Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said

Yet again, the producers and journalists of BBC Television News have demonstrated their superiority complex when it comes to covering important speeches, giving far greater coverage to their own mediated reportage than to the speech itself.

Last night's news that Tony Blair had made his first political speech since standing down as prime minister took up 188 seconds of the BBC 10 o'clock News - which seemed fair enough

Except for the fact that only 19% of the coverage (36 seconds) was of Blair actually speaking.

The other 81% was devoted to telling us what he said and/or what others thought about it.

Most important in all this, of course, was the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, who had more to say than Blair, Cameron and Clegg put together and managed to bag almost half the coverage (48%) for himself.

Does it matter that the BBC increasingly prevents us from hearing what our politicians have to say, preferring to give far more weight to its own reporters telling us what they said?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think it does - for reasons touched on in some of the posts referred to below.

But am I alone in being irritated and worried by this kind of reportage?

Related posts on UK media coverage (or lack of it) of speeches

• Mediated speeches: whom do we really want to hear?
• Obama's rhetoric renews UK media interest in the lost art of oratory
• 'The Lost Art of Oratory' by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?
• BBC discovers the 'Lost Art of Oratory' (again)
• Political speeches can still make a big difference - like changing the date of an election

Vince Cable shows how 'Yah-boo politics' can win victories for the LibDems

I've just been watching last night's Channel 4 broadcast of the Chancellors' Debate, and was fascinated to see that Vince Cable was the only one of the three spokesmen who prompted applause from the audience during his closing statement (see transcript & video clip below).

A victory for 'Yah-boo' politics

It proved something I've always argued, namely that 'Yah-boo' politics works just as well for the LibDems as it does for the other main parties - in spite of the LibDems' long-standing 'holier than thou' claim to be the only party that doesn't lower itself to using 'Yah-boo' tactics.

During Paddy Ashdown's leadership of the party, I often found myself arguing against such an approach, for the simple reason that we knew that 84% of the bursts of applause in political speeches are triggered by two particular types of message (or a combination of the two):

Boasts about our side: 40%
Attacks or insults aimed at opponents: 34%

Combined boast + attack: 10%

(Our Masters' Voices, pp. 34-45).

So, if you're really serious about refraining from 'yah-boo' politics, you're voluntarily reducing your chances of winning applause by more than a third.

Liberal 'Yah-boo' moments from the past

This is not to say, of course, that the LibDems have always (or ever?) been consistent in practising what they preach when it comes to avoiding 'Yah-boo' politics.

After all, Vince Cable's most famous line during his temporary leadership of the party was his 'Yah-boo' remark about Gordon Brown becoming more like Mr Bean than Stalin.

More than 30 years ago, during the 1979 general election, Liberal leader David Steel was also not averse to it, as you can see from this neat example of how to use a puzzle with contrasting solution to say 'yah-b00' to both the other parties at the same time:

[PUZZLE] 'There are two Conservative parties in this election.

[SOLUTION]

[A] 'One is offering the continuation of the policies we've had for the last five years.

[B] 'And the other is offering a return to the policies of forty years ago.'

[APPLAUSE]

Cable's latest 'Yah-boo' moment

In his closing remarks at the end of last night's debate, Vince Cable again showed how to use this 'plague on both your houses' approach to craft a 'Yah-boo' sequence that wins a positive response from the audience.

As with the Steel example from 1979, it showed that a rhetorical advantage for LibDem politicians is that there is always plenty of scope for making simple contrasts between the two main parties - and, in this case, Cable adds to the rhetorical impact of that by listing three dreadful things that each of them is alleged to have done - all of which are offered as the start of a solution to the puzzle with which he opened the sequence.

Then, as he moves towards making a favourable contrast between the LibDem's and both the alternatives, he's interrupted by one of the evening's few bursts of applause:

[PUZZLE] 'The question is who can you trust to do it?

[SOLUTION]

[A1] 'The Labour government led us into this mess

[A2] 'they've done severe damage to pensions and savings

[A3] 'they've wasted a vast amount of money on over-centralised public services.

[B1] 'The Tories presided over two big recessions in office

[B2] 'they wasted most of the North Sea oil revenue

[B3] 'they sold off the family silver on the cheap

'Now they want to have another turn to get their noses in the trough and reward their rich backers.

'I- I - The Liberal Democrats are different..'

[APPLAUSE]

'.. the Liberal Democrats are different.'

Budget eve message from Alistair Darling at the crossroads

Last year, I marked Budget day by posting the remarkable sequence from the early section of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, in which he showed that even something as unpromising as banking could be developed into a powerful and extended metaphor (HERE).

This year, I thought I'd mark the occasion with a clip of some economists - the governor of the Bank of England, Nobel laureate Joseph Stigliz and former chief economist at Shell, Vince Cable - showing how to deploy imagery about bumpy roads, party-poopers, tail-spins and illnesses to talk about our recent economic woes.

But then I noticed that HM Treasury had just posted something a bit more topical on YouTube, namely a video of the Chancellor Exchequer not telling us very much about his plans for tomorrow's big day.

As only 139 people have viewed it so far*, this could well be your first chance to see it. Apparently, we're at 'something of a crossroads', the government can 'help unlock private sector investment' and 'our competitors are not standing still' - and that's your lot as far as Mr Darling's imagery is concerned.

And, if you're a bit hard of hearing, don't worry: we tax-payers have paid someone to transcribe it and insert sub-titles (which has also saved me quite a bit of time and effort).

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if he's got any more metaphors up his sleeve, not to mention whether he's going to 'turn left or right' at the crossroads.

Meanwhile, and to keep you going until then, here are some rather more uninhibited metaphors from the economists mentioned above:

* In the first hour since putting this post together, the number of YouTube views rose dramatically from 139 to 223 - which really makes you appreciate the commendable value for money that HM Treasury is getting from our taxes.

** P.S. A comment added by 'headless' makes the interesting point that whoever posted this video - presumably the Treasury - made it impossible for anyone to rate or make a comment on it!