All entries for Monday 03 April 2006

Newsnight: Latin America

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight

Hot off the heels of (and no doubt because of) Channel 4 News's Week in Iran, BBC Newsnight is this week bringing us a special week of programmes live from various Latin American countries. A worthy idea, but having just watched Monday's programme, it was hardly up to Newsnight's usual standard.

Gavin Estler was our man in Lima, introducing two interesting reports the first about the upcoming elections in Peru and the second about Argentina's maverick president.

The first – by Estler – was an interesting portrait of the tip for the Peruvian presidency, Ollanta Humala, but ruined by a terribly fake interview with the candidate, over – believe it or not – a game of chess. Pull the other one Gavin. Seeing as the two participants spoke different languages it was clear the interview wasn't much of a conversation, but incredibly it was Gavin Estler's wooden questions that gave it away the most.

Greg Palast's film on the Venezuelan's president Hugo Chavez was more my kind of report. Witty, irreverent and well written taking us through Palast's trip to the country. It too had a multilingual interview, but Palast didn't try and con us by conducting during a tennis match or something. Although he did let the president try on his trademark hat which was nice. Most of all it was an interesting insight into a president sitting on supposedly the biggest oil well in the world, who spends all his time planning a weekly 6-hour TV programme which he presents from behind a desk. Not sure what Paul O'Grady would make of that.

It was also a chuckler, because Channel 4 News in learning of Newnight's plans apparently tried to pre-empt the Beeb by getting the Chavez interview first. In doing so they pissed off Chavez so much he went straight to Newsnight anyway.

And finally back out to Gavin, given the demanding task of interviewing 4 people, 2 of whom were via satellite. The most interesting was Otto Reich a former US politician who specialised America's Latin America policy. It should have been a good chance to challenge the American's highly dubious policy in the region. Instead Estler spent most of the time trying to cut Otto off, which is rather hard given the time difference (try interrupting your elderly granny over the phone), and ended up cutting the poor guy off half way through his answers with little remorse.

So much to improve on. And obviously Paxman wasn't too impressed - the look on his face I should imagine resemblant of that when his children come home and tell him they only got a B in their last exam.

: 03 Apr 2006 23:39 |  Tags: Broadcast Journalism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem