Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?



If this blog's main theme during last year's party conference season was the way in which audiences failed to applaud things that they should have applauded, this year's is turning out to be the snakes and ladders theory of political communication - which proposes that, for politicians, speeches work like ladders (by bringing them good news), whereas interviews work like snakes (by bringing them bad news).

Ed Miliband's memory lapse 'exposed' in a BBC interview
As I was driving for about six hours yesterday, I spent much more time listening to the radio than tracking the blogging and tweeting from the last vestiges of the Labour Party conference.

But the car radio obliged - as an example of how a gaffe in an interview can generate embarrassing news for a politician, they don't get much better than Ed Miliband's failure to name one of his party's candidates in the campaign for the Labour's Scottish leader - which was headlined on the early evening news programmes from BBC Radio 4.

By the time I got home, the internet was awash with the news. By 9.17 p.m., Mark Pack had embedded the original clip from the BBC website on the Liberal Denocrat Voice blog (HERE).

A change of heart from the BBC?
But when I tried to do the same earlier this morning, I was thwarted.

Yes, you can still watch the clip on the BBC website, but you can no longer access the code needed to embed it on your own blog or website - which is why I've had to 'make do' with embedding the version posted on YouTube by Guido Fawkes (that's already been seen by about 5,500 viewers).

When it first became possible to embed clips from the BBC website, I welcomed it (HERE). Since then, however, how they decide which ones are allowed to reach a wider audience (by giving access to the embedding code) has remained a complete mystery.

Today it's become be even more mysterious than I thought. After all, why, having supplied the code for embedding this particular clip last night, has the BBC withdrawn access to it this morning?

If they've done it in response to complaints from the Labour Party (who else would want to restrict its accessibility to a wider audience) we could be witnessing an even more worrying form of collusion between broadcasters and politicians than I suggested we're already up against in Politicians & broadcasters: collaboration or capitulation?

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Why did Labour members boo and clap when Miliband mentioned Tony Blair?









News last month that a Libyan crowd had been booing on hearing the name 'Gaddafi' prompted me to note that Arabic speakers apparently boo at names too.

Little did I think that we'd soon be hearing some members of a Labour Party conference audience booing while others clapped on hearing the name 'Tony Blair'.

Not content with announcing "I am not Tony Blair", Ed Miliband went on to make another rather obvious point: "I am not Gordon Brown either" (no response).

Then, with what struck me as an air of frustration and perhaps even desperation, he asserted "I am my own man and I'm going to do things in my own way" - 16 seconds of applause (i.e. twice as much as a normal burst).

Who writes stuff like this I do not know. Whether it was Miliband or his speechwriters, one has to ask whether it really didn't occur to any of them that the lines might just possibly (or should that be 'certainly') be singled out and played at the top of BBC Television's Ten o'clock News (as indeed they were) - or that, barely half-hour later, Sadiq Khan, the M.P. who led Ed Miliband's leadership campaign would be reminding us of these very same words (with apparent pride) in an interview with Kirsty Wark on BBC2's Newnight.

What did the booing and clapping mean?
Having watched the above clip quite a few times, I'm still fascinated by the ambiguity of these simultaneously negative and positive audience responses.

Were those who booed indicating that they were sorry to hear that Ed Miliband is not Tony Blair, or that they were pleased to hear him distancing himself from Tony Blair?

Were those who applauded indicating that they were pleased to hear that Miliband is not Blair, or that they were still fans of Blair?

Whatever the answer, an obvious alternative interpretation was to treat it as evidence of division in the party about its past, present and future - which, as a communications strategy, is about as effective as bowling a full toss for the media to hit for six.

Hunt the split
Although British broadcasters may have largely lost interest in showing clips from speeches during news programmes (see the last few posts), they won't miss the possibility of reporting splits in a party if there's so much as a hint of division. That, after all, has been the leitmotif of media coverage of politics for decades.

So what better way to do it than to focus on Mr Miliband's determination to distance himself from his two immediate predecessors, with the added bonus of showing footage of party members booing and applauding the name of the most successful leader they've ever had.

Can Labour afford to back the Ed Milibandwagon?
On asking this question during the Labour leadership campaign last year, I attracted a bit of flak for daring to suggest that Ed Miliband might be too young to remember what had actually happened to his party during its 18 years of decline and recovery between 1979 and 1997 (HERE).

His recurrent rubbishing of New Labour may have helped him to win that particular campaign.

If this speech is anything to go by, he still seems to think there's mileage to be had from continuing to bite the hands that fed him the promotions without which he would never have become a credible leadership candidate in the first place.

But for me, his speech was a reminder of what I'd written about him more than a year ago: maybe he really is too young to know what he's talking about.

If he isn't, I'm left with little or no idea about what he really stands for or what he's trying to tell us about the direction in which he plans to take his party.

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Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband



Is it a good idea for political leaders to have a go at doing stand-up comedy?

As regular readers will know from a post at the start of the conference season, I'm all in favour of viewers being allowed to hear more from the horses' mouths, so that they can draw their own conclusions about what they think of competing politicians - without having to depend ever more heavily on interpretations from media reporters and commentators.

But, although I do have a few thoughts about the above sequence from the opening of Ed Miliband's leader's speech at the Labour Party conference a few hours ago, I'm more than happy to let you reach your own judgements about it...

Conference season 2011 blogging update:




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Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel









Last night, after watching The Daily Politics show on BBC2, I posted a couple of tweets on Twitter that would hardly have come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog:
  1. "Just watched @afneil 'review' of #Lab11 - i.e. pitifully short extracts from speeches + long/boring interviews."
  2. "If I were Ed Balls, I'd think twice about playing such a long game of snakes & ladders with @afneil"
The tweets, of course, reflect my concern about the way in which British politicians seem to have conceded control of political communication in the UK to the broadcasting media - by going along with the latter's preference for devoting more and more airtime to interviews and less and less to excerpts from speeches, even though interviews seldom deliver anything other than bad news and negative impressions of politicians (for reasons explained in more detail HERE).

A new weapon: media autopsies of media interviews
The diversification of communication in the digital age means that celebrity media interviewers can now carry out their own post-mortems on their own interviews to search out any errors an interviewee (or should that be 'victim') might have made while walking so obligingly along the tightrope prepared for them by the all-powerful broadcasters.

If it then turns out that the politician did indeed land on a snake in the just-completed game of snakes and ladders, the interviewer can start tweeting and blogging about it to their heart's content.

Balls goes under the reporter's knife
And so it was, after the interview was over, out came the pathologist's report, starting as follows (full version HERE):

"I interviewed Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls on the Daily Politics Conference Special on Monday, live from Liverpool, the moment he'd finished speaking to the Labour conference.

"In the course of our usual robust exchange, which we both enjoy, he made a couple of claims that I knew I would have to investigate more thoroughly. And I have! ..." (continued: HERE).

A clearer dividing line between comment and reportage?
I concluded Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation? by explaining why I think the changes that have been taking place matter:


'..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.'

If ever such a debate does get under way, another question we should be also be asking is: how worried should we be if the dividing line between between media reportage and media comment is becoming progressively more blurred?

Conference season 2011 blogging update:

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Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news









In his speech at the Labour Party conference earlier today, shadow chancellor Ed Balls had a go at 'surfing applause' (about 2.45 minutes into the above clip), a technique that's seldom mastered by anyone outside the top rank of political orators (for more on which, with examples from Tony Benn and presidents Obama and Sarkozy, see HERE).

Could this, I wonder, have had anything to do with prompting some rather favourable reactions on Twitter, such as this from @ JohnHigginson: 'Talk from the faithful is that Ed Balls, who has always suffered from a stutter, is becoming better at delivering speeches'?

I also can't help wondering whether it was deliberate and, if so, who taught him to do it?

But don't expect our broadcasters to let a wider audience see it on prime-news tonight. After all, that would mean giving Mr Balls far too much airtime and prevent the likes of Nick Robinson, Tom Bradby, Adam Boulton et al. from spending even more time telling us what he was talking about (for more on which, see HERE).
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A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions


The latest edition of the News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 included a perceptive analysis of Nick Clegg's use of rhetorical questions during his speech at last week's Liberal Democrat conference.

Exaggerated?
Yes it is.

Should the BBC be broadcasting this kind of stuff?
Yes it should.

Is this the kind of show that makes the licence fee worth paying?
Yes it is.

Can you listen to the whole programme again?
Yes you can (for another six days HERE).
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Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses


PLUS
Having grumbled previously about Nick Clegg's past attempts to imitate David Cameron's walkabout apparently unscripted style of delivery, I was delighted to see that he stood at a lectern for yesterday's speech.

If you want to look more like a statesman than a management guru, that's the way to do it, even if you do forget to pretend that you're reading from the hard copy text in front of you.

MINUSES
1. Faces in the background
Fashionable though it's become for our party leaders to make speeches with some of the audience sitting behind them, I cannot for the life of me see what the point of it is.

During the 1992 election, John Major took to speaking in the round and, if I ever manage to unearth my videos of people yawning and dozing in the background, I'll certainly post them on the blog.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, party leaders used to speak from a platform, surrounded by colleagues all around them - until, that is, Harvey Thomas (former impresario for Billy Graham's UK crusades) got involved in staging Conservative Party conferences, where Mrs Thatcher was set apart from the rest so that any signs of audience dissent or doziness couldn't be seen by viewers at home.

Neil Kinnock quickly followed suit - and with very good reason. I have another video from one of his earliest leader's speeches, in which Dennis Skinner and Joan Maynard (aka 'Stalin's aunty') sat behind him eating sweets, shaking their heads and generally looking very cross.

There may not have been any such damaging distractions from those who sat behind Mr Clegg yesterday, but the possibility was always there.

Nor did it do a very good job in accomplishing the only defence for it I've ever heard, namely to demonstrate the ethnic and gender diversity of the party's supporters. I could only see one black face and not as many female faces as there should have been.

2. An unfortunate contrast
The power of the contrast in the armoury of rhetorical devices available to speakers was strongly evidenced by the fact that Clegg's recurring "not easy, but right" line was widely noticed and reported by the media as the leitmotif of the speech.

But, given the alternative meanings of the word 'right' in the English language, and especially in the world of politics, it hardly seemed an appropriate choice. If you're suspected by some of your supporters (and enemies) of selling out to go into coalition with a right-wing party, 'right' is, at best, an ambiguous word to use in such a context- and that too was spotted and has been commented on in the media.

Whether or not this was deliberately intended by Clegg and/or his speechwriters, I do not know. But I'd have gone for a safer option like "not easy, but necessary", "not easy, but unavoidable" or "not easy, but no choice."

On the other hand, if speeches have become as unimportant in UK political communication as I suggested in the previous post, maybe none of this nit-picking matters very much at all...

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