Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
And there are other questions on which I’d welcome the opinion of others, and especially those of you working in politics, the media and academic political science: does it matter and is it a trend that we should welcome or worry about?
For reasons outlined towards the end, I do think it matters and that it is something that we should be worrying about.
To start with, here's a summary of the paper that John Heritage and I presented at a conference at Essex Univerity after the 1987 general election. As it was just before he joined the brain-drain for a chair in sociology at UCLA, we never got round to writing it up (except in various posts on this blog).
A SNAKES & LADDERS THEORY OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
Our argument was a simple one. If you think about the children’s board game, speeches work like ladders for politicians and interviews work like snakes for them.
In a speech, politicians and/or their speechwriters have complete control over what they say and, just as importantly, how they say it.
If they prompt cheers and applause, scenes of audience enthusiasm and approval are transmitted to a wider audience via television and radio.
General elections – as seen on TV – came across as lively contests between politicians who were doing their best to persuade us with passion and conviction.
So speeches worked like ladders in the game that could move a politician upwards on the board towards the coveted prize of positive news headlines.
Speeches = LaddersInterviews are lengthy, discursive and seriously short on the kinds of well-crafted quotable quotes that can be written into a speech.
They feature politicians regularly breaking one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely that questions should be followed by answers.
Media training and regular opportunities for practice have produced a generation of politicians who have become so skilled at avoiding giving straight answers to questions that interviews are arguably at best boring and at worst extremely irritating to the voting public.
Although there are plenty of books of 'great speeches', it can surely be no coincidence that there are very few (if any) books made up of transcripts from 'great interviews'.
To the extent that interviews do occasionally hit the headlines, they hardly ever bring anything but bad news for politicians, as when Jeremy Paxman asked Michael Howard the same question twelve times to no avail in 1997 (HERE).
Nor, during the strikes in June this year, did it do Ed Miliband much good when he was seen repeatedly giving the same more or less verbatim answer to a series of different questions - a sequence that went 'viral' and, at the time of writing this, has been seen by about 400,000YouTube viewers.
Yet we’ve now reached a point where excerpts from speeches are not only rarely shown, but have become little more than a silent backdrop to the media coverage of general elections. For example, here's a BBC Newsnight report from last year, in which Michael Crick tells us what Messrs Clegg and Cameron have been up to during the day. We know that they're speaking because we can see them opening and closing their mouths - but we don't get to hear a single word of what either of them is actually saying:
On BBC's 10 o'clock News, Nick Robinson was there again, telling us that Brown had "come alive as never before in this campaign", while showing us film footage of him 'coming alive' in silence:
And this is why I think that the relegation of speeches to the bottom of our media’s priorities really does matter.
Why?
British broadcasters have the capacity, which they once exercised, to let viewers hear arguments coming directly from the mouths of politicians, delivered in their own words and in their own style of delivery - from which we were then free to reach our own conclusions about what we thought of our masters' voices for ourselves - w
hich does strike me as rather important in a democracy.
But today, the main choice we’re offered is between being told by journalists what our politicians are saying in their speeches
and having to listen to other journalists conducting interminable interviews with them on the off-chance – or perhaps in the hopes - that one or other of them will hit the headlines by landing on a snake (
which, in this age of carefully honed evasiveness, they hardly ever do).
Was it really the Sheffield rally what did it?
A few months ago, the political editor of one of our leading networks told me that the decision to downgrade speeches and rallies in favour of televised interviews had come from politicians, not the media. According to him, the disaster of the Labour Party's Sheffield rally in 1992 had scared the main parties away from holding any more mass rallies during election campaigns.
But I'm by no means convinced that this is the whole story.
For news broadcasters, it's obviously
much cheaper and more convenient
to wheel politicians into a studio than it is to send outside broadcast units around the country to cover election rallies (though, curiously, they don't seem to mind sending them out to film pointless walkabouts in schools, hospitals and shopping centres).
Interviews and other Q-A based shows presumably also appeal to media corporations because it puts them in control by requiring politicians to play by the rules set by a programme's editors and producers.
What's in it for politicians?
But I really don’t see what’s in it for politicians to subject themselves so willingly and continuously to the risk of landing on snakes in interviews - when they could be climbing up ladders that they've designed and produced for themselves in speeches.
I even suspect that the tedium of watching and listening to yet another politician evading yet another questions in yet another interview has contributed to the low esteem in which our politicians are now held. Whatever the politicians and their spin-doctors might think, any competent speaker of English - like most viewers, listeners and voters - can (a) tell at a glance when someone's dodging a question and (b) will draw negative conclusions about anyone who comes across as evasive.
Collaboration or capitulation?
I have no idea whether or not our
politicians have consciously collaborated with or have merely capitulated to broadcasters in relegating speeches to an ever-decreasing role in political communication.
Nor do I know if the broadcasting companies have any empirical evidence that viewers and listeners would rather watch interviews,
silent movies with journalists doing the voiceover, random walkabouts in shopping centres, etc. than excerpts from speeches at lively rallies - though I very much doubt it.
What I do know is that, whatever the impact of the current conventional wisdom on media coverage has on the reputations of our politicians, we can at least vote them out of power.
That is something we cannot do with the executives, producers, editors and journalists who control and determine what we're allowed to see of political debate. Although we like to think we live in a democracy, when it comes to hearing about how it's working, we're at the mercy of an unelected and unaccountable band of professional broadcasters and journalists.
And that's why I think that the current situation not only does matter, but is also something that we should be worrying about - and why I also think that it's high time for a serious debate between everyone involved, including and especially us, the general public.
Related posts on televised interviews
- Do interviews ever deliver anything but bad news for politicians and boredom for audiences?
- Snakes, ladders and the folly of Q-A campaigning
- Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them
- Ed Miliband lands on a snake
- Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
- Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
- 'The lost Art of Oratory' by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
- 'The art of oratory is fast on its way out': at last, some support from a top journalist
- Will the 2010 UK general election be the first one to leave us speechless?
- Political speeches can still make a big difference - like changing the date of an election
- Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said
- Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
- Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?
- Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are bad television?
- Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
- A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
- A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
- The day Mrs Thatcher apologised (twice) for what she'd said in an interview
- A prime minister who openly refused to answer Robin Day's questions
- 'Here today, gone tomorrow' politician walks out of interview with Robin Day
- The day Mandelson walked out of an interview rather than answer a question about Gordon Brown
- Mandelson gives two straight answers to tow of Paxman's questions
- Two more straight answers from Mandelson - about failed coups and the PM's rages
- Rare video clip of a politician giving 5 straight answers to 5 consecutive questions
Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
In praise of Brian Jenner & the UK Speechwriters' Guild
What do Liberal Democrats expect from the 'return' of Dr Death (aka David Owen)?
Our Masters' Voices Then & Now
Curtain imagery from Winston Churchill and John Major
On being defeated in the 1997 UK general election, John Major had no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, but he was under no obligation to resign as leader of the Conservative Party.
I'd be very surprised indeed if anyone watching this responded (then or now) by asking "What curtain, what stage?" - let alone "What on earth is he talking about?"
Nor have I ever heard a similar response to the much more famous 'curtain' metaphor used by another recently defeated Conservative Party leader more than half a century earlier.
Far from prompting those who heard it to start saying things like "What curtain?" or "I haven't noticed any curtains made of iron", the metaphor quickly became part of the vocabulary in the language of the Cold War.
Recycled images
These examples are neat illustrations of two rather obvious, but nonetheless important and intriguing, facts about imagery:
- Whether you use a metaphor, simile, analogy or anecdote, it can be one of the most effective ways of getting your message across.
- The same image (e.g. a curtain falling) can be used to get quite different messages across to different audiences.
A dictionary of reusable images?
Having heard (and/or been involved in preparing) hundreds of speeches and presentations on a vast range of different subjects, I know that a "curtain falling" is just one of many images that can be reused effectively by different speakers for different purposes on different occasions.
As my collection of these continues to grow as the years go by, I'm beginning to wonder whether there might be enough of a market for them to fill another book, working title: An Anthology of Adaptable Images.