Here's Camilla Long in The Sunday Times on last Sunday's Boris Johnson/Andrew Marr debacle:
At approximately 9.45am last Sunday, something awful happened to the political interview. It took place on the sofa of The Andrew Marr Show, after days of furious speculation about whether the prime minister would consent to being interviewed by Andrew Neil. By the time Boris had his one-to-one with Marr, we had somehow got to the frenzied point of believing it is the primary duty of prime ministers during an election to offer themselves to an interviewer of our choosing at a time of our calling, to submit to a ritual humiliation for the purpose of our entertainment — and if he doesn’t, he is a “disgusting coward” and a “traitor to democracy”.
The BBC, and in fact every channel, have whipped up this storm in the service of what they call “the public interest” and I call “ratings”. As I watched Marr attempt to monster Boris in the manner of Neil — a bizarre experience in itself — I thought, why would anyone sign up to this madness? Why would any decent politician stoop to being dragged into a pointless slanging match, harried and humiliated to the point that even Boris’s charm seemed to be on the ebb?
“When are you going to let me finish an answer?” he complained. “When you give me an answer,” Marr snapped, which was straight-up unreasonable.
And what questions was Marr asking? Ludicrously specific ones, designed to trap Boris into a mistake. “Do you know how many magistrates’ and crown courts have been closed?” he snarled. Obviously, Boris didn’t, and looked stupid. Whenever Marr failed to trap him, he demanded, like Neil, that Boris apologise. He did this four times, or was it six? There will be a tally on the internet. It should have been win-win for Marr, but it felt like lose-lose for everyone.
Boris doesn’t need defending, of course, but the presentation of our politics on television does. It is currently a Wild West of competing interests that leads to febrile showdowns or irate audiences full of mad activists, and the result is terrible television. If there’s one thing the past fortnight has shown us, it’s that debates during elections need to come under some kind of debates commission, with set fixtures and audiences picked independently.
This is spot on. That trick of asking politicians a specific question that they're unlikely to know and then giving them the answer. That's pure interviewer vanity. Even Andrew Neil does it and he's one of the better ones. The journalistic ideal is supposed to be speaking truth to power. But in a modern TV interview who really holds the power? I remember Laura Keunssberg interviewing Theresa May. Full of sneer and mock disbelief. If you didn't know already it would have been hard to tell which one was the Prime Minister.
ReplyDeleteYes I was thinking about this the other day.
DeleteI came to the conclusion that the Prime Minister should offer to be interviewed by all potential serious interviewers at length (say an hour each) but on his own terms. He should begin by choosing friendly and constructive interviewers. He should demand that the interviews take place at a place and time of his choosing eg an office at No 10, not a TV studio. He should have advisors on hand to pick up on any of these statistical traps set for him.
He could have a rule about time allocated to interviewer and interviewee - maybe 15-45 and that could be monitored in real time during the interview. Once the interviewer exceeds 15 mins in the hour, that would be the end of the interview. Such an approach would cut down on unnecessary interruptions.
This way I think he could redress the balance and yet ensure the PM was subject to proper scrutiny by the media. I don't think the media would turn down the opportunity to interview the PM on these terms.