Well-remunerated though the job may be, however, there is a price to pay for fronting these programmes. One is the feeling that since you are up there you must be up there for a reason, and that although you don’t always feel like you know much you must do — or you wouldn’t be up there, would you?
I know a journalist who was once introduced by accident as an ‘aviation expert’ on a programme and had that momentary flicker “Well if I’m being introduced as an aviation expert then I must in fact be an aviation expert.”
Since the beginning of this crisis Peston has been attempting, less successfully than Piers Morgan it must be said, to show himself to be the one who still knows the crucial questions to ask. No area of oversight or ignorance can ever be conceded or otherwise admitted to. Why does Britain do less testing than Germany? Why does [insert country name] have better provisions than [insert other country name]? On and on it goes, not to get to any truth but to play the old game that journalists of Peston’s generation and ilk have been playing for years.
Deprived of any story that would allow them to be Bernstein and Woodward, they had to make do instead with showing that they knew more than, say, Chris Grayling and could by constant interruption expose such a person as not being sufficiently on top of their brief.
What is so beautiful about Peston’s interview this week with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam is that even when he is shown up Peston cannot shut up. Because his primary goal is to ensure that he does not come out of it looking bad, or as though he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Each time he opens his mouth it is clear once again that he is trying to ‘gotcha’ the Deputy Chief Medical Officer based on information that he, Peston, has clearly crammed up on only minutes earlier.
Even now, after the interview has gone viral, Peston is trying to mop up on social media in a way that is positively Newman-esque — by pretending that he is a victim. “I was slightly taken aback at the ferocity of the Deputy Chief Medical Officer’s response,” he declared.
People can judge for themselves whether van Tam was ferocious or just calm and patient, but the ego will not let it go, and so he continued: “Just to be clear, I do understand the difference between an antibody and an antigen test. What I wanted to gauge was whether this rapid antibody test could help solve the problem of insufficient PCR (antigen) testing capacity. This was not an unreasonable line of inquiry, in…”
And on he went.
It is tempting to say that this is an unprecedented situation and so the media is doing the best it can — but that isn’t the case. Instead the same style of journalism has been on display and been revealed to be vapid.
After the killing of Qassem Soleimani in January there was a noisy if less virulent outbreak of the same problem. Presenters and pundits who had barely if ever heard of the Iranian general filled the airwaves with their golden insights.
“Was this a Franz Ferdinand moment?” was the sort of ‘clever’ question they asked repeatedly. No it clearly wasn’t, but the charade carried on regardless, with the presumption that nobody would remember next week, and besides which, something else would come along soon.
As indeed it has.
Of course there is, and must be, a place in every society for people asking awkward questions. But asking awkward, difficult questions is a different thing from asking the wrong questions, or asking questions which are ill-informed. And perhaps, during an epidemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, and in which very difficult decisions must be made based on highly complex scientific calculations, that kind of gotcha journalism is no longer a public service but a public nuisance.
Journalism is at a difficult enough juncture, and there are many people in the trade who know a great deal. But the whole profession would be enormously helped if its most prominent representatives stopped giving off the impression of thinking that the primary problem with real experts is that they don’t listen to journalists enough.
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