Form of a Question: How we talk politics matters and context is too often neglected

How we talk politics in the public sphere matters. In political interviews, the most common space, we need to consider carefully the form of questions, because context is often neglected despite mattering deeply.

Owen Jones stirred up a few hornets nests in the last week, by calling into question both the ingrained privilege and biases of those who work in the British media. Despite some angry response, the statistics align with his point.

It is important to question our assumptions. To look at the facts from a number of angles. It is the job of any good journalist. And that, sometimes, means journalists looking at themselves and those they work with.

Especially when it comes the politics in it's rawest form, we need to think and act carefully. The media doesn't just shine a ray of light on the lay of the land, it gives structure to the whole weather system and decides what parts of it we are even able to see.

For most viewers, the crucible in which most Westminster politics is consumed is in the form of the political interview. From Andrew Neil, Laura Kuenssberg and Andrew Marr at the BBC, to Robert Peston at ITV or Krishnan Guru-Murthy at Channel 4, it is a high profile format.

It's also a highly problematic format. I'm not looking here to tear down any practitioners of the political interview 'genre'. But there are questions that should be raised about it's dynamics and how the process unfolds.

The way interviewers approach these set-pieces raise a lot of questions - all of which need careful thoughts. They are gatekeepers to platforms, some with colossal reach. As such they have extraordinary political power, and that must always be held to account.

But here I want to focus on a very particular issue. At present, the common form of questioning in a standard political interview does two things - that might be thought of as mistakes - that seem to render the interviews futile.

From the outside, these interviews follow a particular course - as follows.

Mistake 1: The interviewer asks a question that is phrased in a way that casts them as a proxy for their interviewee's opponents. That means the interviewer adopts the opponent's subjective context as the framing device for the question - as in, what they, subjectively, construe as good and bad.

The result of this is that the interviewee avoids giving a straight answer. They instead attempt to reframe the question to their own - in essence, polemically opposed - context, simply because their own context is an intrinsic part of why they believe what the stand for is 'good'.

Mistake 2: The interviewer treats this attempt to reframe, on the part of the interviewee, as a refusal to give a straight answer and treats them as hostile. They demand that their interviewee give a simple answer within the invalid framing, despite it being fundamentally ill-fitting and distortionary to any answer that might be given.

The result is that the interviewee is rendered incapable of answering the question, as even if they wanted to give a straight answer - or often any answer at all - the framing of the question directly prevents them from doing so.

Any answer given by an interviewee, in this environment that rips it from its native context, is robbed of it's meaning and serves only the opponent's narrative.

Consider an example.

The Tories traditionally think that tax & spend is 'Bad'. So if Labour tax & spend, then Labour are framed as 'Bad' - in this case with the meanings of wasteful, redistributing in a socially negative way that rewards bad habits, etcetera.

However, Labour traditionally think that tax & spend is 'Good'. Yet to confirm their commitment within the framing of the Conservatives is incorrect - in this different context, the meaning is different. Context changes meaning.

That means that, in this scenario, a Labour spokesperson is rendered unable to answer such a question - without first being able to address, and contest, the context within which the answer will be understood.

In this hostile environment, unable to answer, they must either conform to the narrative, or fight it - leading to the perception of evasiveness under questioning or deception, both of which will be criticised.

These points matter.

One direct consequence of this form of questioning is that it creates the perception of politicians who won't answer questions, by directly preventing them from being able to.

In a world in which snippets of interviews are seen more than whole recordings, it also gives people an incorrect impression of deeply-biased mainstream journalists parroting the polarised positions of political parties.

This process, additionally, affords an absurd amount of power to those who 'create the political weather' - who lead the public conversations on values. To a media cycle built around creating and then reporting on, and thus reinforcing, public opinion.

There are no easy answers to this. What is the root of this? Is there perhaps a misunderstanding about what it means to be 'balanced'? Or is it as simple as time constraints?

Either way, context is being left out of the dominant form of political discussions. And that is a mistake. Possibly a tragic one. In politics, every idea, every policy, has a context that gives it meaning.

In fact the fight over the context is often far more important than the day to day fight over any given policy. It is the big war, fought behind the scenes - but it should be up front, in the spotlight.