Former Newsnight journalist was ‘terribly nervous’ of getting tone wrong
Emily Maitlis has spoken of her nerves about setting the right tone during and after the infamous 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew.
In an interview reflecting on her MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival last year, the former Newsnight journalist opened up for the first time about her explosive sit-down conversation with the controversial royal.
“I think we were terribly nervous of getting the tone wrong both in the interview and afterwards” Maitlis said. She noted that there were moments of the interview that became “comedy gold” for comedians and chat shows, but said that she and the Newsnight team “just didn’t want to be part of that”.
Maitlis also told Afua Hirsch, last year’s Edinburgh TV Festival, chair: “Whilst I was at the BBC we didn’t really want to touch the Prince Andrew interview, we felt it had made its mark and had spoken for itself; it was only on leaving that it became something that was easier to revisit [in recent Channel 4 documentary Andrew: The Problem Prince].”
She continued: “I think we felt that we had to treat the whole thing respectfully, because it came from a place of trying to do an interview for people who wanted answers. I wonder whether that wasn’t behind our sort of reticence or reluctance to turn it into something else, turn it into something bigger.”
Maitlis’ spoke at last year’s festival in the wake of her departure from the BBC to co-host Global podcast The News Agents alongside her former BBC colleagues Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall. Her lecture centred on the danger of capitulating to populist rhetoric in order to be perceived as impartial and the danger of normalising the absurd.
Hirsch noted that the lecture seemed to prophesise the current public debate around impartiality which has been stoked by the factors which led to Richard Sharp’s appointment as BBC chair and the debacle over Gary Lineker’s criticism of government policy in a tweet which caused him to be temporarily suspended from Match of the Day.
Maitlis said that BBC journalists had been “living, breathing and discussing” impartiality, ‘both-side-ism’ and the influence of government on coverage “for years”.
“The questions I was raising were the ones BBC journalists have been asking each other: ‘How can we be impartial?’ when there are members of the BBC board who are coming in and telling us how to be more Brexit-facing in our reporting or more friendly towards the Conservative government in our reporting,” she said.
She added that Sharp “has done good things for the BBC” during his tenure at the corporation but that his appointment begged larger questions about cronyism at the BBC.
“It is important to be having that conversation because otherwise we’ve normalised it – it’s not normal to appoint people who are your friends or people who are helping you settle your finances, it’s not normal to decide to put the name of the person you want to have the job out in the public domain and in the press so that no one else bothers to apply because they think the whole thing is sewn up,” she continued.
“This is a public institution, this is our BBC, and if we’re not having that conversation then what is going on?”
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