrayed them. That's it. Quoting a Cameron apparatchik about Clegg being "keen" on raising tuition fees not only doesn't sound very accurate, but is irrelevant with this in mind.
Clegg has been a dead man walking, and so going for the jugular here is like poking a corpse.
Forgot to add: I see you noticed Marr did a classic Evan Davis maneuver after Farage's remark about cutting down the BBC. He didn't say he wanted to eliminate BBC Entertainment, but Marr twisted it and misrepresented it with a very Davis-like, "In other words....." It's probably standard with all journalists who have already made their mind up about the answer, but it sticks out when the BBC does it so often with people not properly of the Left.
ReplyDeleteI hope Farage's team picks up on it being disseminated as fact, and raises such a fuss that Marr has to choke on another apology next week.
"In other words....."
DeleteMarr really epitomizes all that the BBC has become.
Flat out lying, excused as a boo-boo... sorry... tee-hee... or taking what actually happened or got said, reinterpreting it, and then attacking the lie they themselves have recreated.
Envy of the world. Not.
Let me put in a conspiracy theory:
ReplyDeleteThe BBC hierarchy have been running scared since the Farage Debacle - and are desperate to show some sort of even-handedness...so since then they are all over the place. Whereas previously we knew what to expect, now it is anyone's guess...but it seems like the message has gone out "FFS Guys - BE BALANCED!!! - or the licence fee might be on the line!!!"
Aww, do you think morale is at an all time low? Again. What a shame.
DeleteIf they're not biased to the Left, and get "complaints from both sides", why is it always enemies from the Right waiting to pounce?
It does seem to be making some people at the BBC think and try to appear unbiased.
DeleteAnd it is undoubtedly the case that the post-Farage-denunciation debates have been nothing like almost every 'Question Time' style BBC studio audience event we've ever seen for night on twenty years. So something seems to have happened.
The Andrew Marr Show was obviously sent reeling by the 'fox hunting' scandal, and the earlier criticisms of AM's hostile interviews with the Tories.
Also thinking conspiratorially...being well aware of the row following Evan Davis's interview with Nigel Farage (though, apparently, pro-EU, pro-mass migration types found nothing wrong it - see an earlier thread), maybe Andrew & Co. deliberately took the soft approach to the UKIP leader here? I mean, that's not too hard to believe really, if you're an organisation that is desperate to AT ALL TIMES maintain the veneer of BBC impartiality.
And, as David says, Aww.