You Heard It Here First
Andrew McKie has an amusing and interesting article in today's Herald - about the ridiculous 'interview' given by Ed Miliband on the public sector pensions strikes.
See post dated 3 July 2011: 'Endless TV Repeats'.
The only point I would dispute with Andrew is that Michael McGahey was not a trade union dinosaur - he regarded the unions as a 'movement' - one which had to move with the times to survive.
Other union leaders - Arthur Scargill being a good example - regarded the unions in a different light - as an unchanging 'monument' to the past - completely wedded to strike action to solve industrial disputes - and support for the Labour party to bring about political change.
Sadly, it's Arthur Scargill's mindset - that prevails in the trade unions today.
Miliband’s evasiveness is a sign of the TV times
"We know what Ed Miliband thinks about last week’s public sector strikes.
They were “wrong at a time when negotiations are still going on”. He added that “the Government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner”. Ed’s solution is to “urge both sides to put aside the rhetoric and get round the discussion table to stop it happening again”.
I am confident that this is his opinion, because I have watched the interview conducted by Damon Green of ITV News, in which the Labour leader gave this answer almost word for word a full six times, no matter what question he was asked.
Thanks to the internet, thousands of other people have watched Mr Miliband, who resembles a malfunctioning android at the best of times, doing his impression of a broken record. If you haven’t yet seen it, I heartily recommend you have a look, because it is difficult to convey in print the almost hallucinatory effect of this constantly repetitious exchange. As Mark Ferguson, the editor of Labour List, one of the sites which posted the clip, put it: “We’re not arguing that it went viral for a good reason.”
Mr Green later wrote about this bizarre experience on Twitter, confessing that by the end of his time with Mr Miliband he was tempted to ask: “What’s your favourite dinosaur?” or almost anything which might have elicited a different response. But we shall never know whether Ed’s favourite dinosaur was Moss Evans, or perhaps Mick McGahey, because his reply would inevitably have been that the Government was reckless and provocative and that both sides should put aside the rhetoric.
It confirms my view that the Labour party could not have picked a worse leader if they had plumped for Mr Ed, the talking horse, who was at least able to answer straightforward questions without endlessly reciting a mantra prepared for him by his advisors. It is no surprise, of course, that Mr Miliband should want to get across his point (which, at least the first time one hears it, seems a perfectly reasonable one, perfectly clearly expressed) or be on his guard against being tripped up by an awkward question. It’s alarming, though, that he has not the basic linguistic competence to disguise such evasion.
There’s no point in complaining about the evasion itself. That is now part of the stock-in-trade of all politicians. The days when an MP would attempt to give a straightforward answer to a direct question were long gone even by the time that Sir Robin Day retired from Question Time. Yet the inquisitorial interview – which probably began with Day’s celebrated cross-examination of Harold Macmillan in 1958 – has largely displaced the coverage of speeches and parliamentary debates. I’m not sure this is altogether a good thing.
Well-conducted interviews can certainly be revealing. There’s no doubt that grilling Macmillan was better than deferentially asking Macmillan to tell us how marvellous his government was or – as in a hilarious party election broadcast in 1951 – Hartley Shawcross being asked how someone as well-dressed and well-bred as he was had ended up in the Labour party.
But since about the middle of the 1980s, politicians have been wise to the hazards of interviews, and viewers or readers can no longer rely on getting much from them other than carefully rehearsed platitudes which have tested well with focus groups. We more often get the real picture when the politician has forgotten, or is unaware, that he is being recorded, as John Major, Gordon Brown and Vince Cable all found out to their cost.
I think that those politicians – Ken Clarke and Ken Livingstone are good examples – who eschew soundbites in favour of plain speaking owe their relative popularity to the technique, though my cynical nature makes me suspect that their plausibility often springs not from honesty but from a convincing ability to simulate candour. But surprisingly few are any good at this.
It is interesting that the decline of parliamentary debates, which once took up a fair amount of space in newspapers and were given close attention, dates from the time when they began to be televised. This shift was startlingly (well, it startled me) apparent when the most important announcement made by Tony Blair’s government – granting operational independence to the Bank of England – was made at a press conference without any reference to parliament at all. And this, mind you, was a measure which hadn’t even been in the party’s manifesto.
Interviews are expected to provide us with an insight into what people really think, and to get to the heart of an issue. Hence the brouhaha which surrounded the discovery last week that, for his interviews in The Independent, the journalist Johann Hari had routinely cut and pasted comments the subjects had made in their published writings or in previous interviews as if they had delivered them to him. Mr Hari’s defence, that he was aiming for “intellectual accuracy” (that is, what his subjects had not actually said to him) rather than “reportorial accuracy” (that is, what they had actually said to him) didn’t convince everyone.
Politicians repeating carefully formulated phrases, rather than answering questions candidly, do nearly as much to undermine the point of an interview. GK Chesterton once maintained that a form of words which was technically accurate, but which had been constructed with the express intent of deceiving the listener, was worse than an outright lie. But what was sharp practice by Rufus Isaacs in 1913 is now routine, to the extent that Peter Mandelson formally instructed members of Tony Blair’s cabinet not to talk to more than one journalist at a time, so that they would have “deniability” on anything they said.
I have a reckless and provocative suggestion. If it’s difficult to get an honest answer to a straight question in an interview, perhaps we should all start to pay more attention again to what politicians say in speeches and debates, and subject these public pronouncements to forensic analysis. In other words, let’s not put aside the rhetoric, but pick it up and have a good hard look at it."
See post dated 3 July 2011: 'Endless TV Repeats'.
The only point I would dispute with Andrew is that Michael McGahey was not a trade union dinosaur - he regarded the unions as a 'movement' - one which had to move with the times to survive.
Other union leaders - Arthur Scargill being a good example - regarded the unions in a different light - as an unchanging 'monument' to the past - completely wedded to strike action to solve industrial disputes - and support for the Labour party to bring about political change.
Sadly, it's Arthur Scargill's mindset - that prevails in the trade unions today.
Miliband’s evasiveness is a sign of the TV times
"We know what Ed Miliband thinks about last week’s public sector strikes.
They were “wrong at a time when negotiations are still going on”. He added that “the Government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner”. Ed’s solution is to “urge both sides to put aside the rhetoric and get round the discussion table to stop it happening again”.
I am confident that this is his opinion, because I have watched the interview conducted by Damon Green of ITV News, in which the Labour leader gave this answer almost word for word a full six times, no matter what question he was asked.
Thanks to the internet, thousands of other people have watched Mr Miliband, who resembles a malfunctioning android at the best of times, doing his impression of a broken record. If you haven’t yet seen it, I heartily recommend you have a look, because it is difficult to convey in print the almost hallucinatory effect of this constantly repetitious exchange. As Mark Ferguson, the editor of Labour List, one of the sites which posted the clip, put it: “We’re not arguing that it went viral for a good reason.”
Mr Green later wrote about this bizarre experience on Twitter, confessing that by the end of his time with Mr Miliband he was tempted to ask: “What’s your favourite dinosaur?” or almost anything which might have elicited a different response. But we shall never know whether Ed’s favourite dinosaur was Moss Evans, or perhaps Mick McGahey, because his reply would inevitably have been that the Government was reckless and provocative and that both sides should put aside the rhetoric.
It confirms my view that the Labour party could not have picked a worse leader if they had plumped for Mr Ed, the talking horse, who was at least able to answer straightforward questions without endlessly reciting a mantra prepared for him by his advisors. It is no surprise, of course, that Mr Miliband should want to get across his point (which, at least the first time one hears it, seems a perfectly reasonable one, perfectly clearly expressed) or be on his guard against being tripped up by an awkward question. It’s alarming, though, that he has not the basic linguistic competence to disguise such evasion.
There’s no point in complaining about the evasion itself. That is now part of the stock-in-trade of all politicians. The days when an MP would attempt to give a straightforward answer to a direct question were long gone even by the time that Sir Robin Day retired from Question Time. Yet the inquisitorial interview – which probably began with Day’s celebrated cross-examination of Harold Macmillan in 1958 – has largely displaced the coverage of speeches and parliamentary debates. I’m not sure this is altogether a good thing.
Well-conducted interviews can certainly be revealing. There’s no doubt that grilling Macmillan was better than deferentially asking Macmillan to tell us how marvellous his government was or – as in a hilarious party election broadcast in 1951 – Hartley Shawcross being asked how someone as well-dressed and well-bred as he was had ended up in the Labour party.
But since about the middle of the 1980s, politicians have been wise to the hazards of interviews, and viewers or readers can no longer rely on getting much from them other than carefully rehearsed platitudes which have tested well with focus groups. We more often get the real picture when the politician has forgotten, or is unaware, that he is being recorded, as John Major, Gordon Brown and Vince Cable all found out to their cost.
I think that those politicians – Ken Clarke and Ken Livingstone are good examples – who eschew soundbites in favour of plain speaking owe their relative popularity to the technique, though my cynical nature makes me suspect that their plausibility often springs not from honesty but from a convincing ability to simulate candour. But surprisingly few are any good at this.
It is interesting that the decline of parliamentary debates, which once took up a fair amount of space in newspapers and were given close attention, dates from the time when they began to be televised. This shift was startlingly (well, it startled me) apparent when the most important announcement made by Tony Blair’s government – granting operational independence to the Bank of England – was made at a press conference without any reference to parliament at all. And this, mind you, was a measure which hadn’t even been in the party’s manifesto.
Interviews are expected to provide us with an insight into what people really think, and to get to the heart of an issue. Hence the brouhaha which surrounded the discovery last week that, for his interviews in The Independent, the journalist Johann Hari had routinely cut and pasted comments the subjects had made in their published writings or in previous interviews as if they had delivered them to him. Mr Hari’s defence, that he was aiming for “intellectual accuracy” (that is, what his subjects had not actually said to him) rather than “reportorial accuracy” (that is, what they had actually said to him) didn’t convince everyone.
Politicians repeating carefully formulated phrases, rather than answering questions candidly, do nearly as much to undermine the point of an interview. GK Chesterton once maintained that a form of words which was technically accurate, but which had been constructed with the express intent of deceiving the listener, was worse than an outright lie. But what was sharp practice by Rufus Isaacs in 1913 is now routine, to the extent that Peter Mandelson formally instructed members of Tony Blair’s cabinet not to talk to more than one journalist at a time, so that they would have “deniability” on anything they said.
I have a reckless and provocative suggestion. If it’s difficult to get an honest answer to a straight question in an interview, perhaps we should all start to pay more attention again to what politicians say in speeches and debates, and subject these public pronouncements to forensic analysis. In other words, let’s not put aside the rhetoric, but pick it up and have a good hard look at it."
