Spin, rottweilers and the virtual swingometer, Bill Hagerty - British Journalism Review Vol. 16, No. 1, 2005

Bill Hagerty

Spin, rottweilers and the virtual swingometer

British Journalism Review
Vol. 16, No. 1, 2005, pages 13-23

Contents - Vol 16, No 1, 2005

Editorial - A matter of honours 3

Nick Pollard - Diary of a disaster 7

Election 2005

Bill Hagerty - Spin, rottweilers and the virtual swingometer 13

Ivor Gaber - TV: dumb and dumber? 24

Kevin Maguire - When poacher turns gamekeeper 29

Clive Soley - The public is sick of us both 35

Emily Bell - End of the offline? 41

Steve Tatham - Al-Jazeera: can it make it here? 47

W Leon Smith - When principles stampede the herd 53

Suzanne Franks - The neglect of Africa 59

John Coulter - Moral reason never to tell 65

Kelvin MacKenzie - Why Paul Dacre's worth his million 70

BOOK REVIEWS

Harold Evans on Ken Auletta 75

Bryan Wharton on the BPPA 79

Julia Langdon on Jon Snow 81

Charles Wheeler on Greg Dyke 83

Philip Jacobson on Stuart Allan/Barbie Zelizer 85

The way we were 46

In a special section devoted to the forthcoming general election, the British Journalism Review examines the roles of broadcasting, the press and politicians in the high-profile climax of the democratic process. To begin, Bill Hagerty interviewed three prominent television journalists who will be in the front line of the BBC's election coverage. Andrew Marr, political editor of the BBC, began as a reporter on The Scotsman and eventually edited The Independent before moving into television. Presenter and interviewer Jeremy Paxman worked as a reporter on Tonight and Panorama before joining Newsnight in 1989. Peter Snow, Newsnight's first anchor and a co-presenter for the BBC on election night, covered his first general election, as a reporter for ITN, in 1964.

Unleashing Humphrys or Paxo is a democratic service — Andrew Marr

The campaigns

The Labour Party is half-looking at making this an entirely virtual election. They're saying they won't have a battle bus and that they won't have regular London press conferences, presumably because everything will be done remotely and they will provide pictures that we'll just splice together. It's not going to happen like that, but that's what they would like to happen. Most elections follow a fairly similar routine and I'm sceptical about the possibilities of the parties breaking that routine: early-morning press conferences that try to set the agenda for the day, the party leaders scattering across the country by battle bus, plane or helicopter, the photoop moments that provide the television images for the day. Then, hopefully, desperately, we get the unexpected, the story that just starts running and gets slightly out of everyone's control – whether it's Prescott's punch or Jennifer's ear – that's what we're all looking for. An election without those moments won't catch fire, obviously.

We are dependent on moving images, we are completely driven by, say, great shots of Prescott's punch – how many cameras were there, do we have it from two angles or not, how quickly can we get it on air, how many times do you slo-mo? – they are the things that really dominate. It's quite difficult, I think, for someone like me, particularly this time around, when my job effectively is going to be to say each day, “What's the dominant story?” [The personal rift between] Gordon and Tony is going to be one of the most watched aspects of this election. How often are they together, what's their body language like, how do they respond together to questions? – television can do things in showing how people are really behaving that print can't do so well.

I think it was during the last election, when they were being asked about tax plans and whether they would raise National Insurance, that I and Nick Robinson [of ITN] and [BBC colleague] Mark Mardell picked out that they started to twiddle their pencils desperately at the press conference. You could see as the questions got tougher, the pencils started to go faster and faster. It was an extremely good way of showing these were people under extreme pressure and very worried about the precise words they were using in answer to the questions.

If it's true that people have been turning off watching politics and reading about politics over the past five years, then I certainly think this is because we have been giving people too much personality at the expense of real policy. And the biggest problem we've got now and until after polling day, really, is how to keep people interested in an election they have constantly been told is over before it has started. Spin hasn't ever quite gone away and everyone will be spinning at this election. But we are all paid quite a lot of money to see through it and be robust about it and take the phone calls and tell people to get stuffed if that's what we have to do. It shouldn't cause us too many problems.

I think it is going to be a confrontational election, because everybody's got such a lot riding on it. If the Tories don't revive well in this election, the future of the Tory party as it's currently constituted will be something people will be talking about afterwards, let alone Michael Howard's future. They need to gain a fair chunk of seats to show they are on the way back. The Lib Dems could come back with ten more seats – fine, but nobody would get really excited about it – but they also could achieve a real breakthrough and they are very well aware of that.

The Lib Dems are, to put it politely, hard, tough fighters. Behind the bonhomie, a pretty savage campaign is going on all round the country. As for Labour, people say they can afford almost to be complacent. But, assuming Labour win, the nature of the majority is terribly important and will have a huge influence on the Labour leadership succession, which we know is coming, and also therefore on the enthusiasm or otherwise with which they go into a European Constitution referendum. There's an awful lot riding on it for the Labour Party.

The polls

We won't get excited about a single poll. We'll wait until there is a cluster all showing the same thing before we put polls high up a running order – even if they're our own polls, I think. For one thing, it's a sort of degradation of the political conservation if we talk only about polls without talking about the policies and what the different parties would do. Polls are interesting but it is incredibly dangerous to let them dominate. If we're going to have a quite low and severely differential turnout, then the job of the pollsters in accurately predicting what the real voting will be is even harder.

Having said all of that, everybody in the game knows that it requires a sharp narrowing of the gap between the Tories and the Labour Party, or between the Lib Dems and the Tories, to really set the thing alight, and it is perfectly possible, therefore, that this election will be one in which a cluster of polls provides the turning point sometime during the campaign. Say a moment when suddenly the Tories and the Lib Dems are within a couple of points of one another, or the Labour lead, for all the pre-election polls, is down to two points. That's when the whole thing will take off and the real excitement will come in. Without that, it's going to be very hard – I'll do my best to explain to people that it's not dull, of course, but it really has to be a dog race.

The rottweilers

When it comes to interviews, you have to be able to go confrontational. When you've got politicians who simply won't answer a direct question, you have at least to be able to say, on air, I've asked you a very straightforward and simple question – everybody listening and watching will know that you have refused to answer what was a perfectly reasonable question... You have to be able to do that but it's not the only club in the bag. Humphrys or Paxo unleashed, on the right target, at the right moment, is a democratic service – and also just the best adrenalinepumping entertainment you can have sometimes.

If you do it all the time, it's as boring as hell. There are politicians where the best way of interviewing them is simply to say: “Can you tell me what's on your mind, Margaret Thatcher?” And sit back – and it all comes out. Other interviewees are a bit nervous and have to be cajoled and helped – it's whatever technique is going to get the most interesting and honest answers. So there's the rottweiler at one end of the scale and there's the terribly gentle sofa interview that puts people off-guard and produces something unexpected. And the BBC has to do all those things at the same time. I was listening to Ruth Kelly on Radio 4 and she was asked two or three really relevant, important, clear and direct questions by Jim Naughtie and just didn't answer them – she went straight back to the script she'd been told to deliver on the Today programme come what may.

The press

I think we are going through a time when the press is going to look more varied than it has ever before. At one end you've got The Independent, going full-frontal viewspaper and day by day doing heavily viewspaper front pages. I find it very hard to believe that in an election campaign they won't carry on doing that, although it will be very interesting whom they do it for, of course. At the other end you've got Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian, who's clearly decided that it's all gone too far and actually people don't want that sort of thing anymore. He's on his way to a much more austere and traditionalist form of news. I suspect that the Barclay brothers' influence on the Telegraph will push it that way too. Will The Times be able to resist the series of great scoops the Government will give it? I suspect not. But I think some papers will go out of their way to be more austere than we might expect, while others will be at the other end of the spectrum.

After The Sun's [sympathetic] comments on Michael Howard's immigration policy, they're not going to be able to dead-parrot him. I don't think The Sun will necessarily come out pro-Tory this time around, but I guess it is going to be more helpful to the Tories than it was at the last election. I don't think they will go all the way – Murdoch won't want to go with somebody he doesn't think is going to win.

The future

I suspect that the period after the election is going to be more interesting politically than the period before. The referendum on the European Constitution will be the hardest thing in living memory for any BBC political editor and team to cover, because the passions aroused are so great and because the questions of bias and balance are an awful lot more complicated and matter more in some respects.

Parliament has taken a huge battering over the past decade or so, partly because of these huge majorities that have taken some of the real importance away from the chamber. The unfashionable point I would make is that the quality – the actual raw quality – of MPs is quite poor now. If you look at it in a cynical way – the poor material rewards and what's done to them and their families and their private lives – then it's not one of the obvious glittering prizes in life to be an MP. If you were coming out of college or university now and you were very bright and very ambitious and really wanted to make your way in the world, would you try to become an MP, earning £56,000 a year or whatever it is? [It's £57,485]. Almost all the people reporting at Westminster on the MPs don't only earn more than the MPs, they earn more than the ministers too. And they have an easier life.

So I think there is an issue about the talent-pool qualities and it filters back to us – people ask why people like me, Nick Robinson, and Adam Boulton are on television so much. Well, it's partly because MPs are so poor – remarkably poor sometimes – in dealing with the television world and speaking fluent human. That's just incompetence. If they can't learn to communicate on television, then they are the worse for it as politicians. There's a bit of pressure from the press because of stuff on their private lives, but it's up to Parliament to pay them a bit more, too. The idea of cutting the number of MPs and paying them more may be a good one – maybe you'd get better people going into politics.

As for my future, I haven't taken any decisions about what I'll do after the election. I keep reading that I am going to be offered this job or that job and wait optimistically, but no one comes around and says we want you to do this or that. I think a lot of the stories [about me] that appear in the press come from generous-spirited and helpful colleagues who are hoping they might get my job when I'm gone!

It wasn't the media that invented spin — Jeremy Paxman

The campaigns

I don't know enough about how election campaigns were covered 30 to 40 years ago, but my recollection as a spectator was that they were less fought out in the media than they seem to be now. Today you see these public meetings that are not public meetings at all – they are entirely bogus events, which are there to convey the impression that the leader is a man of the people. They're nothing to do with the proper hustings of the 1930s, 40s and 50s that one reads about. My first journalistic involvement in an election was when, as a cub reporter, I was sent sent to Ian Paisley's count in Ballymena in one of the 1974 elections. Then I went to South Down when Enoch Powell stood there. I was absolutely terrified of him, but his wife told me, “Everybody is. But he's such a pussycat.” I was at the count in Neil Kinnock's constituency when Labour lost in 1992 – I was part of the heartless battery of people in the darkness, shouting questions at him as he got into a car for London, realising he'd lost it all. Since 1997 I've been in the election-night studio and will be again this time.

Where Newsnight is concerned, we try to discern what the important things are likely to be during the course of the campaign and then try to find various vehicles for doing them. In one election, 1997 I think, we did what basically were long pieces of scripted drama – “Memos to the minister” – examining what an incoming foreign secretary or chancellor of the exchequer would have to deal with. The most entertaining thing we did during the last election was sending Jeremy Vine from John O'Groats to Land's End in a completely clapped-out minibus. It seems to me you need to find a way somehow of getting beyond this hermetically-sealed little bubble within which most of the election is fought.

We've gone from genuine public meetings to fake public meetings – the great debates are taking place in television studios and elsewhere. You look at some of these “public” events and they are not representative of a crosssection of the population, there are people who are there by invitation only, people who won't be too troublesome. What they are really about is creating an idiom in which the leader is seen as somehow being an ordinary bloke. We try to find a way of getting back to some sense that this actually matters, because it is the one time when the fate of politicians is in the hands of the ordinary citizen.

Is there too much political spin? Well, I simply don't believe we invent it. And we're not obliged to listen to it or believe it. After all, it wasn't the media going around creating the photo-opportunity where Margaret Thatcher is cradling a calf, or riding on a tank, or – my favourite one – Tony Blair appearing at peace talks after the Good Friday agreement and saying, “This is not a time for sound bites, but (...pause for effect...) I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.” That was just priceless. It's not journalists who invent all of that and if politicians are saying that journalistic spin is damaging the democratic process, I simply don't understand.

Is there a lack of respect for politics and politicians? Well, I believe politics matters, but has there ever been a time when politicians have been highly respected? I agree it's disappointing that people seem disenchanted with the political process. But there are lots of reasons for this. When it comes to it, what can a government do? Actually, events conspire to make any manifesto hard to realise. And unexpected things happen... the Iraq war is a good case in point – did anyone at the time of the last election think we might be involved in that? And so much power has shifted away from national governments to international organisations, whether it be the EU, or NATO, or the UN or whatever. And global business, too – can a government stop a multi-national corporation from, say, moving its production from Tyneside to India? And then we, the public, put them in an impossible position. We say: “Go on, make us some promises” and then we get pissed off when they can't realise those promises. We want the new Jerusalem, but we don't want to pay more taxes for it. So I don't necessarily buy the arguments that there is something wrong [with the democratic process]. If there is, then clearly the media have to accept that some small portion of the blame attaches to us. But there are much bigger organic things at work, which are much more interesting to examine than whether the way in which politics is reported is going to make people more engaged with the process.

The polls

Everybody does 'em. The journalists do 'em and the parties do 'em. If they're all showing roughly the same thing then one takes them more seriously than if they are all showing different things. But the last election I did was the American [Presidential] election in November and all the early exit-polling data on the night – it wasn't confined to media organisations, the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters were both producing the same stuff – was suggesting that Bush was going to get at the very least a bloody nose. And it was totally wide of the mark.

I make no claim that polls influence how people will vote. As for influencing people not to vote, well I've heard that said but there are plenty of other reasons why people don't vote and they are not necessarily all bad reasons. Personally, I think it's part of the deal – if you live in society, you pay your taxes and you vote. That's an essential civic obligation. Although on the whole I am in favour of the State getting out of people's lives, I wouldn't have a problem with a system that said voting was compulsory. People have died for this right and I think it matters. However, does it necessarily follow that low turnouts are a sign of a sickness in society? I think you could argue that people have plenty of other things to do with their lives and if they think the outcome is a forgone conclusion, they may think it not very important. Or it may mean they are quite happy with their lot in life. Even though I think you should – must – vote, a low turnout doesn't necessarily indicate some rot in our society.

The rottweilers

Cynicism, as the word is commonly used, is not appropriate. Scepticism certainly is. I certainly would not attempt to defend everything one ever does – I'm sure one makes mistakes, mistakes in emphasis and understanding and persistence and so on. However, I think that if you have someone in for an interview, your job is to explore what it is they're saying and to test the arguments. If that means not taking a load of flannel, so be it. It happens in such a small minority of interviews. There are some politicians – I won't ruin their career prospects by naming them – who actually will turn down the opportunity to go to other places where they will just get two minutes and: “What do you want to say to the nation today?” They prefer to have the slightly more feisty interchange they'll get here, where they will be asked direct questions and will have to give direct answers. You just hope the viewers and listeners and their representatives in the BBC management see [criticism from politicians] for what it is.

The press

Can one see the same set of circumstances reported entirely differently in two daily newspapers? Yes, one can and one does – but is that damaging? I don't think people are stupid. How does one judge these things? How do you sense public feeling? For example, there is an anxiety in this country about asylum seekers – I certainly do not seek to justify some of the newspaper campaigns that have been run, but one does hear people talking about it and these are not people who are simply victims of Daily Mail propaganda.

Blair went out of his way to court the Murdoch press, but recent research showed that the effect of newspaper endorsements, a favourable press in elections, was something like – I'm plucking the figure out of the back of my mind – one per cent, or something like that. I don't believe that governments lose elections because of newspapers. Neither do I believe that front pages like The Sun's “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?” would have been run had Neil Kinnock had been leading a party that was ready for government. When there's a tide running, even if all the newspapers were to say something different they couldn't alter the outcome.

The future

We've heard so many times that a particular election will bring about a huge sea change in British politics. I think I'll wait and see. I think politics matters and I enjoy it and I personally enjoy election campaigns – I think they're jolly good fun. But the phoney war we're in now is, I think, frustrating and a bit irritating. It's an odd system when a prime minister can just choose when he wants to have his election. I don't see why we shouldn't have fixed-term parliaments and indeed maybe term limits on prime ministers. But I can see that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Ideology has simply evaporated — Peter Snow

The campaign

My role has remained much the same over the years – to explain as spectacularly and clearly as one can the results and what's actually happening, and, even more importantly, as the computer graphics get more sophisticated, the turn-out and the marginal seats – the hows and whys as well as the whats. The first time we ever saw computer graphics used properly in an election was in February 1974, when I was with ITN. They were simple, but people were simply stunned – it looked like the space age. At it turned out, we had only about six months to prepare for October 1974, but those graphics were an absolute stunner and from then on it's always been very exciting.

There have been two main changes in elections over the years. To begin with, the evaporation of ideology and the sense that we are choosing between three managements teams, who, broadly speaking, are going down the same furrow although tinkering around at the edges a bit – unlike the 1960s and even the 80s when there was a really serious choice to make which brought people out to vote. The other is that some sort of disillusion set in, not just with the meat of political discussion, but with politics as a whole, with the way the country is run. So one of my jobs on the night is to dig out the people who didn't vote and find out why they are so turned off by politicians. One reason is that they don't think it matters any more, another is that there's a Labour Government with a big majority and it doesn't look like losing, so there's no point in voting.

Journalistically, there a sort of feeling that, Oh dear, this election could be rather like the last – we had the same feeling in 2001. When that happens I immediately get more enthusiastic than before, because the challenge is to make it more exciting on the air. In 2001 we had a real problem and this time there could be a rather similar outcome. Tactical voting is something we'll be looking out for, but illustrating all these things is the key thing – how do you illustrate tactical voting, how do you illustrate [people] failing to turn out to vote?

In the European election in June 2004 and during the American Presidential election we took a leap forward in virtual reality. You can do anything in three dimensions all around you and we are going to be in a virtual world this time, producing even more spectacular graphics than we've had before. We are going to have a virtual swingometer and a virtual map of the country, and [a virtual] House of Commons. It presents a huge challenge to the presenter, I may say, because in a virtual world it's just simply a grey-lined studio – you can't see anything at all. So I shall be in this rather large studio with a great curtain all around me, knowing that the viewers are looking at the most wonderful pictures with me standing there trying not to look lost.

The polls

In 1992 the BBC poll suggested that there would be a hung parliament, with the Tories just slightly ahead – fortunately we got the winner right! Then the Basildon [Tory] result came in and I remember pointing to the little blue seat that should have gone red if Labour were going to win, and saying: “That little blue dot may indicate the polls got this election wrong.” But our poll got the last one [2001] almost absolutely right.Polling has always seemed to me to be a compete miracle – that by talking to 1,000 people you can get some idea of what the nation thinks. I know a mathematician would say it's not, but to me it remains a miracle and terribly useful. Yes, it goes wrong. It has a natural sampling error of 2 or 3 per cent, which actually explains a lot of the errors the polls come up with. I'm the first person to say don't be unfair to the pollsters – we can't blame them for getting wrong forecasts for more than a day or two ahead. Where they come in for stick is when they come up with forecasts on polling day morning that are really quite wrong. The idea is absurd that in an intelligent country you should ban polls because they might give an inaccurate view of what the country thinks. As for swaying the vote, I hope people are intelligent enough to look at a poll and make up their own minds. Anyway, it's information that people are quite entitled to have. Why shouldn't they know that Labour is apparently heading for defeat, or the Tories or the Liberal Democrats are doing very badly – and why should that not affect the way that they vote? Why shouldn't they have the luxury of saying: “Oh dear, my party is doing very badly, I'd better support them.”? Or: “My party's doing very well, I won't bother to go to the polling station.”? People aren't stupid.

The press

Are newspapers more partisan now than there were in the past? I'm not sure that they are. It was quite clear in the 1960s and 70s which party each paper supported and I think it is rather less clear now. In this less ideological world I think the papers find it more difficult to stick with a particular political party. The comment in newspapers is as colourful and idiosyncratic and as forceful as it ever was, perhaps more so, but I don't really know that the press or broadcasting can be blamed for turning people off politics. I think it goes deeper than that. I suspect you have to turn it back to the politicians themselves rather than simply blaming the press for mocking politicians, which they always have done, of course. To use the words fair or unfair about the press is a bit silly but I think it would be unfair to suggest it is only the press that has turned us off politicians. I don't think there's been a fundamental change in newspapers; certainly I don't think any of them are so irresponsible that I won't read them.

The future

After every election I think I'll go off and farm or something, but I never really think more than six months ahead, so maybe I'll be around for the next one and the one after that. The fact is I feel no less involved with or enthusiastic about them than I have for the past 30 years. Where on earth will we be four years from now? You know, the cardboard swingometer that Bob Mackenzie used [when the device was first introduced] was so understandable that I sometimes half wonder to myself if we're not going overboard and whether in 20 or 30 years time we'll be back to the blackboard and a bit of chalk.

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