Emily Maitlis: TV news in peril from political pressure

TV news is capitulating to politicians’ populist rhetoric and adopting dangerous ‘both-sideism’, according to Emily Maitlis.

Delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, the departed Newsnight presenter raised fears about the slippery slope towards “normalising the absurd” amid a febrile political climate and increasingly polarised society.

In a bid to prevent the next generation of journalists from repeating mistakes which have been made, Maitlis rang alarm bells over the “staggering speed” at which democratic norms around previously-settled questions are being threatened.

“We’re becoming anaesthetised to the rising temperature in which facts are getting lost, constitutional norms trashed, claims frequently unchallenged,” she said. “We are seeing politicians move in directions that are deeply and clearly deleterious to basic democratic governance.”

She traced the problem back to the election of Donald Trump as US president which ushered in a new era of communications. “Politics has changed. But we as journalists have not yet caught up,” she said.

While stopping short of outright criticism of the BBC, Maitlis highlighted several recent examples of ways in which it had failed to handle situations towards the end of her two decades at New Broadcasting House.

Addressing the “now-infamous” way in which she was reprimanded over her 2020 Newsnight introduction following Dominic Cumming’s breach of lockdown rules, Maitlis hit out at the speed at which the BBC issued an apology to Downing Street following what she considers to be a typical introduction.

“Within hours, a very public apology was made, the programme was accused of a failure of impartiality, the recording disappeared from the iPlayer, and there were paparazzi outside my front door,” she said.

“It makes no sense for an organisation that is admirably, famously rigorous about procedure – unless it was perhaps sending a message of reassurance directly to the government itself?”

She went on cite several other examples which had rankled including unjustified criticism from Brexiteer and former prime minister candidate Andrea Leadsom, hostility from Labour supporters following the decision to superimpose an image of Jeremy Corbyn over the Kremlin, and giving free reign on Newsnight to Trump acolyte and fake news proponent Sebastian Gorka.

She warned that populist rhetoric, which is widely used to campaign for political power, aims to discredit journalists who report the news in a fair and balanced way and in their efforts to signal their balance and impartiality, journalists end up “practicing bias”.

“[Populism] is not an ideology. It is a means to achieve and retain power,” she said. “The way populism works – on us as journalists – is to seek to somehow divide us from the public. To make us feel that we are not ‘of the people’. That those in power are the only ones that can understand ‘normal folk’.”

She added that it took too long to recognise its dangers and find the journalistic tools needed to deal with it.

Both-sideism

Maitlis also identified ‘both-sideism’ as an issue that broadcasters “tie themselves up in knots over” as they bid to be perceived as impartial.

“This myopic style of journalism… reaches a superficial balance whilst obscuring a deeper truth,” she warned.

The farcical nature of the situation reared its head during the Brexit debate when Newsnight made the well-intentioned decision to present viewers both sides of the argument.

“But we got it wrong,” she admitted, revealing that it might take producers just five minutes to find sixty economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice espousing it. “But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”

The long shadow cast by ‘both-sideism’ was also felt during a Newsnight interview with Robert De Niro.

The Hollywood actor raged against Trump’s handling of the pandemic three weeks after his notorious suggestion that bleach could cure Covid, during a pre-recorded interview. Fears of bias almost stopped the interview from airing after a “terrified” Maitlis suggested that it should not feature.

“Why do I feel unable to let [De Niro] say it without trying to find an equally world-famous actor who is miraculously going to tell us the opposite?” she said.

Paralysis

Maitlis characterised the impact that Brexit and Trump continue to have on news reporting.

“Those two seismic shifts have not been and gone,” she said. “They’ve come and stayed.”

She set out fears that journalists are running scared of being labelled “pessimistic, anti-populist, or unpatriotic” by blaming the current economic changes underway on the decision to leave Europe.

“Every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are pushing the public further away. Why should our viewers, our listeners, come to us to interpret and explain what is going on when they can see our own reluctance to do so?”

As she prepares to take the helm at Global’s The News Agents alongside Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, she urged her compatriots to be braver and stop second-guessing themselves, while becoming more transparent with audiences.

“The News Agent will allow us room to move away from cellophane-wrapped formality, lift the curtain on why things happen, how we choose our stories and how we book our guests,” she said.

The call to arms also includes hold power to account even when it is uncomfortable to do so, recognise and call-our populist tropes and favour nuance over simplistic, binary “stagecraft”.

“Whilst we do not have to be campaigners, nor should we be complaisant, complicit onlookers,” she concluded.

“Our job is to make sense of what we are seeing and anticipate the next move. It’s the moment, in other words, the frog should be leaping out of the boiling water and phoning all its friends to warn them.”