Abstract
“Minister, are you going to resign?”… “Prime minister, when will you fire the home secretary?” … “Boris, when will you apologise for your insult?” Viewers of TV news are used to hearing such questions shouted by unseen journalists from behind cameras trained on politicians as they leave 10 Downing Street or their homes.
Rarely, if ever, does the politician answer. Then again, that's not really the point of this pathetic ritual. There cannot be a better definition of a rhetorical question, since the shouter doesn't expect, or even want, a verbal response. Far better to show an MP, whether smiling or grimacing, ducking silently into a car or scurrying away down a street.
It could be argued that the intention is to suggest to viewers that the target has something to hide or is refusing to do face-to-face interviews. Some people, probably a minority, may indeed think that.
Much more likely is the drip-drip effect on the audience. Day by day, shout by unanswered shout, the clips contribute to public cynicism about politicians. As worrying, is the thought that it also contributes to cynicism about journalists.
Back in the 80s, when the practice is thought to have started, its freshness was somewhat appealing. It had a democratic feel to it, a guarantee that we were no longer subject to the age of deference. Journalists were not merely going to observe politicians and keep quiet while waiting for an arranged sit-down interview. They were seeking to throw them off their stride.
The woman credited as the shout-out pioneer, ITN's Joy Johnson, did hope to elicit some kind of response. One example occurred at the 1989 Conservative party conference when Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson walked together into the lobby of Blackpool's Imperial Hotel. Johnson shouted to Thatcher: “Do you have confidence in your chancellor, prime minister?”
Lawson, who later admitted it was a false show of unity, resigned days later, prompting Johnson to remark: “I should have directed the question to the chancellor and asked if he had confidence in his prime minister?” Johnson (a BJR board member) continues to believe in the validity of the exercise.
I cannot agree. It has become a thoughtless routine and its repetition on an almost daily basis undermines any journalistic value. Very occasionally, politicians do respond, but without offering a newsworthy quote. They reveal nothing of consequence. Most often, they pin on smiles and go about their business.
For many years, the noisiest of shouters was the BBC producer Paul Lambert, who was nicknamed “Gobby” by his colleagues. Asked in 2013 about the point of his work, he said it was to “fill in” an item in a TV bulletin “when you haven't got pictures”. The following year, he left the BBC to become UKIP's communications chief and then found himself being shouted at in the street by Channel 4's Michael Crick: “Are you going to resign after this shambles of a conference?”
Good fun, of course, watching the biter bit, but it also indicated the real reason for the custom's enduring use: it is entertainment rather than journalism. It does not inform. It is broadcast for the viewers’ amusement, although the likely result is far from funny. In its most recent iteration, where the shouter often appears on screen, it is also contributing further to another disease of TV news: the celebritisation of the shouter. The most obvious example is the BBC's political editor, Laura Kuenssberg. Excellent in so many respects, she should pull back from this nonsense. As should all TV news editors.
Shouting questions is, to be frank, childish, asinine, superficial, pseudo-journalism. It is a pretence that the journalist is asking a question on behalf of voters. In fact, by constructing the most provocative question to which the shouter knows there will be no answer, the journalist is taking part in a charade.
One of its critics, George Pitcher, who lectures on journalistic ethics at the LSE, believes the shout-outs, at one extreme, amount to a version of virtue-signalling. But, at the other, he warns that they resemble the cry of the mob. There is something to that. Shouting at politicians became a familiar sport outside parliament during the Brexit debates and led, inevitably, to threatening behaviour, as suffered by the then – Conservative MP Anna Soubry when she was called a Nazi.
Perhaps the best, and wittiest, response to the practice was by Oliver Pritchett in his Sunday Telegraph column in July 2016, under the guise of “Visiting Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nether Wallop”.
In next year's module on television and politics, he wrote, “I will be dealing with the Theory and Practice of Shouting Questions at Politicians as They Walk to Their Cars. This will involve some on-the-spot practical experience and you are advised to spend time in the vacation familiarising yourselves with some notable pavements and trying out a few shouts, such as, ‘Are you thoroughly ashamed of yourself, minister?’ Or, ‘Have you been sacked?”'.
Pritchett noted that there “appears to be a competition between journalists about a) who can shout the loudest; b) who can ask the silliest question; and c) who can be the rudest”. And he concluded: “They really should shut up… The shouters may well argue that one day, just possibly, an MP will stop in his/her tracks, turn back and say something of enormous import. And pigs will fly.” Exactly.