Another Rottweiler Joins the Macho Pack of Matadors

In the bizarre bullring of the Westminster lobby there is a precise hierarchy with its own etiquette. Top matador is the BBC’s political editor and protocol always gives him the first question, the first stab. Only after that comes a thrust from ITV, a parry from Sky, a jab from Channel 4 news and a mordant mortar from Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun, with the other newspapers following on behind. So when the BBC chooses a new leader of the pack, it is totemic.

Departing doyen Andrew Marr, my old friend and erstwhile editor, has a wry and dry delivery, a sharp wit underpinned by a breadth of experience and interest that gives him a distinctive elan as he walks that treacherous BBC tightrope between fair judgment and opinion. (The one downside to his reign has been his many lesser imitators who mistake genuine wit for callow facetiousness and cynical sneering, as in the truly toe-curling Yesterday in Parliament slot.)

Marr has had enough of standing on College Green for quick two-ways with presenters: television news burns out the brains of many who stand too long in its glare. So who was to succeed him? It became a matter not just of personality but of profound substance, narrowed down to two diametrically opposed candidates, ITV’s Nick Robinson and Newsnight’s Martha Kearney. There can hardly have been a more revealing decision about what the BBC thinks political reporting should be.

This is how the two sides squared up in the heated internal debate. In the male corner was a man seen as a rottweiler of the lobby: relentlessly aggressive, abrasive and sometimes downright rude, admired for his take-no-prisoners onslaught on politicians. Clever and consumed by an obsession with all the minutiae of every passing ripple in the Westminster game, the man is a walking Wisden of political detail. He is the lobby personified, he was made for it and it for him. Two tough guys – the editor of the Today programme and the editor of the 10 o’clock news reportedly strongly backed the macho candidate.

In the other corner, Martha Kearney is calmer, wiser and – that rarity in the lobby – someone who is as interested in the policies themselves as in the Westminster game. Because she is not a rottweiler, her denigrators outrageously called her “coquettish” – which roughly translates as “not a man and not hideous to behold”. She can be acerbic, but the real difference is that she does not approach politics as a violent contact sport between the lying bastards in power and the noble gladiators in the media.

Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news and reportedly Kearney’s strong champion, curiously did not make the final decision. Here was a display of the same old sexism that daftly denied the job to the excellent Elinor Goodman in favour of the undistinguished Robin Oakley. But if the job is defined as macho, then women’s faces don’t fit.

Reports of this have wrongly focused on the old BBC problem with bias. Marr was persecuted by the Mail because he came from the Independent and the Observer. Robinson is said to redress that because he was national chairman of the Young Conservatives for a year under Thatcher. However if he is on the right, he is a very wet pro-European: his vicious film on Iain Duncan Smith certainly pulled no punches. Despite plenty of Tory-leaning editors in senior positions the BBC always jumps more nervously at charges of leaning leftwards than at those of rightwing bias. (Murdoch’s Fox News was at it again recently.)

No, bias either way is not the problem. The issue here is how politics should be reported. The BBC’s big political beasts – John Humphrys, Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Neil and now Nick Robinson – all treat politics and politicians in more or less the same way: with naked contempt. Default mode is to regard all politicians as liars. If they are only laying out some prosaic but important policy, then the only way the viewer/listener might possibly be saved from boredom is by assault and battery on them.

When I was the BBC’s social affairs editor, and later called back on a small outside committee of advisers to look at political coverage, the navel-gazing at senior levels was intense, and it remains so. How can the BBC do better at getting people to watch politics and engage with the issues of the day? Public-service broadcasting has a duty to citizenship. Squadrons of pollsters and flotillas of BBC editors regularly consider the problem, but somewhere between the seminars and the newsroom falls the shadow. (How did they spend the first 20 minutes of their flagship “serious” 10 o’clock news bulletin on the Michael Jackson verdict?)

The mighty BBC news machine dominates not just in sheer volume, but as a sheet-anchor of authority in the rudderless anarchy of what is or isn’t “news”. Other media seize on the agenda chosen by the Today programme, Breakfast or the World at One, watching how the story is angled on the six and the 10. But the paradox is that the BBC newsroom is itself gripped by self-doubt and easily dragged into whatever agenda the press has confected. BBC producers scan newspapers anxiously to affirm the correctness of their own news decisions, so the raucous mainly rightwing attack press too often pulls the BBC on to its own terrain.

It is exceedingly hard for the BBC to stand firm as the still point in the swirling waters of the great noise of newspaper opinion. Mainly it succeeds, but it could try harder. There is now no competition worth the name: what ITV or Sky does need not concern the BBC. (With Mark Mardell as new Europe editor it can at last cover the absorbing politics of our near neighbours.) The 39% who didn’t vote at the last election show that disengagement and distrust run deep. Politicians can take some blame – the least they could do is create a fairer voting system – but the media bear a heavy responsibility too. Pollsters find voters turned off by ya-boo, yet the media respond with yet more politics as blood sport. Bullying star interviewers are more powerful, famous and self-important than the wretched morsel of a temporary minister served up for the day’s ritual goring. Women viewers and voters are especially alienated by it. Did the BBC run any viewer research on a preference for killer Robinson versus the analytical Kearney?

With Labour in power for so long and no opposition worth the kicking, some of these presenters take it on themselves to redress the imbalance. How else can they show impartiality? But bias is not the enemy so much as that old “bias against understanding”. What politician ever dare have a remotely interesting speculative conversation in public in the face of this barrage? The BBC might try to make it possible.

It may be unfair to judge Robinson by the style of reporting demanded of him at the struggling ITV news. Once back at the BBC he will not need to shout so loud: he is certainly clever and knowledgeable. But this was one of those defining moments when the BBC had to choose between two attitudes towards politics – and sadly they chose combat.

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Tags: Another, Joins, Macho, Matadors, Pack, Rottweiler