Sack Paxman

Last night Twitter was abuzz with the "car crash" interview of Treasury minister Chloe Smith. People were still tweeting and blogging about it this afternoon. With my usual excellent timing, by now there will be no-one left on the planet with even the vaguest interest in clicking through to yet more comment on that interview.

So well done on making it this far. And here goes...

I agree entirely with Richard Morris' succinct review of why Chloe Smith had no excuse.However, I want to focus on Jeremy Paxman. I've blogged previously about why I no longer watch Newsnight when he's presenting. But I would now go further than that. I think he deserves to be sacked.

Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 by englishpen

Not for this interview in particular. It was quite legitimate for him to be asking when the decision to delay the fuel duty rise was taken, why Smith appeared to have changed her mind about the issue, how the measure would be funded, and why this measure took priority over reducing the deficit.

And not because of his bullying approach per se. His technique last night was no worse than Paxman has deployed many times before; and although I detest the default attitude to politicians of "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?", it is sometimes necessary to deploy an aggressive approach to try to cut through obfuscation about very serious matters.

No, I think he should be sacked because he is incompetent. And this interview illustrates this perfectly.

Before the interview, we already knew that the decision was a last-minute one. We also knew that it would mostly be funded by departmental under-spends, but that it wasn't yet clear how much would be taken from each department.

So what could a good journalist realistically hope to achieve in this interview? I would suggest that the five key things we would have liked to have found out are:

1. What are the justifications for the Government changing its mind?
2. At a particular moment when tax receipts are sharply down and borrowing sharply up, why wouldn't the money be better spent reducing the deficit?
3. How does this decision square with the Prime Minister's boast that his will be "the greenest government ever"?
4. Why was the decision so last-minute?
5. When will it be known which departments are to experience budget cuts as a consequence of this decision?

A smart interviewer - such as Jon Snow, Robin Lustig or Andrew Neil - might well have started with questions that a Treasury minister should be able to answer, following up with thoughtful questions that attempt to tease out ambiguities and gaps in the logic. It's true that there might be times when an interviewee can be unsettled by a relentless, aggressive, opening attack; but overusing such a technique means that future interviewees will be resolute in sticking rigidly to their talking points.

Instead, sensing the weakness of the Government's position on the decision, Paxman set out to entertain the audience with the ritual humiliation of a minister:

• He asked Smith about 10 times "When were you told about the decision?" (or words to that effect)
• He repeatedly shouted, hectored and interrupted Smith.
• He asked an excessive number of questions phrased in such a way as to humiliate rather than to elicit serious responses, including:
• "Is it hard for you to defend a decision you don't agree with?"
• "Is this some sort of joke?"
• "Did you get the sums wrong?"
• "Do you ever wake up in the morning and think 'My God, what am I going to be told today? '"
• "Do you ever think you're incompetent?"

To be fair, Smith could have made a much better fist of responding. After all, a decision to delay a tax rise is hardly the most difficult position to defend in politics. She needed to keep pivoting back to "Hard-working people and businesses aren’t interested in the process. They're interested in the outcome, which is the Government listening to how badly people have been harmed by Labour's deficit, and so we're taking the right decision to ameliorate Labour's taxes. This will help people who commute to work, people who travel because of their jobs, people who live in the country..." Of course that's easy for me to say. It's not so easy to do it under the hot lights and the sneer of a boorish interviewer. But that's her job, so I'm not overly concerned about that. And she'd already been through one interview earlier in the evening, so she knew what questions were very likely to come up!

So how well did Paxman do? Of the "five key things we would have liked to have found out" I identified earlier, how many did we gain information about?

And this interview isn't an isolated case.

If it turns out that BBC News is actually a subdivision of BBC Entertainment, then Paxman's bosses should be rightly proud of his continuing ability to attract attention. On the other hand, Nick Clarke, Vincent Hanna and Charles Wheeler will be turning in their graves.

What mark would you give Paxman?

I've had enough of Paxman

Watching Newsnight yesterday, something snapped.

I (and others) moan endlessly on Twitter about how dumbed down Newsnight has become, and about how lazy Jeremy Paxman's interviewing has become. Rather than dwelling on the negatives, I even tried to make some positive suggestions for helping Newsnight recover.

But I've had enough. Paxman is typically aggressive, provocative and rude. Sometimes smugly and smilingly condescending. And he almost always falls back on a small repertoire of tricks, such as "How can you say that when... [Report X has said something different]?", "Oh come off it!", "Do you agree with [ally Y] when he says...?", "Which is it: Yes or no?"

It's true that there are times when this style can help cut through flannel. But it's becoming overused and all too often reduces political discussion to something only slightly more grown-up than the Jeremy Kyle Show. A more clinical, well-briefed, forensic technique can actually help bring out weaknesses or implications of arguments that interviewees hadn't even considered. Think Andrew Neil at his best.

It's not just that Paxman's interviewing style is dated: He's also a particularly poor chair of discussions involving more than a few people. He fails to hide his contempt for particular people, parties and arguments. And he often seems unable to move on from trivial or superficial matters to the substance of an issue.

It doesn't have to be like this. I recently caught Channel 4 News for the first time in a long while (I'm not often available to watch television in the early evening) and the contrast with Newsnight was huge. Considered, probing, responsive. Everything Newsnight isn't, and should be. I also think Radio 4's The World at One and The World Tonight also get the journalism spot-on (although, again, I don't catch them as much as I'd like).

But Newsnight has always been the pre-eminent current affairs programme, so it has been hard to come to terms with its decline. It still holds a sway over many in politics, but I've come to believe that the trashing of serious discussion in favour of pantomime is doing our political discourse no favours.

To bolster my resolve, here are some Paxo moments of the past few years:

• Alex Salmond is like Robert Mugabe.
• George Osborne shovels shit.
• Newsnight's own correspondent Paul Mason is not credible.
• Interviewing Eurfyl ap Gwilym, in which Paxman seems to believe "The private sector is too weak" means "A weak private sector is sustainable" (it doesn't); the Plaid Cymru manifesto says "There should be no cuts in Wales." (it doesn't); "The funding formula for Wales is unfair" means "There should be no cuts in Wales" (it doesn't); "Wales receives more public funding per capita than any English region" (it doesn't); and that comparing Wales with other parts of the UK is both important and irrelevant.
• Repeatedly asking, with no finesse, a question that a Treasury minister clearly isn't allowed to answer.
• The BBC have censored almost all the internet clips of Paxman asking "Why is it the Greeks are so dishonest?" but you can probably find it on Google if you look hard enough. Here he is though, interrupting the President of Iceland to say "Don't trust an Icelander", asking Britain's UN ambassador "What's the difference between Zionism and racism?" and asking the Irish Finance Minister "Wouldn't your assertion be rather more plausible were this crisis not entirely the consequence of your own incompetence?"
• Finally, Paxman's wasted opportunities interviewing Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, etc. etc. etc.

How the BBC's Newsnight can recover

There's a useful debate over at The Observer on "Has Newsnight lost its way?" As anyone who's followed my tweets over the last year can tell, I'm pretty much with John Naughton's views. There are some good comments there too.

The guests are drawn from a narrow pool, often lacking the intellectual heft that a serious-minded analysis requires. Moreover, the discussions often seemed designed to generate heat rather than light, and they are far too short to allow proper elaboration and critical engagement. Meanwhile, Jeremy Paxman's interviews have become shallow lazy exercises in attention-seeking rudeness rather than the razor-sharp dissections they should be.

More broadly, this comment from Naughton is particularly telling:

"What was most striking about Newsnight's attempts to cover the recent unrest was the absence of any sign of intellectual curiosity."

Rather than dwell on the negatives though, I'd like to summarize my view of how Newsnight can recover:

1. Newsnight needs to sharpen its focus on what gets lost in the hubbub of 24 hour news. This means putting events into social and historical contexts, and worrying away at the kinds of questions that Naughton notes are missing: the hows, the whys, the shoulds. It means forensic analysis and not accepting simplistic answers.

2. The presenters and reporters need to be given time to do their jobs. Maitlis, Esler, Mason, Urban, and Watts are all good journalists. They are being let down by an agenda that is about grabbing attention rather than pursuing understanding. They need more time and a clearer mission.

3. Interviews need to be more subtle. The old-fashioned bombastic interviewing style of Paxman and Wark has had its day. It's time for careful questioning rather than trying to provoke gaffes.

4. The excellent Max Atkinson has noted a number of production mistakes that need to be stamped on. Examples include distracting graphics, silent speeches, and patchwork formats.

5. More intellectuals should be invited on, and they need to be given time to develop their views and to engage directly with each other. Lack of proper time for these discussions and too much interruption lead to superficial analysis.