Hectoring interviewers. Baying audiences. TV’s making a travesty of the election
BAYING audiences during broadcast debates, hectoring TV interviewers and panicking politicians terrified of being exposed for not having perfect recall of the smallest minutiae of their party’s policies.
How undignified. How un-British. What a travesty of a General Election!
Yet it all started so well. The June 8 poll, we were told by all parties, would be one of the most important in our history. One which would shape the direction of this country for generations to come.
Tragically, the campaign has descended into a shabby circus during which very few of the big issues facing post-Brexit Britain have been discussed properly.
Instead, voters have been subjected to unseemly daily brawls during which TV and radio stations have turned the contest into a battle of the airwaves, offering presenters the opportunity to boost their egos and score petty points off politicians.
As a result, voters have been deprived of intelligent debate — with democracy demeaned in the process.
Of course, it is vital that politicians are held to account, ruthlessly tested and challenged so that the public can see if they are worthy of the trust placed in them to run the country.
But too much of the 2017 General Election campaign has been about the preening vanity of the broadcasting frontmen and women.
For instance, we are led to believe that it’s somehow important whether Andrew Marr or Robert Peston landed the best knock-out blow during their rival Sunday morning TV shows.
Will it be one of the Dimbleby brothers or Huw Edwards presiding over the BBC’s Election Night coverage? Does this mean that the self-important Nick Robinson will be sidelined?
WORRYINGLY, I believe that these TV bighitters often regard themselves as more important than the politicians that they are interviewing.
Take, for example, Jeremy Paxman. This week, he interviewed both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Paxman’s belligerence was such that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition were allowed to give measured responses.
In the same vein, the BBC’s Andrew Neil had Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron as his guest on Thursday night as part of his series of set-piece interviews.
Perhaps viewers should have guessed in advance the tenor of the confrontation, considering the grand title of the programmes — The Andrew Neil Interviews. Yes, rather than The Party Leader Interviews, all the emphasis was on the star broadcaster.
In the event, Neil treated Farron with condescension bordering on contempt. He constantly interrupted and scarcely allowed him to express his opinions.
For his part, the struggling Farron had suffered a previous bout of bullying from Channel 4’s Cathy Newman. She clobbered him over his Christian faith and the fact that he had once said that homosexuality is a sin.
As I said at the time in this column, Newman behaved as if the Lib Dem leader was due in court for genocide.
Such overbearing, look-at-me performances by TV interviewers may offer brief televisual pyrotechnics, but they corrode politics. These well-paid peacocks have power and scant responsibility. Nobody has voted for them.
They are not democratically entrusted by the 46 million people entitled to vote to keep this country safe, manage the economy, negotiate Brexit, run the NHS or improve standards in schools. As I said, they have a vital role to play in a modern democracy. But their own opinions do not matter a jot.
There are some honourable exceptions. Nick Ferrari, a presenter on LBC radio, performed an important service at the start of the election campaign when he exposed the abject incompetence of Labour’s Diane Abbott by asking her a series of questions about her party’s policy on policing.
At one stage, Abbott risibly suggested that a Labour government would hire 10,000 new officers at a cost of just £300,000 a year. Ferrari swiftly pointed out that each officer would therefore be paid £30 per annum. This was financial illiteracy on a grand scale.
We have scarcely heard from a shamed Abbott since. The public owes Nick Ferrari a big thank-you. For voters know that if Labour is voted into government, Abbott would most likely be Home Secretary, the minister in charge of the nation’s security — a truly dreadful prospect.
No other frontline politician is capable of such an utterly hopeless performance and Ferrari’s forensic questioning of Abbott provided a public service.
YET it also had the unfortunate consequence that jealous broadcasters tried to ape him by turning the election campaign into a competition about which one could trip up their interviewees on the most obscure statistics buried in their manifestos. This shows a very serious and irresponsible lack of understanding.
Media grandees such as Paxman and Neil ought to know better. Their prime job is to help voters form an educated choice when it comes to polling day.
One BBC reporter who does this well is Norman Smith, the BBC’s assistant political editor. He is well-informed, sensible, fair and unassuming. He keeps viewers and listeners abreast of the political developments of the day but does not impose either his personality or his views.
Such a broadcaster is refreshing when compared with some other aspects of the BBC’s coverage of this election — such as occurred on Wednesday night when leading politicians from the seven main parties were subjected to an ugly 90-minute bear-pit of hysteria, heckling and hectoring.
Such a disgraceful shambles — in combination with TV’s egotist interviewers — is not only an insult to voters but also to this country’s great traditions of political debate.