Seeing the tree for the woods

So, a few days ago, there was a nasty accident on a rollercoaster at Alton Towers, in which several people were injured.  It was very bad, and some of the injuries were quite serious.  It was also the first accident of its kind at a park owned by Merlin Entertainment ever.  Merlin, by all accounts, seem to have responded entirely appropriately, co-operating fully with the H&S executive, reaching out the families of all the victims in positive dialogue, and closing all similar rides at other parks until the cause of the accident was able to be identified.

A few days later, the CEO of Merlin Entertainment, in understandable demand from the media, appeared on Sky News to be interviewed by Kay Burley.

The 'interview' seemed to make uncomfortable viewing for all concerned, with the exception of Burley, who in her trademark blunt style repeatedly fired increasingly bizarre questions at Mr Varney, who to his credit took it all very calmly, and didn't ever step over from polite refutation and explanation into defensiveness - something which must have been incredibly difficult given the increasingly hostile and repetitive line of questioning, which included Burley repeatedly trying to get Varney to confirm details of the injuries to one of the victims (details not having been officially released by the family themselves) in spite of him politely saying several times that he had no intention of doing so.  This was less an attempt at journalism (exposing the facts of an incident of public interest) and more an exercise in emotive character assassination, attempting to fluster the interviewee and put words in his mouth, and becoming increasingly aggressive and repetitive as he refused to co-operate.

The interview caused somewhat of a storm on social media, with a petition starting (because these days we can't have anything vaguely controversial happen without there being a petition about it) demanding that Sky News immediately Sack Burley for the 'awful way she conducted her interview' and went on at some length to describe how she had been 'rude' and 'patronising' and all sorts of other terrible things which had been an 'embarrassment to Sky News'.

Now, first of  all, I am not sure how a news organisation like Sky News, which delights in muck raking at each and every opportunity, can be 'embarrassed' by one of its employees doing exactly what they no doubt pay her rather handsomely to do.  But that's rather by the by.  My main issue with this is what I might tentatively describe as the 'Clarkson Syndrome'.  Bear with me, because this one takes a little explaining.

Jeremy Clarkson has said, at various times, some pretty questionable and outright stupid things in his time as a broadcaster.  He has made comments which were racially inflammatory, comments which were blatantly mysoginistic and comments of a homophobic nature.  He has variously offended entire countries, communities and genders.  He is, by any measure, somewhat of an idiot.

Nevertheless, the constant and focused attention on Jeremy Clarkson in his years at Top Gear as the Most Evil Man in Television always somewhat bemused me.  Not because I agreed with the things that he said, nor the usual refrain of 'Ugh, it was a JOKE' that would peal loud and clear from the rooftops of every Jezza fan.  But more simply because Top Gear is a television programme.  Broadcast by the BBC.  That means, whenever he said one of these 'inadvisable' things on the show about truckers and prostitutes or gay people or Mexicans or women, there had been a whole crew - cameramen, grips, editors, producers, sound guys, directors etc etc, who had all seen him do it and said nothing, and then cut the show together and left it in, and then sent it to some programme controller at the Beeb to review before broadcast who had similarly said 'Yep, looks good to me' and passed it on.  ONLY when the inevitable backlash would occur would good old Jezza be hauled before someone at the Beeb and then delivered to somewhere to gurn his way through some half assed apology which one could always see he not only didn't mean but occasionally didn't really seem to understand and then all would carry on until the next time.

If you want proof of this concept, look at the whole 'N' word furore, wherein Clarkson allegedly mumbled the offensive word in a repetition of a nursery rhyme half a dozen or so times in a scene which was then cut, presumably because however unclear it was (and having listened to the tape myself many times over, it REALLY was) the people looking at it had the sense to go 'Hmmm, bit not good allowing him to say that word in any way'.  So it wasn't that the people involved in the making of the show COULDN'T recognise when a faux pas was made, it just seems that in many cases it was ignored.

So yes, Clarkson is a fool and an idiot and quite possibly a bigot, but focusing on him has the convenience of ignoring just how institutionalised his attitudes were, not only amongst the show staff and his co-presenters, but in the BBC itself.  Which to me is the far more salient and worrying fact to consider.  After all, if one middle aged presenter is a bigoted arsehole, you can sack him and solve the problem.  If the sort of casual bigotry he represents is endemic to an entire broadcaster, the problem becomes a little more difficult to address.

Which brings me back to Burley.  Yes, she is the one on the screen saying these things, but she is the front piece of an entire news broadcaster.  She doesn't sit alone making judgement calls at her desk on what to say, she's wearing an earpiece into which her director and producer and all sorts of other important folk who pay her wages can speak, and is in front of an entire studio.  At any point, if anyone at Sky had an issue with what she was saying (and if they in any way were shooting for a dignified and decent example of broadcast journalism then they bloody well should have) then they could have intervened.  They didn't, tarring them with the exact same brush which people seem happy enough to confine to Burley.  What she does on a regular basis (and let's be honest here, this is FAR from an isolated example of her style of 'interviewing') isn't right, but to simply target her as if to day 'get rid of her and the problem goes away' is wrong headed at worst, and naive at best.

And that leads me to another point - the way in which criticism is addressed to her.  I think to start this, it's best that I point you to this article

So, Eve Simmons thinks that we should recognise Kay Burley as some sort of Feminist Icon, and that the storm of criticism which has flowed forth against her in the last few days is sexist and wrong.  She cites examples such as Jeremy Paxman, John Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy in her comparative defence, asking why none of them were the subject of petitions for being sacked after, respectively, calling Ed Miliband a 'North London Geek', accusing Alex Ferguson of being 'Stalinist' and delving into personal details of previous battles with drugs and alcohol during an interview to promote a new summer blockbuster for kids.  She also cites perennial offender Eamonn Holmes for implying that a rape victim might have avoided her attack had she opted for a taxi home. Now, with regards to that last one, I suggest that you google the words 'Eamon Holmes, rape, taxi and see how many results come up, telling you all about how vilified he was, and how charities publicly demand he apologise for his remarks.  It being 2011 at the time, we weren't quite into the current phase of petitions demanding people be sacked for everything ever, but believe me, he didn't get off lightly from his idiotic comments.

Regards the other three examples, I am actually frankly staggered that Simmons thinks that these are in any way comparative.  Paxman has made a career out of patronising politicians - people who exercise power over every person in the UK and who in return have very little in the way of genuine accountability.  That there was an interviewer ready, nay eager, to puncture their collective sense of self-importance was to be welcomed.  Additionally, Paxman did not 'call' Miliband a North London Geek, he reiterated a popular phrase that had been doing the rounds in the media.  There are many reasons to dislike Paxman (and I do) including his latter love with his own legend and his all-consuming arrogance, but I think this example in no way comparative to the Burley interview.  I am not especially familiar with the Snow interview or whatever was happening when he made the comment, but again I would argue that a passing comment about the political ideology of a public figure is somewhat different from a sustained and aggressive interrogation of a private individual who happens to be the CEO of a company.  And the Downey Junior thing was ill-judgment on Guru-Murthy's part.  That he thought it appropriate to ask such questions in that environment, and then sought to defend it on the basis of C4 news 'not doing puff pieces' (I can't think why this would be your defence when you are blatantly sat there in a junket room with a tier one Hollywood A lister to ask them questions about their new summer popcorn flick). If Guru-Murthy wanted a serious interview with RDJ about his former issues, he should have requested one - this was cheap, lazy ambush journalism, and I think that the fact that he was not only savaged by RDJ himself in the press but also by most of the internet and the media was adequate 'punishment'.  There was in fact a petition for Channel 4 to apologise, but it got 16 signatures before closure.

The point is, Simmons actually raises a valid point, but does so in the most wrong-headed and ridiculous way imaginable. Because here's the thing - Kay Burley IS a woman in a prime position.  She's beaten the odds in more ways than one.  She's not from a privileged background, she is still working in a prominent position in her fifties and - shock of all shocks - she is a woman.  These facts on their own are to be lauded.  It isn't common or usual for a woman of her age to be in the position that she occupies, much less a woman from a less privileged background who has doubtless had to fight her way to get there.

And even more pertinently, at least some of the criticism that is noisily thrown Burley's way IS sexist in the way that it is couched.  For example, look at this video of 'Kay Burley's Worst Bits'

Between every segment (and at the beginning) we get a picture of Burley with the caption: KAY BURLEY: SKY NEWS OLD AND HAGGARD RESIDENT PIG.  I struggle to think of the last time that age was brought up as a criticism of Jeremy Paxman (65), Jon Snow (67), Eamon Holmes (55) or Robert Kilroy Silk (73) yet Kay Burley (54) is apparently fair game for being 'old and haggard'.  Come to think of it, I struggle to think of any of those male broadcasters ever being criticised in general for their appearance, let alone being called a 'pig'.

But if you comb through the comments on twitter and on the petition (as I have briefly done) there doesn't seem to be much of the sort of thing that one would normally expect to see whenever a woman dares raise her voice in public.  There are no sexual threats or comments on her looks (that I have seen) - to be clear, I am not saying that they don't happen, but they are clearly not all that prominent, most people just feel that she was 'rude', 'disrespectful' and 'bullying'.  If the argument is to whether people would feel the same had a man conducted the interview the same way, well that's an interesting theoretical, but unfortunately they didn't so we won't ever know.  The funniest bit of all is that Simmons starts her piece with an apology to Burley, for having done her own job in interviewing her a little while ago, following the 'brief' she was given to get some embarrassing revelation or comment from her.  Which sort of proves my whole point - Simmons clearly expects the reader to sympathise with her mea culpa because 'the editor made me do it' but seems either blissfully ignorant of happy to gloss over the possibility that perhaps Burley was under the same pressure to perform when she interrogated Varney, with a man (or woman) in her ear telling her to press harder and keep asking until he cracked, choosing instead to attempt to defend the interview on the basis of being 'hard journalism' rather than the car wreck of attempted emotional manipulation it so clearly was.

Perhaps this is the way that Burley has made her way.  Perhaps it all just boils down to her giving the producers and directors (and by extension the audience) exactly what they want.  Somehow, given her unapologetically 'feisty' persona and incidents like pinning a camerawoman to the wall by her throat because she had - horror of horrors - accidentally caught her in the face with the edge of her camera in a media scrum, suggest otherwise.  Burley is no shrinking violet.  She may be giving the people who run Sky News what they want, but it isn't, I suspect, purely done for a quiet life.  I would hazard a guess from her body language, her general demeanour and her twitter outpourings that she thoroughly enjoys herself in doing what she does.  I just think that if we all really thought about it, we'd realise that targeting her and ignoring the huge corporation, nay institution, that is standing behind her and driving all that she does is rather akin to attempting to putting up an umbrella in a hurricane.