Page 109 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

Brian Walden’s and David Frost’s Sunday interviews, Jonathan
Dimbleby’s lengthy interviews on the BBC’s On the Record, and
John Humphrys’s Today interviews have been important agenda-
setting moments in the political cycle. The politicians’ motives and
interests in subjecting themselves to interview have been discussed
already. Here, we note again the combative, sometimes accusatory
style of the Humphrys or Paxman interviews, and the now
commonplace assumption that such an approach is both legitimate
and necessary. These interview-celebrities, who with rare exceptions
are very much the ‘stars’ of their shows, confront the politician with
‘what the public wants to know’. Some, like 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 studies. 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) move in the same circles as those being
interviewed. Indeed, both Robin Day and Brian Walden had back-
grounds 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 sophisti-
cated 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.

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