PRESENT TENSE:WATCHING NICK Clegg and David Cameron's joint press conference live on Wednesday, you could see the TV reporters sitting in the front row. Their cameramen filmed them as they asked their questions, which were posed in a way that was as much about performance as content, so that they could be edited and displayed on the evening news. "Look at me," they were really saying, "I'm asking a question. And I'm doing it with a flourish."
It turned out that each of them asked vaguely ludicrous questions, the substance of which was overshadowed by the limelight hogging. But they still included them in their bulletins. Nick Robinson of the BBC delivered his question with such vivacity you had to replay it to realise it was daft. Cameron actually suggested as much in his reply, but that bit was edited from later reports, left on the cutting-room floor as all bad takes should be.
Adam Boulton of Sky News asked a particularly contrived and unanswerable question. Then again, it had been a strange week for Boulton, just as it had been for his colleague, Kay Burley. Both gave excruciating examples of how the theatrics of news reporting can descend into hamminess. In the showbusiness of television and – to an extent – radio, there will always be many actors, but each gave a full demonstration of how dangerous it is when commentators see themselves as principal players.
If you haven’t seen Boulton’s argument with Alastair Campbell, put their names into YouTube and enjoy watching the Labour spin doctor expertly push Boulton into a finger-jabbing, beetroot-impersonating, “don’t-tell-me-what-I-think” rant, which ends with the Sky man declaring: “I actually care about my country!” Burley, meanwhile, shouted down an anti-coalition protester until he started gibbering. She ended it: “Why don’t you just go home?”
Boulton’s performance was genuinely hilarious, all the more so because it’s a relief to know it’s not our news channel, even as it pipes itself into our homes and blinds us from ginormous screens at Dublin’s train stations.
This is, as we already know, the era of the adversarial interview. It is long-established, this Paxmanisation of news coverage, with presenters apparently visualising political interviewees tied to a wooden chair at a bare table beneath a single swinging light bulb.
Richard Downes, for example, left Morning Irelandthis week to become RTÉ's Washington Correspondent.
Downes is a good reporter, but as a radio presenter he was a practitioner of the “impress me” school of interview. It often seemed as if his default attitude was impatience. If you had taken a drink every time he completed someone else’s sentence, you would have fallen off the breakfast bar before 8am.
There was also a great sense of cynicism. If he had been interviewing a sick child you might have expected him to cut across with a sigh: “Well, you say you need a new kidney. But why should we believe you?”
There often seemed to be an element of performance about all this, as there is with so many broadcasters now. By leaving for the States, Downes will arrive in the Broadway of news, whose influence has been profound. He will replace Charlie Bird, whose own character and presentational style proved so impactful at home but was lost on the bigger stage.
It’s not that well-delivered truculence can’t be a winning tactic. Vincent Browne deploys it to often excellent effect, as he and his guests try to match each other’s jolly infuriation. But his programme is personality-based, far more in keeping with the US news channels, the Fox News types, where the name over the door clearly warns all those who enter there.
There is a fine balance, though, between the showbusiness of broadcasting, and the ability to entertain and drag out some insight from whatever party spokesman has been thrust forward to defend some policy or other. During the aftermath of the British election, several presenters displayed irritation that went beyond the norm. David Dimbleby appeared vaguely dismayed for much of the BBC’s coverage.
Even Paxman had a moment that went beyond his trademark tetchiness, ending one edition of Newsnight with the line that Britain had “made a bollocks of” putting an X on the ballot paper. The electorate had done no such thing. The language was not offensive (as many claimed it was), but you could argue that the attitude was. At that point, Paxman really needed to get off the stage.