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"Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" - Rob Burley
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The forensic, long-form political interview remains possibly the best, and certainly the most entertaining, mechanism for political accountability. Can it survive in an age of spin, social media and soundbites?
To answer that question, Will is joined by Rob Burley. Rob is one of the most respected and experienced editors in British political television, with a CV that includes stints as editor of the BBC’s live political programs, The Andrew Marr Show, Politics Live and Newswatch.
His new book, ‘Why is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?’, is a history of political television and a love letter to its highest form: the long-form, forensic political interview.
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Transcript
Teenage fascination with political interviews
00:00:13
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. One of my great joys as a teenager was the ABC's 730 report. As an aside, that's probably all the information you need to know my success rate with girls at the time, but I digress. Specifically, I lived for the evenings when Kerry O'Brien would invite Prime Minister John Howard onto the program.
00:00:37
Speaker
O'Brien had his flaws as an interviewer, most notably a barely concealed bias, but he was a serious and highly intelligent journalist. Howard was the titanic political figure of his age in Australia and a master of handling the media. The talents of these two men elevated Australian politics, normally an extended parade of drab mediocrity to the level of gladiatorial combat. It was brilliant entertainment and it served an important purpose. O'Brien was intent on nailing Howard.
00:01:07
Speaker
and Howard believed in the importance of fronting up and fighting the battle.
Rob Burley's career and book
00:01:11
Speaker
I quote, The politics of Kerry O'Brien were a mile away from mine, yet I appeared regularly on the program because it was a serious current affairs presentation. Unfortunately, we don't have many journalists like O'Brien anymore, and we don't have any politicians like Howard. These twin facts have put the forensic, long-form political interview at risk.
00:01:31
Speaker
I'm joined by someone who understands their importance better than anyone, Rob Burley. Rob is one of the most respected and experienced editors in British political television, with a CV that includes stints as editor of the BBC's live political programs, The Andrew Marsh Show, Politics Live and News Watch. His recent book is wonderfully titled, Why is this lying bastard lying to me? Rob calls it a history of political television and a love letter to its highest form, the long-form forensic political interview.
00:01:59
Speaker
I stumbled on it by chance and I'm glad I did. It's one of my books of the year. Rob, welcome to Australia. Thank you very much. Well, great to be here. Maybe to start, tell me a bit about your journey. Tell me about what's led, led us to this conversation.
00:02:13
Speaker
That's going back away now. I think the roots of it really, I don't know what the situation in Australia was with this, but in the 70s and 80s, when I grew up in the UK, we had three channels until 1982 and we had four, and that was amazing. We didn't have much choice about what we would watch on TV. In a way, I was forced
00:02:35
Speaker
on a wet Sunday in November as a kid to turn on the telly and look at ITV, the main commercial channel show, which was called Weekend World, which was a show hosted by a guy called Brian Walden, who was a former MP who interviewed the leading politicians of the day.
00:02:53
Speaker
And I didn't understand it really at first. I didn't know what they were talking about. And as I got older, I was able to sort of decode and understand more about the concepts and the things that were at stake in these conversations. But I did know that something important was happening and something consequential was happening. And I became kind of addicted to it really as a format. And I became fascinated by the way that politicians and interviewers interact on television.
00:03:20
Speaker
in myriad numbers of programs that we had in the UK in those days. And I followed that through really as a career. I think sometimes you get the career you need, even if you don't know you're doing
Role of a TV editor in politics
00:03:31
Speaker
it. And somehow I ended up directing myself towards that world and becoming someone who worked with people like Andrew Neil, who's one of the greats of the current era, and Jonathan Dimbleby, who's also a fantastic interviewer, and numerous others.
00:03:43
Speaker
So the road I'm on now started back in, you know, probably 1977 or something when I was eight. And there was nothing else to watch that day. And I ended up watching something that sort of turned me on to politics. You said in the book that the role of editor is the best job in television, in your view. What's an editor do on a political television program?
00:04:09
Speaker
There's always a little bit of confusion because people have in their minds as editors who actually edit film. Of course, they are people, they're very important people in the TV production process. But the editor of a programme is a bit like the editor of a newspaper in that they make the decisions about what's on that show. And they don't just do that on their own, they obviously do that in conjunction with the presenter. But the culture of British television anyway, is that that presenter is not the editor in chief.
00:04:35
Speaker
the editor is the editor and the presenter is the person that carries through that particular program under direction, really, of the editor. And so that's a really powerful and intoxicating role to have and one you need to take seriously and one I really, really enjoyed. So that's why I say it's the best job.
00:04:52
Speaker
That's interesting. And the way that you say that, you know, that it is powerful, it is intoxicating, it can be addictive.
The craft of political interviews
00:04:58
Speaker
That can also lend itself at times if you're not careful to to pushing a particular agenda or letting bias scan the way. And I've heard you speak about how you mitigate against that. We'll get to that. But before we do, the thing which I loved about this book is that it looks at
00:05:13
Speaker
the political interview as an art form, as a craft. I hadn't even considered it that way and as someone now who interviews people on a weekly basis, I loved hearing the way that you would go about preparing or helping your presenters prepare for an interview and all the strategy that sits behind it.
00:05:31
Speaker
I'll start with the question that you think is the best question you've seen asked of a political interview. It was asked of Sir Robin Day, arguably the father of political interviewing in the UK by public intellectual Bernard Blavin. And he said, is it fair to interrogate politicians as a political interviewer does, given how challenging the politician's job is? How would you go about answering that question?
00:05:54
Speaker
I think I'm really glad you noticed that because actually I think the first person in all the interviews I've done is actually a lighted on that particular quote, which I thought was really important and arguably sort of is one of the counterweights to a perception one might have from the title of the book.
00:06:08
Speaker
and also from the general culture, which is that somehow politicians are all lying bastards. I don't think they are. I think actually that's not fair. I do say that in the book, but that quote is designed to kind of point towards that. The reason that we have to do it though, the reason that political interviewers should be questioning politicians is because politicians need to be held to account. Some of them behave honorably. Some of them are doing their best. Some of them are not. Some of them are inadequate. Some of them are very good. Some of them have things to explain. If there's a heroine in this book,
00:06:38
Speaker
Margaret Thatcher, because the way she approached this question was that it was absolutely part of her duty to submit herself to these sorts of encounters. Because A, it was accountability, and B, it was her opportunity in a way to be the teacher that she thought she was to the nation to say, why I'm right, and why you need to follow me, and why I'm suggesting as the sometimes painful medicine this country needs
Accountability in political discourse
00:07:01
Speaker
is the right thing to do. Now, how else can you do that unless you go out and make the argument? Yet we have a generation to leap forward.
00:07:08
Speaker
briefly, we have a generation of politicians now in the UK who seem to want to skip that bit of the process, just get into power really for reasons that may be altruistic, they may be selfish, but they aren't explained. And that's extraordinary. Liz Truss, who was the short serving Prime Minister in British history in last year,
00:07:29
Speaker
had Thatcherite outfits and Thatcherite mannerisms, but didn't have that essential respect for the argument and for the process when she was proposing quite radical things. I'm not interested in the judgment about those things being right or wrong. I'm just thinking that if you want to go and say, look, we have to break the status quo in this country with a radical approach to tax and spend, et cetera, et cetera, make the argument. Go and put yourself through the mill. That's what Mrs. Thatcher did.
00:07:56
Speaker
So, yeah, so I'm digressing, but it's an important function and the best politicians embrace it. Well, the really interesting comparison that comes up in the book is between two Tory PMs. It is between Thatcher and more recently Boris Johnson. And I think you enjoy looking at those two as a comparison in how they both approached journalists and then political journalism more specifically.
00:08:18
Speaker
Took me through those respective approaches and maybe how does it shine a light on broader changes amongst the political class when it comes to how they approach journalists?
00:08:27
Speaker
Sure. I mean, as I say, Mrs. Thatcher, first of all, came to this with respect for the process. She saw the media, she saw television as an essential component in her ability to speak to the electorate and to be held to account, but also to make her intellectual arguments. And she did so from within herself. This was not something that was handed to her by advisors who told her she should do something or shouldn't do something. They would try, but she would decide what she wanted to do.
00:08:52
Speaker
Fast forward to Boris Johnson in 2019, and there was a tradition, and I hope it returns, but there was, and it's now in the past tense, a tradition in the UK during a general election
Political strategy and media avoidance
00:09:02
Speaker
campaign that every leader of the main political parties, which would be essentially the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, and then the nationalists, depending on their level of support and others, would submit themselves to an interview
00:09:18
Speaker
with the premier interviewer of the day. That would be half an hour's worth of interviewing, not necessarily live, but certainly broadcast at prime time on BBC One. That's a big deal. That gets to a very, very significant audience. This has always been something that has essentially been agreed. You can never compel people to do this, but people like me who negotiated these encounters would always basically rested upon the good faith and the norms that applied.
00:09:45
Speaker
Now, what happened in 2019 was that Boris Johnson never, his people never really answered the question to me and to others at the BBC whether he would do this interview. So we had to go on and work on the basis that given he wasn't saying he wouldn't and that he was saying, well, dates might be an issue, we can talk about logistics. We did pursue the interviews with other people, including the Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn. And that was a very bad interview for Jeremy Corbyn, probably one of the most damaging interviews in any election campaign for a major leader. It was conducted with Andrew Neil and it was disastrous for Corbyn.
00:10:14
Speaker
And then after that, it transpired that Boris Johnson wasn't going to do the interview. And the reason he waited, the reason he strung as long was to make sure that his opponent did do the interview and was damaged. Now that is dishonourable. It shows contempt for the process. And it's the kind of thing Mrs Thatcher would never have done. So, you know, for Boris Johnson, getting into power was the important thing. Doing it honourably was a secondary question. And in the end, it turns out that
00:10:36
Speaker
What we hear subsequently from various accounts is that Johnson may have wanted to do the interview himself. He kind of waxed and waned on the question. His wife apparently had views on it and thought he maybe should. But in the end, his advisors decided. So that was Dominic Cummings, who was his very powerful advisor, and another guy called Lee Kane, who essentially decided it was best if Boris didn't take the risk. So there's the difference. Now, in terms of the more general approach these days to scrutiny,
00:11:05
Speaker
I think there is a reluctance to be scrutinised. There's a lack of buying into the concept, the Mrs Thatcher embrace, which is that you have to do and Tony Blair embrace that you have to do it and it's the right thing to do. And you know, it's get away with the bare minimum. And that
00:11:21
Speaker
I was at an event last week in Yorkshire in the UK and I spoke to an audience about the book. And I said to them, you know, in my view, if people won't submit themselves to scrutiny, you shouldn't vote for them. And the response in the room was that that was the right thing because it's contemptuous of the process and of the electorate. I'm very passionate about this. I better shut up otherwise I'll never stop talking.
Spin doctors vs. authenticity
00:11:43
Speaker
You mentioned Cummings, and I seem to remember one of the two quotes that you start the book with is from Dominic Cummings, and I'll paraphrase, but it's in Cummings, typically blunt, profane style. It's something like, why would you put this effing gaff machine in front of the media when we can effectively get away with not doing it? How do you think about the role of political advisors and spin doctors, which perhaps maybe came to prominence during the Blair years in the UK, and then it's now just a part of everyday business in politics.
00:12:11
Speaker
What role do they play in this trend that you've seen play out? Well, I mean, the truth is, if you're a political journalist, you don't like them because they're clever people who are lining up on the other side to stop you doing what you ideally want to do, which is to conduct the kind of interview that makes waves, that changes things, that moves things on, that gets people to be more honest than they might have wanted to be, that's revealing. And of course, that's sort of self-interest speaking. So I understand why they exist, and I think it's fair enough.
00:12:37
Speaker
The problem that they've created is that they're actually ill-serving their masters increasingly, because people just don't believe what politicians say in a very profound sense, because they feel that people are clever enough to spot the techniques that are used. They're literate enough to understand that this man has been sent into a room to repeat the same phrase over and over again, ad nauseam. They know that that's happening because they're not stupid and they can hear it.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, it was true in the 90s. Well, the reason is how the 80s. In the 80s and 90s, the Labour Party had years of opposition, lack of discipline, people just saying whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it, and it wasn't coherent to the electorate. And so the spin doctors that came in then were designed to try and
00:13:22
Speaker
kind of get some sort of control of the process. But in the time since then, it's become more of a complete control of the process, to the point where there's no authenticity whatsoever. So it will be the politician who can break free of this.
00:13:37
Speaker
and can be authentic. And often this is what people term as populist politicians, because Boris Johnson could sort of do this and communicate direct to people in a way that seemed to sort of step outside of those tram lines that the spin doctors had imposed, will profit and will benefit. Now, perhaps for ill, in the case of Boris Johnson, who was a particularly skilled individual at
00:13:58
Speaker
playing things by rules he made up himself. Whatever you think of him, he was extraordinary in terms of the way he communicated. He did it, but all I would say is if future politicians are sitting there thinking about how to connect,
00:14:12
Speaker
They should perhaps try and move away from the spin doctor control approach and just try and give themselves some leeway to actually talk to the people, because that's what the greats, you know, if the modern greats of British politics, the Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, even though Blair understood the power of spin doctors, he was much more gifted than so many of them are, who just power at stuff. He was much more fluent. He believed in something. That's what we need to get back to.
Responsibilities in political dialogue
00:14:39
Speaker
That's the positive side of the equation, but you also mentioned in the book that there is a negative side, and it's reflective on us as voters and as viewers. So you say that, and quite correctly, in the modern age, every slip of the tongue is a gaffe, every apology a humiliation, every tentative conversation about policy options a pretext for a political row. How much are we to blame as viewers for the way that politicians conduct themselves in that really fierce message discipline?
00:15:08
Speaker
I don't know if that's viewers so much as journalists, to be honest. I think both sides have created problems. The politicians create problems because they won't speak, either they won't be scrutinized at all, or they won't speak properly, or they won't just talk normally and explain things. The journalists, at their worst, are just looking for the next story and so just want to amplify any interesting thing that's said as a gaffe or a policy change.
00:15:32
Speaker
I mention in the book, there's a few occasions when there's been overtures, usually by the journalists side, to try and reset and recalibrate this relationship between journalists and politicians and actually say, can we stop the silliness on the one side, the gaffes on the other side, the lack of communication? But it never really works because whenever it's been attempted,
00:15:54
Speaker
It's usually the journalists who sort of lay down their arms and then the politicians come in and shoot them anyway because they haven't signed up to it. I don't know, there's no mechanism really to get it. The only way it's going to happen is if politicians, this is the way I alluded to a little earlier about getting rid of spin doctors to some extent, is if they can see the advantage for them.
00:16:14
Speaker
because Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher saw an advantage in going out there and submitting themselves to this and talking freely and explaining what they feel and what they think, because they had ideologies actually. Mr. Thatcher obviously had a particular ideology. Tony Blair was a kind of a complicated thing, but about repositioning his party, they believed in it fundamentally. Boris Johnson did not believe in anything fundamentally, apart from Boris Johnson.
00:16:42
Speaker
So therefore, you can't go onto television and confidently espouse something if you don't believe anything. And too many of the people that follow.
00:16:50
Speaker
in that camp, although Liz Truss apparently did believe in something, but equally wasn't willing to come and talk about it. So it doesn't always follow. But do you see what I mean? I think it's blame on both sides. In terms of the public, and I do sometimes think the public don't believe, I mean, it's not their fault, perhaps, but something's been lost in terms of our civic duty as electors and voters and citizens. We have to do a bit of hard work as well.
00:17:15
Speaker
We can't just expect the journalists to do the questions, the politicians to have the answers, and we can just sit on the sidelines and say they're all rubbish. There needs to be some kind of literacy in politics amongst the general public. Whether that exists or not is questionable, and how you fix it, I don't really know. That's a really interesting little insight around the sense that we may have lost something around civic duty. Yeah. What do you put that down to?
00:17:40
Speaker
I don't know if you're aware of a program called Question Time. I don't know if you have a similar one in Australia.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah, it would be Q&A is the equivalent industry. So what you have there is you have this and the other example is Vox Pops in news packages. What you do is you have a sort of elevation of the citizen to a status of sort of untouchable expert in everything. So if they feel something and say something, they're kind of right. Now, the reason that that happens is because obviously they're the people that elect the politicians in the end and they are being and they're supposed to be held accountable by those people. But if those people just
00:18:14
Speaker
have reflexive emotional responses and never engage in the actual detail, then why should they be elevated to that level, if you see what I mean? So you had a syndrome, there's a very funny comedy sketch over here about question time, which was that around the time of the bankers' bonuses, controversy around the financial crisis,
00:18:36
Speaker
And the guy just puts his hand up in question time and goes to him and he just says, the bankers, the bonuses, the bonuses of the bankers and the whole audience just gives them massive ovation because he's just said all the things that we hate and he said nothing constructive. And I think that is a sort of feature of where we've ended up. But politicians don't help us in that regard. But I do think it's got to be the media, the politicians and the public. Look, all I can do is write a book. I don't know and talk to you and other people, but that's what we have to try and change.
Extracting truth in interviews
00:19:01
Speaker
Well, what you do know better than almost anyone is how journalists can pierce through that shield of message discipline. What are the practical ways that a really good journalist, when you've got a politician who has obviously got a series of talking points and their minders have said, right, stick to the script, stick to the script. What ways can a really good interviewer pierce that shield?
00:19:22
Speaker
Okay, great. So there's a few things. One is, I'll give you an example which relates to Boris Johnson. So this is about the first thing and the fundamental thing is very good research. So that's not just knowing everything about subjects, but also researching how they tend to respond to particular questions. So in 2019, for example, Boris Johnson was going to be interviewed by Andrew Neill.
00:19:41
Speaker
This was to become the leader of the Tory party and therefore the Prime Minister. Before the general election, this was a party election. And we looked at all his interviews and we noticed that pretty much whatever he was asked early on in the interview, he would say,
00:19:57
Speaker
that he'd reduced the murder rate or the crime rate in London to a particular percentage, and that this was something that recommended him as a leader. It didn't matter what the question was, because none of the questions related to the crime rate in London, when he was Mayor of London, that was, but he always did it. So that was one thing. The other thing he always did
00:20:14
Speaker
He always talked about the GATT agreement. This is very arcane, but this is a 1947 trade agreement that was relevant to the question of what would happen if the UK left the EU without a deal about how to do trade in the future. There was Paragraph 5B of that particular GATT agreement said that you could continue on the arrangements that already were in existence. I only have to explain that to make sense of the story. We knew that he understood that clause. He
00:20:43
Speaker
was regularly known to talk about 5B. It's all fine. 5B of the GATT agreement, 1947, all sounds very impressive. It's going to sort us out. So those were two things he said. The research is understand things, but also understand what he's going to say. On the first point about the crime rate, fine.
00:21:02
Speaker
But the crime rate was reduced by a higher percentage in every other area of the country at the time that he was referring to. So when he came back with this irrelevant point that was designed to confuse matters but make him look good, we were ready with a fact that just exploded the relevance of it and also showed it actually was not even something to boast about. So that was effective because it obviously showed up his tactics, but also laid the ground for the next thing, which was the conversation about 5B.
00:21:28
Speaker
Our question, and there's a debate amongst the people involved about who actually thought of this, I maintain it was me, what we should ask was if he knows what 5B is, it's very unlikely he knows what 5C is. Because like a student in a seminar,
00:21:46
Speaker
who's just kind of crammed in order to get through that half an hour. Johnson's not going to know the depth of it. And indeed, he walked straight into that trap. We danced him down the road to 5B. We invited him to talk about 5B. He spoke about it with great sort of confidence. Andrew Neil had a slip of the tongue and it's allowed about the clause himself. So Johnson was full of bravado and saying, you know, saying it's all about 5B, get it right, get the detail right, Andrew, which of course is ironic because Andrew Neil is Mr. Detail and Boris Johnson is Mr. Not Detail.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then Andrew just said, and what about 5C? And the way I describe it in the book is, you know, the bird stopped singing, the traffic stopped on outside the studio. Everything fell silent as it became obvious that he'd walked into this monumental trap and that he was going to have, and they had no way out. In the end, Andrew said, you don't know, do you? And he said, no. And he tried to laugh it off, but it was revealing. And it wasn't, by the way, what they call in America. I don't know what they call that in Australia, a gotcha. Yes, I gotcha. Is that what they say in Australia?
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It really annoys me because a gotcha might be how much is a pint of milk, how much is a litre of milk, whatever it is. And they give the wrong answer and you say, well, you're out of touch. And that's a cheap gotcha. This was a fundamental question at the heart of the election that he was running for to be a leader.
00:23:04
Speaker
he understood the detail that he could deliver a Brexit that would be okay for the country. And it was based on sand. And I think we demonstrated that. He was then elected to the post of leader of the Conservative Party. So, you know, you can only do what you can do. But those are examples of research being the thing. One other thing that comes to mind quickly. Well, sorry to keep banging on. Please, please do.
00:23:26
Speaker
is when it comes to the repetition and just not answering questions, I don't think it's done enough. I think I try and do this when I work with Beth Rigby on Sky News, is call it out. What politicians want and what a lot of political journalists go along with
00:23:45
Speaker
is that these conversations exist in some parallel universe where there's not normal interaction. You spoke to your partner or your family member or whatever, and they spoke to you like this. You would just at some point stop them and say, what?
00:24:00
Speaker
Sorry, you just keep saying the same thing over and over again. And I'm asking you a question, you're ignoring it. So I think it's really important sometimes to introduce an element of reality into that fake world they try and create and say, what? Sorry, I know you've said that. And viewers will note you keep saying over and over again in exactly the same formulation. We've heard it. Can you please answer the question? You know, and so that may work or it may not, but at least it points it up.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, I've had the exact same feeling because, you know, you don't need to be an expert in politics to see this happening before your eyes, to see there's a question and clicks with you that you go, it's got nothing to do with the question that answer. That's obviously been pre prepared. Why don't more politicians, sorry, why don't more journalists do that? Why don't they call out the bleeding obvious?
00:24:46
Speaker
I'm just writing a new chapter for the paperback of the book that's coming out next year.
Impartiality in journalism
00:24:53
Speaker
A lot of the people that work in political journalism, they think that politicians and the rules around them are immutable.
00:25:01
Speaker
they'll never change and they do sort of exist in this reality. Of course they're going to say that because X. It's sophisticated to understand that of course politicians are going to not answer the question because they have all these different considerations. I'm just not going to buy that. I just don't think we should buy that. But I think they do. I think people, that's why I never really like to hang out with politicians or their advisors. I like to kind of maintain a distance from it because it's only then that you sort of just see this for what it is.
00:25:32
Speaker
There are other reasons. The other reason, let's be frank about political journalists, is that they depend upon politicians for their stories and for access and for all those things. The danger is you get too close or you need to be too close to do your job properly. If you started saying the emperor's got no clothes on, then you get chucked out.
00:25:52
Speaker
Some people would argue that there is another reason, and that is that there are many journalists today that do have an ideological agenda, that do have a bias. So there's a lovely line in your book. You say your approach to political interviewing can be boiled down to one question, what is the truth? You go on and say, this book is about the search for truth when a powerful person sits down with a first-class interviewer to answer the important questions.
00:26:18
Speaker
Now, I read that and I was inspired by it, but at the same time may feel a bit quaint today for some people. I think it feels like more and more journalists today are interested in pushing an ideological agenda as opposed to seeking the truth. To give you an example, I put out a tweet a while ago and I asked, could you name one journalist who you are unsure how they would vote in an Australian general election?
00:26:42
Speaker
And there were very, very few compelling answers, maybe one or two, which I agreed with. Is that ideological lens in journalism a bigger problem than it was, say, when you started your career and how do you mitigate against it?
00:26:55
Speaker
These are good questions. First of all, I have to see most of this in the context of my time at the BBC. Obviously, the BBC has an avowed position of impartiality. That's not to say that it's not the same ITV and Sky News, but it's a difference because it's paid for by the license fee. There's a particular imperative to impartiality. I've really always embraced impartiality.
00:27:20
Speaker
Now, the thing is that nobody in the world comes to the room without their own views in reality. But it's about, in that context, striving to achieve a very difficult thing, which is impartiality. So you don't pretend that it's a sort of exact science, but you must try and live it.
00:27:42
Speaker
And for me, the reason that works and the reason that can be effective is that you, as a producer, an editor or a presenter, you're not interested in furthering your political viewpoint. That's not why you're in the job. You're interested in whoever it might be, you're interviewing, revealing the truth about that person or about their party or their policy.
00:28:02
Speaker
and that that is of greater significance and interest to you than anything to do with your own ideology. So that's how I practically approach it. To be honest, I think there are people I've worked with in the BBC and ITV and Sky. Some of them I might guess their political persuasion, others not so much. But let's look at Andrew Neil. As you say, he's the chairman of the spectator. It's a writer center magazine.
00:28:27
Speaker
He's a man that's come from business and from journalism and who doesn't really hide his own perspective. But does he deliver impartial, valuable interviews of the highest order? Or has he had a track record of doing that? Absolutely. So, you know, people on the left in Britain object to Andrew Neill because he's on the right, you know, so therefore he can't be fair. But people, everyone's got a perspective, but it's how they execute the job itself. And Andrew Neill is, you know,
00:28:55
Speaker
It's a living example of that and exemplifies it. And the same, I would say, is true of people who are regarded as left of center. If they're a good political interviewer, they're not interested in that. They're interested in the truth. Some journalists are not as good as others as leaving those views behind the door, and some aren't even asked to at different broadcasters. So I think that's how I... I don't know if I answered your question, but that's how I approach that.
00:29:21
Speaker
I think that answers part of it and I agree in theory. The thought that has crossed my mind is that there are more obvious signs of bias and they could be, you know, I mentioned Kerry O'Brien at the start of the interview. He's made no bones about the fact that he is left of center.
00:29:37
Speaker
Andrew Neale similarly, you know, is right of center and you're aware of those biases. And in some respects, they are less dangerous because they're out in the open and people know where those presenters are coming from. There are more subtle and insidious forms of bias. So it could be how frequently you interview one side of politics relative to the other. It could be which topics you choose to talk about with specific people.
00:30:01
Speaker
How you frame particular stories can have a huge impact on how they're perceived. What practical steps can journalists and editors, I suppose, take to guard against those more insidious forms of bias if the objective is the search for truth?
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I think when it comes to that kind of more complicated issue, I think it should be a product of the kind of interrogating of the subject you go through when you're preparing for the interview. Otherwise, you end up with people who just
00:30:34
Speaker
For example, I remember being back at the BBC once, back in the early parts of 2010 when the Conservative government came in, and we were going to interview people about education policy. The general approach of people in the room one day was that we obviously needed to interrogate how bad an idea free schools are. These were schools that were taken outside local authority control, they have much more autonomy,
00:31:00
Speaker
And I remember saying, well, why do we come at it from the perspective that they're a bad thing? I mean, we need to come at it from a perspective, which is we want to test whether they're effective or not. How do we know whether they're successful or not? Can you explain to me why this would be a good idea rather than this is a really, really bad idea? How dare you introduce it? So that, but that, all I'm saying is that, that actually flows out of a kind of environment you create as an editor, which is open.
00:31:27
Speaker
and on guard to the tendency of people to fall into a particular perspective about particular issues. It's part of the job to say, well, let's come at it from a completely different perspective.
00:31:41
Speaker
So that's my answer today. You need to be vigilant for it. And I think I say in the book, in terms of the BBC, there's a lot of talk about significant individuals coming from the right who are powerful in the BBC or have been, or people leaving the BBC to go and work for the Conservative Party. But as the sort of centre of gravity of the organisation, I felt when I worked there,
00:32:04
Speaker
was actually sort of left leaning in a kind of soft left sort of way. And so I found it was important to just try and disrupt that a bit. And actually when you do, people are like, oh yeah, of course we're being impartial and they realize what they're doing and then you get a more successful outcome. Yeah, that's really interesting. That conscious awareness of it, I think is a really important point. I want to get your thoughts on misinformation and disinformation, which are two of the buzzwords of our time in media.
Countering misinformation in media
00:32:30
Speaker
the UK and Australia are both grappling with how do you deal with misinformation and disinformation. In Australia, we've had a referendum recently where misinformation was a alleged reason that was put forward by the yes side as why potentially the no side won.
00:32:47
Speaker
there is going to be an Australia looming battle over misinformation bills and government regulation of speech, particularly online. Similarly in the UK, the online safety bill is one example of where there is attempts being made to try and regulate speech. My question, I'm sure you're not as familiar with the Australian context, but more on principle. Where do you stand on the principle of regulating misinformation or disinformation?
00:33:14
Speaker
I kind of have to keep coming back to the book really on this stuff. So let me think. I'll be agnostic on the question of regulation of it, but I think it's obviously a challenge and I think the most powerful period of that challenge in the UK came in the Brexit referendum.
00:33:32
Speaker
when, you know, what actually we had, we had both sides saying things that were, that were sort of partial, not really true, didn't really stand up to scrutiny, and ended up having an argument about things that were fake or lies or whatever you want to call it, rather than a fundamental argument about the actual subjects of what would happen if we left the EU. So I think, so if we look, when we look back on that, I think we can say that that was not the finest hour of political journalism in the UK, because we allowed ourselves to sort of be
00:34:02
Speaker
driven, and I think this is understandable, but it looks like a mistake in retrospect, driven by the campaigns that boil down complex issues to slogans on the back of a bus, on the side of a bus, or elsewhere. And this is both sides, by the way. So we were sort of led by that particular
00:34:19
Speaker
narrative rather than taking an independent step back and trying to assess the veracity or otherwise of both perspectives. We were just led by the nose by them. I think that's been the most prominent example in the book that I cover about things that simply aren't true, that ended up becoming common currency. I'm not sure that really answers your question.
00:34:41
Speaker
No, it does, but I think it also raises a follow-up question, which is, if those journalists didn't have the powers of scrutiny to go beyond the slogans and beyond the campaign messaging, which has been the traditional role of journalists, does that suggest that the quality of journalists is getting worse in the UK?
00:34:58
Speaker
I think what it is, is referendums, they only come around, I don't know how often they've happened in Australia, I know there's been a recent one, but the last referendum, there was the referendum in Scotland for independence, but the last national UK referendum of any note would have been the one about the EU back in the 70s. So I don't think
00:35:18
Speaker
It seems to me, in retrospect, it wasn't the bad journalists, but it was like we're used to covering election campaigns. There's these parties who are pursuing a particular narrative that they've invented and we follow it because it's the battle between the parties. The problem with that is that if they're both bullshitting you, then where's the person who put their hand up and say that this is bullshit because they're both doing it? In other words, again, in retrospect, I don't particularly
00:35:47
Speaker
I was there and I was doing a particular show and I looked back and I was dreading it. I went back to these programs to think of the ones I made. Actually, I must say, I would say this, but I was pretty pleased with how we did it because we did call this stuff out. But the overall drive of it was a bit like an election campaign. I'm not sure that's the way to do it. I think there's lessons learned from that. Whenever one of these comes again,
00:36:10
Speaker
I'd hope that there would be a different approach to that, more of an adjudication on truth. But it will come back to your points, though. You see, the trouble is, if you try to adjudicate the truth in something so complicated and so partisan and so passionately felt, then people challenge, they challenge your adjudication, or they challenge the possibility of any adjudication, really. The adjudication becomes impossible if there's no common ground on what the kind of parameters of the adjudication should be, if you see what I mean.
00:36:41
Speaker
And that's your point about subtle bias. It's not to say it's not actually legitimate. But how do you ever settle a question then? Maybe you can't.
00:36:50
Speaker
I agree entirely and I think you've seen this phenomenon play out with fact checking units that a lot of media organizations have now where they've gone from checking facts, things that can be objectively true or untrue to what I would call contestable opinions. I think a lot of the time if you see in Australia and ABC fact checking unit, the BBC fact checking unit, they're really looking at something which could be a contestable opinion. And in Australia, a lot of the debate
00:37:19
Speaker
A lot of the things that were called misinformation, in my view, were predictions about what would happen in the future if a referendum was to pass or to fail. I think it's really tricky, but I think this thing comes back to your whole book, which is, I think it is the role of really good journalists to tease out where that truth is. I think that is the role of the media, and I think that's the role of hopefully a really educated public.
00:37:42
Speaker
It is murky waters when the government potentially is playing that role. I want to finish on the future of TV journalism, which is where you have spent your career. It is your passion. We live in an age where TV journalism is declining. Sorry, TV viewership, I should say, is declining. Gen Z attention spans perhaps less than previous generations. Social media is made for soundbites. It's not made for long-form forensic interviewing. Does political journalism have a future?
Future of political journalism
00:38:11
Speaker
Yes, it has to have a future. Absolutely, it has to have a future. In fact, for all these reasons, it's more important than ever that it has a future. One thing I want to say, just to pick up on the point you were making there about around contestability and around the most important thing, and the thing I find most depressing about my experience, largely in interactions on social media down the years, in recent years as a kind of editor, was there's a mindset amongst people
00:38:36
Speaker
They're regarded as bias or offensive in some way, the mere presence of people on television who disagree with them. They've lost somehow the passion and the welcoming towards debate. For example, I'm forever, even now, and I'm not even there anymore, I get attacked for
00:39:01
Speaker
the Tufton Street. This is basically think tanks in the UK. There's a street called Tufton Street where a number of them are located. These tend to be think tanks on the right of politics. There's lots of conversation about the fact they're not transparent about their funding. And I understand that's an issue, and I think it has to be referred to.
00:39:20
Speaker
But these people do not want these people on the telly. OK, they do not want to hear from them, despite the fact that if you want to argue against them and win the argument, you can't do it unless they're there. And secondly, they're clearly influential people and ideas in the country that you live in. So why would you want to not hear from them with all the provisors? You might need to talk about the funding question, etc.
00:39:42
Speaker
And I'll come to all that because that's the sort of environment we're in. And so there are contestable questions, but we all need to embrace debate. It's like in the UK, we had around the trans debate. So we did an interview with Beth Brigham Beyond, with Stonewall, which was a very sort of powerful interview where we
00:40:03
Speaker
examine some of these arguments around the trans rights. Now, one of the problems I think, whatever you think about what should happen to trans people in terms of whether they need a certificate or whether it might be, there was a policy among some in that movement to not have debates. No debate was part of it because we can't debate our existence, they said.
00:40:24
Speaker
Now, in fact, it's turned out that that's ill-served that community, because the issues have become much more contested and blown up and difficult because there was a reluctance to have a proper debate about it. So I just want to make a plea to anyone to think it's a good thing. I used to say that people you disagree with will sometimes be on TV, and that is something you should be glad about. So anyway, it came to my mind, I wanted to talk about that point. In terms of political journalism and social media,
00:40:52
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the content on social media that's kind of political is derived from TV output. So I would argue a long-form political interview, which may be watched by, in the UK, say 700,000 or 800,000 people if it's on the right time of day,
00:41:07
Speaker
may reach many, many more by being cut up and served in different ways on social media. And that's fine because it's only the process of sitting down for that long that you get to the sorts of content that might actually be nourishing and valuable that would then be worth sending out there on social media. You'll get better stuff.
00:41:28
Speaker
We only got the five C thing with Boris Johnson only went sort of viral because we took the time to prepare for it and the time to do the interview. So these two things actually coexist in a simpatico together. If you have serious journalism, then actually that will produce good social media and better social media than seven minute interviews where someone's
00:41:47
Speaker
that the interviewer is just trying to get some kind of cheap headline and the interviewee is trying to say nothing and then maybe it's a car crash because one of them fails to do what they set out to do. That's on social media. There you go. There's nothing in it. Whereas I'm saying serious political journalism on television can serve social media well by producing better content.
00:42:08
Speaker
You've watched political communicators for your entire adult life as you were growing up as well. What characteristics do the best political communicators share? Are you talking about interviewers or interviewees? I'd actually like to get your perspectives on both, so let's start with interviewers. The best ones are
00:42:33
Speaker
They come in through very well prepared and they're curious, they want to know the truth, they're not pursuing warm agenda over another, so they're interested in that. They listen. You need to listen to what the interviewee says. It's only if you listen to what they say that you might detect stuff that's there that's not just the parroting of the slogans.
00:42:55
Speaker
Courage, you need to speak the truth about what you're hearing. So like I said earlier, if someone is just going through this bizarre process of speaking in a bizarre way and saying nothing, you call that out and you have the courage to do so. So you need to be fearless. I mean, Beth Rigby is fearless, I would say, and she's an excellent interviewer. But also, look, I would like a culture which Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher used to have, which was it wasn't conflict necessarily. It was an environment where there was intellectual curiosity about what the other person was saying.
00:43:24
Speaker
At least until the final interview. At least until the final interview, which is, well, that's a whole big story. I mean, I'd love to tell it, but that final interview was a different thing. But before that, they had a conversation on air. And I've been reviewing even further, going back into the archive and looking at that material even further. And it is just extraordinary that we see in real time the evolution of her public position on the trade unions or whatever, because he teases out of her a willingness to go a little bit further. And it's that curiosity
00:43:53
Speaker
And like I said about debate, we should, people involved in politics and involved in political media should love ideas and they should love debate. And that's what the best political interviewers do, as well as, look, let's be honest, there is an element of blood sport in this, right?
00:44:07
Speaker
you do enjoy the drama, you enjoy the coup de grace, you enjoy the moments of unrepeatable kind of magic. And that's one of the things about TV is that TV is magic. It can be magic. There can be lots of fairly mundane stuff and then there'll be magic. So I'm not high-minded enough to say I'm just interested in ideas and intellectual thoughts. I'm interested in drama too. But they come together, and Margaret Thatcher and Brian Walden, they came together.
00:44:31
Speaker
I think we can cover off interviewees in another podcast because I think that's a lovely note to end the conversation on. Rob, why is this lone bastard lying to me? It really was one of my favorite books of the year as a media and politics nerd. It was just deliciously funny. And the way that you tell stories like Walden and Thatcher and then Blair and
00:44:52
Speaker
and all these great characters in such a lovely witty way for revealing these truths around the importance of holding politicians to account. I thought it was brilliant. Congratulations on the book. Congratulations on a wonderful career in political journalism and looking forward to chatting again. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Cheers, Will.
00:45:09
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.