DEFERENCE CUTS

Of course, it’s all the fault of the 1960s. For the century and a half before that revolutionary decade, the “great and the good” were treated with all the deference to which they considered themselves entitled. In the longer view, I suppose, the scornful, the satirical and the downright scabrous have been more often in the ascendancy: one thinks of Swift, Pope and Defoe in the first half of the 18th century, Gillray and Rowlandson in the second half. Apart from the freedom that they may make of unbridled linguistic usage, the humorists, impersonators and caricaturists of the present age draw no more blood than did their afore-named predecessors.

In between times, geese were generally not said boo to and certainly not offered any sauce to gander at. In 1951, as a general election got under way, the BBC politely asked the shadow Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, if he would care to submit himself to an interview before an outside broadcast camera. Eden gamely said that he would but made it clear that the only interrogator he would tolerate was Leslie Mitchell, the Corporation’s senior harmless lightweight.

Leslie Mitchell, a safe pair of hands

Mitchell duly squared up to the soon-to-be Foreign Secretary (and, given Churchill’s relative frailty, effectively manager of the government) with this opening salvo: “Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it's quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today. Or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home? Which is it to be?” It seems a mighty chasm between that pat-ball and the take-no-prisoner cross-examinations of Sir Robin Day and Jeremy Paxman.

The Mitchell approach, with all its complaisant clubman undertones, was swept away by the swiftly accumulating developments of the 1960s, particularly those unleashed by Hugh Carleton Greene’s leadership of the BBC and crystalized in That Was the Week That Was on the box and Private Eye in print. The pendulum swung from one extreme to the other and remained fixed on “yah boo” from that day to this.

Eden in interview with Mitchell: everything in the garden was lovely

Fast forward, then, and we find the hapless Ed Miliband unmercifully pilloried for giving the same answer to every question in a television interview, recorded by ITV but pooled for general use, that would appear in that night’s news on every outlet. You can watch the tape on this link:
http://bit.ly/lzqs4S
I should have thought it was perfectly obvious that Miliband’s performance had a clear purpose to it and not a purpose that he would feel the need to explain because he would have no reason to expect that this tape would be released in order to mock him. The mockery that has indeed been heaped upon him demonstrates some resonance about the state of the culture.

Here, for instance, is Damian Thompson in The Daily Telegraph: “Not since George Brown used to go on television smashed out of his wits has a Labour politician made such a hash of things … he gave the same answer six times, irrespective of the question. His voice was robotic, his eyes glazed … At any moment, you expected a hypnotist to step forward, snap his fingers, and say: ‘You’re back in the room now, Ed’. For the Tories, truly this is the gift that keeps on giving”.

Incidentally and as a matter of record, George Brown did not “used to go on television smashed out of his wits”. He went on television clearly (and in the circumstances forgivably) affected by drink just the once, on the night of Labour’s triumph at the 1964 general election. I watched his appearance at the time and can vouchsafe that he was very far from out of his wits. Damian Thompson – who, in case you were wondering, is a Tory (and one of William Hague’s gay protégées but that’s a story for another day) – was two at the time. He attended something called Presentation College in Reading so you might think he would know something about presentation. Let me take the trouble to explain to him – and to any of my readers puzzled by Miliband’s “interview” – what was going on here.

Anyone who ever looks up from their iPad or their burger and chips will have noticed that very little coverage of politics in the media in the last – oh – thirty years is concerned with what politicians actually say. Considerably more is devoted to what reporters and other commentators (some of those themselves politicians) say about them. The only times that politicians’ own words are given due space and time are when they have said something disobliging, revelatory, erroneous, apologetic or unguarded. Or – and this is germane to the case under review – when the rules oblige the bulletins to give equal space to opposition as well as to government and the opposition has made a clear statement of policy.

Ed in interview: "I vill say this only once"

This swing away from what politicians wish to say (“perhaps you would prefer to talk about home”) to what reporters and commentators wish to say is a central part of the process of the media’s wholly successful attempt to arrogate to itself the setting of the political agenda, indeed of the whole agenda of public discourse.

Not surprisingly, politicians have sought means to combat this, not least in the employment of media advisors. These advisors came up with a nifty device, the sound-bite. This device – a succinct, free-standing summary of a position – was gratefully seized upon by the media, particularly the broadcast media, as a means of appearing to satisfy – or at least to include – actual politicians in their own disquisitions. For a long time, politicians felt that they could rely upon the media to spot and pick up on these sound-bites, as long as they were prominently voiced. Alas, that is no longer the case. The news media are so competitive with each other and so desperate to hold audiences against the ever-increasing distractions from new media that they try to insist upon exclusive tasters of what a politician has to say (you’ll have noticed how often you see someone giving a speech mutely while the reporter comments and then suddenly making whatever main point the speech had to deliver in a one-to-one interview).

Smart politicians, anxious (as the jargon has it) “to get their message across”, seek to control how they are heard with even more brutal techniques. One such was precisely what Miliband was up to. He agreed to a pooled interview and then declined to say anything except his prepared sound-bite, giving the broadcasters no option but to transmit what Miliband wanted rather than some (to his mind) secondary, irrelevant or perhaps less well expressed alternative. The device worked on the night. Miliband’s position, cogently stated, appeared on every news bulletin.

That should have been that. However, the interviewer was evidently a neophyte who had never encountered this phenomenon before, though several leading politicians have used it, including George Osborne and Alistair Darling. “His interviewer, Damon Green, was freaked out, as he later confessed” according to Damian Thompson. In an entirely underhand move, Green or some other ITV person released the complete tape to YouTube where, without context, Miliband’s performance was bound to seem curious.

Damian – Omen II

Green may be a greenhorn but Thompson is not. There are only two possible readings of Thompson’s shock-horror account. Either he genuinely doesn’t know how broadcast news operates which, for a man who has been in the business nearly thirty years, is itself quite a scandal (what does he do all day?). Or he knows perfectly well but is trying to do the leader of the party he opposes a piece of no good in the eyes of readers who cannot be expected to divine why such an apparently odd interview should have taken place. I incline to the latter explanation, if only to spare Thompson’s blushes.

The Telegraph’s agenda is one thing. That professional broadcasters who consider themselves progressive (people like Chris Addison and Armando Iannucci) should join in a Twitter harangue that seeks to characterise Miliband as if he is in some degree autistic is perfectly horrible. I appreciate that I am in a category numbering fewer than double figures in believing that Ed Miliband is a good, thoughtful, shrewd and smart leader of the Labour Party and – here’s the clincher – that there is no one else remotely close to leading who could or would do better. I don’t agree with all his positions or policies. Far from it: I oppose him on public service worker strikes, on his failure to make regulation of the banks and radical tightening of the tax system a crusade, and on Libya. But nobody in the Labour ranks is voicing that sort of opposition so I don’t see the advantage of damaging Labour by damaging its leader.

What is so depressing about this ridiculous episode is that, as with Gordon Brown’s overheard remarks about Gillian Duffy, the morality of the media and its use of its privileged access is not questioned, even by experienced and progressive commentators. My regular readers may remember that I advised Brown to hit back at Sky News for breaching his confidentiality by subterfuge rather than to hold his head in his hands in a BBC studio as though he were at fault. I hope Miliband will wake up and take Damon Green to task for his ignorant and illicit release of the tape. But I fear that even politicians have been seduced into believing that the media is so powerful it can do whatever it wishes. After all, it has taken the revelations about hacking into the already dead Milly Dowler’s phone for the criminal behaviour of Murdoch’s underlings really to get people angry.

Johann: there's a tirade in town

Another story about media morality gave the same Damian Thompson another stick with which to beat the left. Johann Hari, a columnist on The Independent, “confessed” to having imported extracts from their writings into interviews with various thinkers and, as it were, passing these quotes off as if given to him on the day. Hari justified this by arguing that the written thoughts were better expressed than the spoken ones and that several fellow journalists had told him that the practice was common.

Leave it to Damian Thompson to invent the world in which Hari operates: “Student radicals re-tweet his tirades against Tories, bankers, Catholics, Americans etc before rolling out of bed at noon”. This is so unworthy. A radical student re-tweeter of my acquaintance – how many of those does Thompson actually know? – regularly rolls out of bed at 11:45, sometimes even earlier.

As it happens, I follow Hari on Twitter, though not in The Independent, and I must have slept through all his tirades (can you do a tirade in 140 characters?). What I most recall of his tweets is his admiration for Grace Dent and Clive James, two writers who (as may be verified in earlier postings) I abominate. I submit that admiring Dent and James hardly constitutes a threat to the established order.

Thompson accuses Hari of being “happy to tell lies” and indeed the headline of his piece picks up that notion: “Writers who tell lies for a ‘greater truth’.” On Twitter, where the traffic is very far from universally supportive of Hari, I have seen him accused of “plagiarism” and “theft”. None of these accusations has any merit. Hari has certainly been naïve. He has probably been encouraged to work above his pay scale. But what he has been doing is merely to try to make his journalism as readable and authoritative as possible. Though I never went so far as to substitute written material for spoken in print interviews that I conducted, I certainly subbed and tidied up the spoken quotes that I included because verbatim transcript of speech usually read inelegantly at best, incoherently at worst.

In sum, I suggest that Hari could have conducted himself, both in the interviews that led to the outcry and in the outcry itself a touch more shrewdly. But to pillory him is absurd. Compared with the Neanderthals at News International and the crude propagandists at The Telegraph, Hari’s sins are pettifogging.