Newsnight host Emily Mitlis took aim at Donald Trump, the British government and the BBC – her soon-to-be former employer – in a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival on Wednesday night. But more importantly, she’s given no clue about her infamous interview with Prince Andrew, which she now hopes will turn into a written drama.
“I apologize to anyone who came thinking this was going to be about meeting Prince Andrew,” said Mitlis, who is said to have signed a deal with Blueprint Pictures to make a screen adaptation of the interview. “This will have to wait until next time.”
While many of Maitlis MacTaggart’s lecture attendees had hoped she would talk about the “car accident” interview, which saw Andrew kicked out of public life after it aired, Maitlis chose instead to focus on the journalistic landscape, giving examples of her own interviews with a counselor. Ex-Trump Sebastian Gorka and actor Robert De Niro.
“I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to hold power to account,” she said in opening her speech. Princes, prime ministers, presidents and policy makers. But that’s the thing. It has become – and becomes – more difficult. And tonight I want to explore it. Because my suspicions – no, be braver – my thesis is that political actors have changed. The policy has changed. But as journalists, we haven’t caught up with him yet.”
She went on to say there is a “total disconnect” between the current cost of living crisis and the current Conservative leadership election, which will determine the next prime minister after Boris Johnson’s resignation, which she described as a “circus of power vacuum”.
Mitlis also targeted the way in which public figures have increasingly attempted to discredit the media, citing her interviews with Gorka as an example, as he “was taking up most of the interview time by shouting abuse at the BBC,” she said. .
In response, Mitlis said she tried to defend the announcer. “It’s crazy,” she said of the interview. He was accused of gaining traction on social media. And it allowed him to become a viable debater. See where I’m going with this. Either way, Gorka won, and BBC lost.”
And while Mitlis said her lecture wouldn’t be “a post-BBC employee talk” – she took the opportunity to pay tribute to her former employer, who operates with strict rules of integrity – she described her talk as a “breath. A deep breath. All the things that could not have been said wisely in That time, it can be said more easily now.”
However, the BBC has reached out to apologize “quickly” after the British government press offers to express its dismay in a Newsnight segment about an aide of Boris Johnson violating lockdown rules during the pandemic.
“Why did the BBC immediately and publicly seek to confirm the government spokesperson’s opinion?” asked Mitlis. “Without any kind of due process? Doesn’t it make sense for an organization with impressive and famous rigor about procedures – unless it might send a reassurance message directly to the government itself?”
Earlier this year, Mitlis announced that she was leaving the BBC after two decades to host a podcast at Global alongside Jon Sobel, BBC North America Editor.
It also reported an interview with actor Robert De Niro in which he criticized Trump for his handling of the pandemic. Maitlis revealed that after she finished the interview she told her editor Adam Komsky, “We can’t rule it out. He’s very anti-Trump.”
“Adam looks at me to see if I’m kidding,” she recalls. And I’m not. I’m terrified that by putting the interview as it is, we’ll be seen as biased. De Niro is a world-renowned actor, a New Yorker who has chosen our show, “Newsnight,” as a place to land his ideas so carefully. So why I feel unable to let him say that without trying to find a world-famous actor who on the same night will miraculously tell us the opposite. Wouldn’t I fall for both sides—the wrong equivalence—even if we had?”
It speaks again of the power of imagined populist accusations of bias in a journalist’s brain. So much so, that we censored our private interviews to avoid backlash.”
At the end of the lecture, Mitlis spoke briefly about her upcoming global podcast, “News Agents,” which she said “will give us room to move away from the cellophane-wrapped formalities, to lift the curtain on why things happen, and how we do it. Choose our stories and how we book our guests.” Pro-X vs Pro-Y cliched gameplay, we may pick the nuances as we did in [BBC podcast] Americast.
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