POLITICS: Manners maketh Paxman
Who do they think they are?
It was, as Kirsty Wark on Newsnight proper hastened to assure us, a great event. Earlier in the evening (9pm, BBC2), Jeremy Paxman ‘interviewed’ the Prime Minister in Gateshead, and was helped in this task by a studio audience of about two dozen people. These lucky tykes were permitted the great privilege of being allowed by the show’s host, Mr Paxman, to occasionally join him, at his direction of course, in the questioning of Mr Blair. The fruits of this encounter have been divided into two parts, with the questions relating to the coming war in Iraq shown tonight, and tomorrow evening, we’ll be served up Mr Blair’s answers to all other questions. Not one thing of interest emerged from this session, and the Prime Minister, equitable fellow that he is, emerged from it entirely unscathed. His reasons in granting this audience can only be guessed at, but the effrontery of the broadcast media, as exemplified by Mr Paxman and the rest of the Newsnight crew, can only but be marvelled at.
Ms. Wark told us (and more than once), that this was ‘the first time that the Prime Minister has had to defend himself in public, on television in front of a studio audience’. In truth, the Prime Minister has been ‘defending’ himself quite a lot recently, in public, and even in front of audiences still more illustrious than Jeremy Paxman. What, however, mattered, at least according to the scheme of news-worthiness that Newsnight evidently applies, was that the Prime Minister had finally been brought to book by the only court that matters: the one held in a Newsnight studio.
For of those of you who didn’t see this damp squib (headline news in the 10.30 Newsnight, though not, obviously, important enough in itself to have escaped the minority confines of BBC2 and been broadcast on BBC1) I really don’t have to tell you anything you can’t already guess. Jeremy Paxman was insufferably rude, constantly interrupting the Prime Minister throughout — the full, camp gamut of nostril-flaring and bouffant-wiggling was employed as the BBC news anchor repeatedly put the Prime Minister to rights on the great issues of the hour. Equally predictably, the Prime Minister lapped it up, and instead of muttering some manly oath along the lines of, ‘interrupt me again, and I’ll introduce that boom mike to your teeth, the long way’, smiled sweetly, and continued apace with whatever it was he was saying before Mr Paxman’s am-dram hammery inserted itself into the foreground of the screen.
It really ought to tell us, even the egos at Television Centre, something, that politicians are happy enough to put up with this abuse. The chief reason why frontline politicians are more than prepared to endure this condescension from television (and radio) journalists, is that they know precisely how little impact it all has. Far better to go through this pantomime with the puffed up presenters, than to find oneself in a process wherein dangerous questions could be asked, and where, worse still, complex and difficult agendas might be advanced. By collaborating in the debasement of the discussion of mass politics by the mass media, politicians do themselves the signal service of removing and reducing an external threat to their performance: each encounter of the sort that a Jeremy Paxman specialises in, simply reinforces the convenient dominance of slogans and cartoonish character-projection in politics as presented to the public. Instead of a democratic dialogue, in the manner, we were always taught, those priggish ancient Greeks favoured, we have what passes now, in contemporary Britain, for ‘high politics’.
When modern British politics ossified into its present form (Labour vs. Tory, with a rump Liberal party) in the 1920s, the most acute summary of this process reminds us that:
High politics was primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre . . . Political rhetoric was an attempt to provide new landmarks for the electorate. Political manoeuvred was designed to ensure that the right people provided them . . . Rhetoric was a form of exemplary utterance, an attempt at constructive teaching, an effort to persuade the new electorate to enter the thought-world inhabited by existing politicians. It was an attempt to secure acquiescence through words, a claim on the part of politicians who demanded it to speak to speak for the people and persuade them that they had the keys of whatever kingdom they thought it desirable to enter.
Think, if you’re a politician, how infinitely more convenient it is to address the electorate with baby-talk. This has been the great, pacifying achievement of television in its ‘coverage’ of politics in Britain: to ease, and sooth, and literally make dumb the people, with their shallow presentation of the art. Every vain, self-congratulatory emission from broadcast news that proclaims the rigour of their analysis, the very fear with which politicians dread their coming, tells us of nothing save the inordinately stupid vanity of the men and women involved. Politics in a democracy is essentially the art of getting away with it in front of the public, and the kindergarten approach foisted on politics by the BBC is thus of immense value to the political class, and them alone.
After poor, mad Tony Benn came back from Baghdad, one constant, jealous criticism from the television and radio hacks was, ‘we could have done it so much better — there’d have been no soft questions from us’. For you see, a BBC man out with Saddam would have been bound to ask the tricky questions, the questions that would have made the Iraqi president squirm, for isn’t that what they do to our own politicians each and very night? The answer to that question is, inescapably, ‘No. No they really don’t do that’. You don’t have to be a raving Marxist, merely a student of personal unpleasantry, to appreciate that there’s something fundamentally dubious with our media/political interface. Which is to say, if the broadcast journalists were in truth causing any substantial difficulties for the politicians they deign to allow into their studios, one of two things would have long ago happened: either the politicians would have sensibly started avoiding those studios, or, and still more certainly, a distinct froideur would have entered into the off-stage relations of the two groups.
The sheer, unadulterated cosiness that prevails between British journalists and British politicians tells a truth of its own: our politicians positively relish the mindless corruption offered up as entertainment by television and radio news. And they are right, by the light of their own self-interest, so to do.
From gimmicks like that patronising audience of ‘ordinary’ punters that the BBC had selected to act as chorus to Mr Paxman (and what was their actual point? were their questions simply on offer, in order to supply some of the emotional authenticity the BBC contends inarticulacy to be the sincere proof of?) to wonders like tie-less presenters, the form the reporting of politics has taken in the broadcast age is immeasurably to the detriment of democracy. This is not simply a matter of causing exasperated voters to scream at the screen, despairing of the empty modishness of the man, ‘Portillio, you complete and utter prick, wear a tie damn you!’ What it has done is to substitute poor, unintelligible instancy for well-rehearsed truth. What the players put across, now that the likes of Mr Paxman so daringly talk down Prime Ministers, and eschew that old-fashioned nonsense of conversational civility, and any backwards sense of place, is performance art, entirely disconnected from the reality of governing. That requires longer sentences and better sets to convey to the electorate, and for now, thanks foremost to the BBC, they are very much in the dark.
Kit Kildare, June 3, 2002 07:24 PM