When Emily Maitlis was growing up, everything stopped for the news. Her father would tune in religiously to the evening bulletins and nobody was allowed to interrupt the pips. The news mattered. For his daughter, it still does. She slid into journalism virtually by accident, but takes it very seriously indeed. As a Newsnight presenter she didn’t just live from headline to headline, but would stand back and reflect on the craft. In her memoir Airhead, in which she analyses old interviews and teases out the often uncomfortable ethical dilemmas raised by questioning a Donald Trump or a Steve Bannon, you occasionally catch a sense of frustration between the lines; something she seemingly wants to say but can’t. This week, having left the BBC to start a new podcast with fellow former BBC stalwart Jon Sopel, she finally let rip.
Populism, she argued in a clearly cathartic appearance before the Edinburgh TV festival, was tying the media up in knots. Politicians were acting in ways that are “deeply and clearly deleterious to basic democratic government”, trampling over constitutional norms, making “things that would once have shocked us now seem commonplace”. But journalists still clung to an old idea of impartiality and balance – that both sides must get an equal say, and let the viewer decide – which is effectively now being weaponised against them. To have a pro-Brexit economist debate a pro-remain one on air was not “balance”, she said, if economists generally were so overwhelmingly against leaving that it took hours of ringing round to find one lone maverick in favour. Broadcasters now reject such false equivalence on topics where scientific consensus is overwhelming, from climate change to vaccination, so why not in economics?
