Every time Laura Kuenssberg interviews anyone newsworthy, her goal is to generate "controversy" rather than shed light on a topic or, heaven forfend, produce a piece of journalism that might help demystify politics. Her interview with Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury on Sunday morning is a textbook example of her "method".
Asked about his presiding over child abuse scandals in the Church of England, Welby at length apologised for his inaction and supplied a series of excuses for not investigating allegations properly. Why use several sentences when an "I'm incompetent" would have done? But it was when Kuenssberg got round to the notorious serial child abuser John Smyth that the "trap" was sprung. She asked if Welby had "forgiven" Smyth.
The reply was so obvious that even ChatGPT would have got it right. With the caveats of "it's really a question for the survivors" and "I shouldn't be centred in this", he said yes. Because as a serving bishop Welby still has to pay public heed to the nostrums of Christianity, in which mercy and forgiveness are primary virtues. Kuennsberg knows this, knew he couldn't offer any other answer, and immediately following the end of the interview turned to her panel of pundits and Yvette Cooper and expressed faux astonishment that the former leading cleric of the Anglican Communion could forgive such a man. As night follows day, that was the headline on the BBC website (reproduced above) and across several newspaper sites.
Apart from the usual establishment biases, it's well known that Kuenssberg's approach to politics journalism involves two things. Gossip-mongering, which serves to distort how politics really works. And to make political weather at her interviewees' expense, provided they are outwith polite Westminster company (recall the "lapses" of the Corbyn interlude), or their career is on the skids. Welby had disgraced himself as Archbishop by, at best, not noticing the Church's problems with child abuse, and attracted even more opprobrium for his jokey valedictory speech in the Lords. It was therefore safe for Kuenssberg to reuse this has-been as a headline generator, and conveniently any outraged whipped up puts distance between his time at the heart of the establishment and the establishment itself.
Kuenssberg's "techniques" wouldn't pass muster on a hyper-local blog, let alone on BBC Sunday politics programming if gotchaism didn't serve the powers that be. The so-called concern for the truth is reduced to wrenches thrown into politicians' spin, but in the hands of mainstream broadcast journalism this is to dumb down public discourse about politics even further. Kuenssberg, for instance, is almost a virtuoso at teasing out the trifles and irrelevances. She might repeat well-worn criticisms of the issue she's interviewing a politician about, but never knowingly questions the assumptions their position is based on nor suggests credible alternatives to what's being fronted. Treating politics like soap opera often means characters and performance get criticised, but the script is never open to challenge.
3 comments:
Nothing really new here - I've been haranguing the BBC since at least Andrew Marr's stint on the Sunday show about the absurdity of reporting as 'breaking news' at the end of the show, things that were said by politicians, often using the same coercive gotcha techniques, in the middle of the same show. I have likewise objected to the BBC and Guardian's now endemic use of 'fury' in headlines, to describe such things as disappointment, concern or even anger, to no avail, and don't even bother now resisting the creeping use of words like 'terrified' to describe what might at worst be deep distress - about say benefit cuts - which I agree are distressing but terror is a different category of distress altogether and there are good reasons why we have so many words. I used to despair (more accurately get a bit annoyed) at the tabloids debasing language and culture, but at least I never felt like they were on my side, but seeing now news outlets that I always felt a natural sympathy with doing the same things is as sad (but neither terrifying nor infuriating) as wandering into the once great WH Smiths and being offered a packet of crisps for £1.50 and a half priced chocolate bar at the till. Sorry to say it's why I have largely stopped watching the BBC or reading the Guardian.
Is this sort of tabloid journalism by senior BBC staff a consequence of the need to generate 'clicks' over-riding the supposed public purpose of the organisation? Does the pressure on their funding make them feel they have to demonstrate their 'popularity'? The easiest way to show this being the number of hits they get. Are individuals within the BBC pushing themselves forward against internal competitors using this metric, encouraged by management? See how LK's replacement Chris Wotsit behaves in a very similar way.
Such a metric is always going to lead to focus on the lowest common denominator rather than any attempt to explain and illuminate. This approach results in a downward spiral towards a mix of provocation, tittilation and pandering, and avoids any challenging or educating, or even genuine informing. The BBC mission has thus become to generate reaction and hence 'interaction' (as in clicks or comments).
“Has this country ever been beset by a worse collection of political and media elites?”
I know you pose this as a rhetorical question, but Laura, our intrepid truth seeker, is just one of that fetid cabal of privately educated school girls/boys that currently front the BBC news output. I, too, have stopped watching or listening to BBC news or their current affairs programmes. Generally, the presenters are a tedious, monochrome, patronising, craven and insipid bunch who, despite the catastrophic decline in viewing numbers, continue to present the political & social events of the day as ‘theatre’ and the ‘news’ as a series of snapshots, with no historical context. Particularly for the younger audience this format is a depressing turn-off. The cheap and easy gladiatorial style of style of ‘gotcha’ moments in their more weighty (?) broadcasts are just a regurgitation of the rhetorical duelling that took place in their student debating societies.
The Gaza atrocities, the imminent climate crisis and the attacks by Trump on liberal democracy has thrown them and this cosy format into disarray. Israel and the US were supposed to be our friends and respected neighbours but it is becoming harder and harder for the BBC to give them their customary due respect. The climate crisis can no longer be presented as a bunch of angry, eccentric and sentimental hippies who want to retreat into an unrealistic bucolic idyll. As these material contradictions become more apparent the archaic format of presenting these events as the ahistorical ‘politics as theatre’ becomes increasingly untenable.
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