James Murdoch backs Rebekah Brooks, but not without pausing every 2 seconds

"Apparently, James Murdoch went to the School of Lawyerish Non-speak, and passed with high honors!"

Denise Graveline (@dontgetcaught) via Twitter, yesterday.

I've blogged before about something that conversation analysts call 'pre-delicate hitches' (for more examples of which, see the list of posts below).

‘Hitches’ are things like pauses, ‘ers’ and ‘ums', restarts of a word that had been aborted, etc. They tend to occur at points in a conversation where you're leading towards a topic or a word (or it could be news, gossip, a swear word, obscenity, joke, etc.) that's likely to come across as rather delicate, controversial or even offensive to whomsoever you happen to be talking to.

The general argument is that we use such ‘hitches’ to let our hearer(s) know that we know that they too might find what we're saying rather 'delicate'.

One pause every two seconds

So I wasn't at all surprised to see that James Murdoch's backing of Rebekah Brooks yesterday (a delicate topic if ever there was one) was punctuated by 24 pauses in 48 seconds - although, like Denise Graveline (above), I was fairly appalled by his use of transparent and proactive 'lawyerish non-speak'.

Apart from the high pause rate in this particular clip, I also enjoyed "I am satisfied" and "I think", neither of which sounded as confident or certain as he perhaps should have done under the circumstances. Note also the slight hesitation "are-are.." before coming up with his assessment of her standard of ethics and conduct as "very good".

The question put to Murdoch (3.40 seconds into the full 16 minute interview HERE) was the interviewer's second attempt to get an answer:

"My question was is it really conceivable - you're asking people, in looking people in they eye and saying 'look, she and others in her position did not know that you were paying out enormous sums of money to these people' and what I'm saying is 'is that really conceivable?'"

After delaying for about 1 second, Murdoch starts to reply (slash marks in the transcript below indicate pauses of different duration):

Murdoch: "I am satisfied ///that Rebekah//her leadership of this business//and her//standard of ethics/and her standard of conduct/throughout her career//are-are very good/and I think/ what she's shown and what what we have shown//with our actions//around/transparently and proactively working with the police//Recall/it's the///process of information discovery//that we went through//proactively and voluntarily/that actually started these investigations /to be opened again by the police//earlier this year//It's the proactive and transparent handing over of information to the police/to aid them in their inquiries around payments to the police and things like that actually/she has led/and this company has led."

Related posts on pre-delicate hitches

• Gordon Brown is finding the jacqui Smith expenses story more 'delicate' than he says
• The 'delicacy' of Mrs Clinton's 'consequences' for North Korea
• 'Pre-delicate hitces' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen
• Pre delicate hitches from the White House
• Andy Burnham declares his candidacy for the Labour leadership
• Was the royal engagement interviewer more nervous than his interviewees
• Prince Charles knew that what he said about Camilla becoming Queen was extremely delicate

96% of BBC television news of phone-hacking ignored the House of Commons debate

My optimism about the televising of the phone-hacking debate in the House of Commons yesterday was, as I feared, short-lived (HERE). I'd ended my post on it with an open question about Chris Bryant, M.P., whose speech had opened proceedings.

"Whether or not we'll get to see any more of him (or any of the other speakers in the debate) on prime-time television news programmes tonight, of course, remains to be seen..."

Answer = 36 seconds

Impressive speech though Bryant's may have been, only 14 seconds of it made it on to BBC 's News at 10 last night (still available HERE on iPlayer). And all we got to see from the other speakers in the debate was 22 seconds of the speech by Tom Watson, M.P. Of the Attorney General's speech, we saw 0 seconds.

So a paltry 4% of the 15 minutes of news devoted to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal came from the important debate between our elected members of parliament.

PMQs more important than a proper parliamentary debate?

If the weekly exchanges between the prime minister and leader of the opposition count as 'speeches', the BBC showed us more than twice as much of Cameron (46 seconds) and Miliband (38 seconds) in action than of Bryant and Watson in the main debate - i.e. nearly 10% of the 15 minutes on phone-hacking.

And this is one of the (many) things that strikes me as so depressing about the media's coverage of politics. Compared with the rowdy Punch & Judy show of prime minister's question time, yesterday's debate (on the same subject) showed our MPs at their best - making serious and carefully argued points in a very reasonable and civilised manner.

With the BBC preferring to broadcast (at our expense) rowdiness rather than reason from the House of Commons, is it any wonder that our politicians are held in such low repute?

Meanwhile, "the BBC encourages you to embed its video and audio on your website" (as we're told in the instructions at Democracy Live).

This raises the interesting question of whether the BBC has decided not to bother showing much from speeches on its prime-time news programmes because anyone with a computer can watch the whole 3 hour debate online (as here):

Phone-hacking debate brings speeches back to our TV screens - at least for a few hours

After years of writing and blogging about the reluctance of British television news programmes to broadcast much from speeches (e.g. HERE & HERE), I was delighted that, for today at least, we were allowed to watch the House of Commons debate on phone-hacking live, continuously and without any intervention by reporters telling us what the speakers were saying - and to be able do so simultaneously on three channels, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament and Sky News.

It's a very long time since this has happened, and I'm hoping that it could mark a significant change in the attitude of broadcasters towards speeches and doesn't merely turn out to be a rare exception that proves a rule.

Given my suggestion that interviews have taken over from speeches as the main means of political communication in the UK as a result of collusion between politicians and the media, I was particularly struck by the first 30 seconds of this clip from the opening speech by Chris Bryant, M.P., who also seems worried about our politicians colluding with the media.

Whether or not we'll get to see any more of him (or any of the other speakers in the debate) on prime-time television news programmes tonight, of course, remains to be seen...

P.S. You can now watch the whole of this 3 hour debate (and find out how much of it was shown on BBC Television's News at 10) in the next blog post HERE.