- Steve Jobs shows how to use an object as a visual aid (and how to speak about it)
- Steve Jobs shows how to time the changing of slides (and how not to)
- Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address (9 million YouTube views at time of posting this + another million in the 24 hours since then)
The End of Summer - with thanks to Steve Jobs & Flipron
Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
- Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
- Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
- Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?
- The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation & the ladder (speech) that had saved it
Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission
Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than they were a year ago
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
- Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
- Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
- Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?
- The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation & the ladder (speech) that had saved it
- Delayed applause at a key point in Nick Clegg's conference speech
- Party conference season prize competition
- Delayed applause in Vince Cable's speech (at same point as in Clegg's)
- More lessons from Vince Cable's speech
- Labour Party leaders' acceptance speeches" Neil Kinnock, 1983; Ed Miliband, 2010
- Ed Miliband "gets it" in his bid to bond with the brethren
- Did David Miliband lose because he was too old and experienced?
- Delayed applause for Ed Miliband's claims on the 'centre ground'
- 'Clap on the name': a practical tip for Ed Miliband and/or his speechwriters
- Delayed applause for William Hague's boast about being in government
- What a peculiar Tory backdrop, Part 2: What do the flags mean?
- Tories 'Bomb Middle England' - by Banksy
- Delayed applause, poor speech writing & delivery strike again in Osborne's speech
- Delayed applause for Cameron's government - from the Conservatives!
- BIG SOCIETY: little applause
- Conference season competition results
The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation and the ladder (speech) that had saved it
The Frost-Nixon interview as the ultimate snake
After all, the party conference season, with its mix of extended interviews with politicians, very short clips from their speeches and much longer clips from media commentators telling us what they're talking about, has yet to grind to a close.
From my point of view, having started the season by asking why our politicians are so willing to play snakes and ladders under media rules that give them little chance of landing on anything but a snake (HERE), the chance to see the Frost-Nixon film could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
- Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
- Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
- Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?
Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?
Having kept an eye out on both male and female speakers at this week's Labour Party conference, I thought that they and other readers might like to see three good efforts from women who spoke there.
For what it's worth, my general impression is that some of the party's leading women are way ahead of their male brethren when it comes to effective public speaking.
Or is it simply that, even in a party so lacking in charismatic male speakers, women still have to be far better than average to get noticed and rise within the party?
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
- Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
- Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
- Why did some Labour members boo & clap when Miliband mentioned tony Blair?
Why did Labour members boo and clap when Miliband mentioned Tony Blair?
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'.
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- Stand-up comedy from Ed Miliband
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...
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
Andrew Neil plays snakes & ladders with Ed Balls before picking up a scalpel
- "Just watched @afneil 'review' of #Lab11 - i.e. pitifully short extracts from speeches + long/boring interviews."
- "If I were Ed Balls, I'd think twice about playing such a long game of snakes & ladders with @afneil"
'..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?
- Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition
- Politicians and broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
- Clegg's conference speech: 1 plus & 2 minuses
- A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
- Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
- Stand-up comedy From Ed Miliband
Ed Balls surfs applause - but don't expect to see it on primetime TV news
A comic analysis of Nick Clegg's rhetorical questions
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