Page 104 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE MEDIA AS POLITICAL ACTORS

Paxman, hang on to their victim like a pit-bull terrier, until the
politicians’ refusal or inability to answer is transparently revealed.
Robin Day too, in his prime, had sufficient status as a pundit to
discard the conventions of etiquette and deference which politicians
could once expect to be observed in broadcasting studios. Such
status is acquired, like that of the press columnist, by the
interviewer’s history of access to the inside track of politics, and
the audience’s knowledge that he (they are, as yet, mainly men,
although Zeinab Badawi, Kirsty Wark and Sheena McDonald have
emerged as future contenders) move in the same circles as those
being interviewed. Indeed, both Robin Day and Brian Walden had
backgrounds in professional politics.
The phenomenon of the ‘star’ interviewer, and the increasingly
combative, adversarial style of broadcast political interview in the
1990s, has been a cause of considerable tension between the
politicians and the broadcasters, especially the BBC. First the Tories,
and then Labour in office, have attacked the BBC’s most aggressive
(some would say most effective) interviewers, like John Humphrys,
Jeremy Paxman, Anna Ford, and Sue MacGregor, on the grounds
that they are usurping the right of the elected politician to present
his or her arguments on air. BBC managers have been regularly leaned
on by both Labour and Conservative media ‘minders’ anxious to
protect their clients, and to create a less adversarial interviewing
environment. The interviewers have responded by saying that they
are merely doing what their fourth estate role requires of them—
standing up for the public, and representing its interests against a
political class whose members now come to the broadcast studio
armed to the teeth with sophisticated public relations and news
management techniques, designed to maximise the free flow of nice-
sounding but politically empty rhetoric. The adversarial interview,
say its advocates, is a necessary tool to cut through this rhetorical
gloss and expose the hard core of policy beneath.
In a notorious case of this technique in action, Jeremy Paxman
once asked a Conservative minister exactly the same question
fourteen consecutive times, and still failed to get the straight answer
he wanted, thereby communicating a powerful message about the
politician’s prognostication and evasiveness. At other times
interviewers have crossed the line from legitimate questioning into
the realm of rudeness and self-importance, elevating the
demonstration of their own inquisitorial cleverness over the carrying
out of the journalistic tasks at hand. On balance, however, and in
the face of such intensively deployed public relations techniques as

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