Walking The Dog with Emily Dean - Cathy Newman (Part Two)

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

We’re back in Brockwell Park with Cathy Newman! Cathy’s got a cat - a Russian Blue called Cher who didn't join us on the walk, however we think Raymond reawakened her inner dog-lover. Is it time to get a whippet?!Cathy tells us all about how she worked her way up through journalism to become the presenter of Channel 4 News. She talks about her famous interview with Jordan Peterson, and how she dealt with the abuse she received afterwards.If you haven’t heard the first part of this chat, you can listen to it hereThe Ladder is available now! You can get your copy hereFollow Emily: Instagram - @emilyrebeccadeanX - @divine_miss_emWalking The Dog is produced by Faye LawrenceMusic: Rich Jarman Artwork: Alice LudlamPhotography: Karla Gowlett  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I really hope you enjoy part two of Walking the Dog with Kathy Newman. Do remember to listen to Part 1 if you haven't already and we'd love it if you subscribe to Walking the Dog. Here's Kathy and Ray Ray. When did you move to Channel 4? It was around 2006. 2006, yeah, 2006. So I was a chief political correspondent on the Financial Times

and I started doing sort of punditry, you know, commenting on politics. and and you know you know sometimes at the end of a channel four or news night they have two journalists of arguing the toss about a political story of the day so I started doing that and then when the political correspondent job came up at channel four news it was suggested that I go for it and I got it and did that for several years I'm trying to think yeah about five years I think it was and then I became presenter I get the sense that you were you were a little bit nervous to begin with, though. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, my first live as a TV correspondent,

I almost got run over. So that was tricky. And it was not a roaring success. Let's just say that. Why? Well, because it's somehow slightly terrifying. Although I had been a pundit, when you become a fully fledged TV correspondent, it's very different from being a pundit, you know, for a newspaper who happens to go on telly occasionally, because you've got to bear in mind all the impartiality rules and you know you've got to do an absolutely to time live of you know two and a half minutes where you've got to get all the facts in and correct and preferably without looking down at your notes too much so I found that whole business initially quite terrifying and but then I loved it I mean I loved all the sort of skullduggery and intrigue of Westminster and sort of getting that on

the telly and the sort of live nature of a lot of these political stories. And there was always some sort of drama and quite often that would kick off just before we went live and I love the excitement of that. Are you a bit of an adrenaline junkie then? Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I mean, I read the, I read the news even on holiday. You know, I read it all. And I'll always have, if there's an alert that comes up, you know, I will always look at it seconds later. It drives my kids slightly mad. But, yeah, I mean, presenting is a whole other different kettle of fish. you're holding the whole show together

so if something goes wrong it's all on you really I mean obviously there's a huge team of people behind the scenes who but my point is that if something goes wrong you are the on-screen person trying desperately to hold it together and I remember once very early in my presenting career there was a one of the cameras had gone wrong

and for some reason in the gallery, which is the kind of behind the scenes bit, they didn't know that I couldn't see any auto queue on this camera. And because it was early in my presenting career, I hadn't so got used to the fact that I had a pile of scripts on my desk. And obviously now, I would just pick them up and start reading from the scripts until the camera came back on.

But I didn't do that. And I was kind of like a rabbit in the headlights for at least 10 seconds, which is an eternity in live TV. I think often women do feel they have to, ask permission. Yeah. You know, it's like your instinct is often right and it's about learning to trust your instinct that you probably knew you could go to those scripts.

I think it's also just not worrying about screwing up so much. And I think women are so, and I'm, you know, I've said, I've said several times I'm a perfectionist and that is good because you're going to get your facts right, you're going to check your facts. It all goes into that whole thing of drive and the wanting to succeed. But that you don't, sometimes it's occurred. because you can be so worried about getting everything right that you're you're not relaxed enough and one thing my first TV boss said to me was that the worst

thing is if the viewer feels uncomfortable so if you're looking stressed out the viewer's going to be stressed out so I think I've learnt that's just come with with age and experience really that if something goes wrong you've just got to be the kind of swan serenely floating and your legs are paddling very fast underneath. You know, anything can happen on live TV. And I remember reading Andrew Mars book, who, like me, he went from newspapers. In fact, he was my old boss at the independent. Not the challenging boss. He was a very lovely boss. But he went, made the same trajectory from newspapers to TV. I remember reading his book and he's so right that he says,

you know, with live TV, you're never 100% happy. Because nothing ever goes to 100% right. And for a perfectionist, that's a hard lesson to learn, but it's a very important lesson. And I think it's an important lesson of life too Because, you know, I struggle with, you know, I want my house to look like a hotel, but of course it doesn't. And I struggle with that. So I want the world to be a very nice boutique hotel. It's not.

I mean, that's just ridiculous. So that is a learning curve that I am, you know, I'm halfway up that learning curve, I think. Yeah. Every day is a school day. You had a slightly weird encounter with Jordan. Peterson and when you had that encounter with Jordan Peterson I think you dealt with it with a lot of class and dignity and not everybody agrees that's okay I disagree with them well you know it was

tricky because the day of that the day before that interview I'd had an array of really challenging interviews for that night's program on I think there was one was on Syria there was another on something very meaty interviews and so I I'd spent all day preparing that. When I got to the end of the show, I had this book on my desk, which was Jordan Peterson's book. And I had, you know, it was completely unrealistic to read and digest it and research it by 10 a.m. the next morning, which was when the interview was. Obviously, if I'd known then what I know now, I would have said, hang on a sec. I need a week to get my head around this.

And I didn't have that. So I did the best I could under the circumstances. And, you know, I do hundreds of interviews a year. and not all of them go right, as Andrew Maher says. You know, not everything goes 100% right in live TV. He's undealable with. But remember, I didn't know that at the time because there wasn't even a Wikipedia page on him at the time, by the way.

He was that unknown. So I had no idea what to expect, really. I just sort of thought, oh, well, I've done... I've read the book as best I can, and, you know, there's some interesting stuff we can talk about gender pay, and there you go. But it was interesting that what you did, we see things as a sort of gladiatorial battle because everything's based on male culture.

And actually what you were doing, which is how women approach things, which is, oh, okay, fair point. Yeah, I mean, I was sort of punished for that. People talked about his gotcha moment. But yeah, I don't mind that at all. I don't mind admitting that, actually, yeah, you've got a point there. I think that's fine. That's the whole point about debate, I think. Yeah.

But mainly the thing I wanted to say. was, I'm so sorry that you had such a horrible fallout from that. Oh, well, it's not your fault. I mean, there's always hate is going to hate. Isn't it Taylor Swift that said that? She's right. And, you know, that is unfortunate the world we live in. Yes, it was really horrible.

And the death threats and the doxing and the, you know, my kids stumbling across like pornographic memes was horrible. But in a way, to quote another, the cliche, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And having been through that, yeah. Yeah, nothing, you can sort of get through anything, really.

Did he ever get in touch with you and say sorry? When Channel 4 called in security because of all the death threats, he did sort of say to his followers, oh, you know, cool it, whatever. But I'm sure he'd love to do another interview but I'm not sure that's going to happen. I think we can go down the middle.

Let's give it a go, Cathy. Kathy, I want to know about your wonderful husband. John. John is, he's a writer as well and he's freelance, so does that mean he's sort of able to manage the household a bit when you're up and stuff? Yeah, I mean, he does all the shopping and the cooking, and he takes the lion's share of the childcare. He hates me saying how amazing he is in interviews because he just thinks people find it annoying.

I mean, he is amazing and I couldn't do what I do without him. I think it's really important though to recognise that that whole thing of you can have it all. You can't have it all and there are things that I've missed out on at home because of the job and there's things that John has missed out on career-wise because he's. he's, you know, doing all the childcare and the shopping and the cooking. So I don't think, you know, the idea that there is this kind of like amazing sort of domestic paradise where work and life is perfectly balanced is, it's that's a fallacy. So, yeah, it's totally the case that I think it's very hard to bring up two kids and have two

people in very demanding, stressful jobs. I don't think that's very easy to achieve. But the consequence of that is it means that one person's career has to sort of lose out a bit. And that's hard. You have been very emphatic, I've heard you say in the past, that you don't cook. Yep, don't, yeah. Well, I do occasionally cook a cake or biscuits. I haven't for ages, though. I think pumpkin tart was the last thing I did for Halloween. So, yeah, I think I, I don't, I mean, but that's, I don't, I don't really like cooking and I'm not very good at it. John does like cooking and he is good at it. So it's not like some feminist principles.

It's just how it's worked out, really. And I think loads of blokes cook now, don't they? But I think a lot of people do it in a very showy way, whereas John is, John very magnificently does the macaroni cheese on a school night and that kind of thing. I think it shows that he's confident in himself, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. I did a very good female thing there, didn't I, if that makes sense. I'm a man when you say that. I'm just going to, I'm not going to say that.

I'm going to keep it in to show that I've learned the error of my way. It's read Kathy's book. I'm going to say, I think he strikes me. Don't ask permission. That shows confidence, I think. I think so, but I think also, I think it's quite, there are going to be different phases. Going back to our life is long point.

They're going to be different phases of our life. where, you know, maybe the next phase of our life, his career comes to the fore and mine takes back seat. I don't know. I'm not volunteering. I'm not resigning right now. The thing about you, Cathy, is I can really imagine you putting your feet up and saying, oh, I'm not bothered by my career. I'm just going to sit here and watch boxers. Yeah, that doesn't really ring true, does it? Are you quite an organiser, Cathy? Very, very, very organised. In fact, the reason I rushed out the house this morning was I was trying to organise end of term for scholar, our eldest, who's at university.

I'm trying to combine that with a nice weekend. And I was sort of like doing all the bookings and blah blah, blah, blah. Everything's a, yeah, a juggle. But I love organising. Do you? Yeah, I have to. So although John does the cooking and the shopping, I am the organiser of the household. If that makes sense.

Do you deal with admin? I just did it there. See, we've got, do you know what? We're going to be on if that makes sense, what, to stop us. saying it. Maybe we should do a new podcast called If That Makes Sense. Actually, that's really a bad idea. I've got all these podcast titles

but I haven't yet done a podcast. I can't imagine. One thing I often end up talking about in this podcast is how people feel about confrontation and I don't think I've ever met anyone who I feel would be less concerned about it. I went and did a talk at a school

recently and they asked me do you ever get scared at interviewing people and I can't imagine being scared. I mean I went over to Moscow and interviewed Sergei Lavrov and that was moderately scary because you know he's quite a scary man and also it was not it was it was before the war but it wasn't that long before so Russia was you know we had to sort of take burner phones and you know we had to take all these kind of we had to be quite on our metal. Hello darling what kind of dog is this beautiful oh I love a Brea

French sheep dog. I knew she was a sheep dog of some sort, but in this sheep dog are there not completely different. Riyos are beautiful. Hello. Tibetan in there. Oh no, he's an Imperial Shih Tzu. I know.

Every time I say that, I feel I've put someone down. Imperial Shih Tzu does sound rather grand, doesn't it? This is Malka. Malka? Malka, which means queen in Hebrew. Oh, the queen and the... the emperor. Malcolm.

I'm meeting. Oh, look, and actually, look, this is the first time Raymond sat all walk. I mean, he's been dawdling all walk. Well, do you know, he, he's a bit bowing before the queen. Yeah, I think he is. I think he is slightly subservient.

It's very nice to meet, Malcolm. And you, Malcolm, are you quite good at containing your emotions? Or are you a crier? Oh, I am quite a crier. But it's interesting. I want some, I once saw John Snow start to cry in the studio when he was doing an interview.

I think it was Tahrir Square when, you know, there were the big demonstrations. And he was in the studio doing an interview down the line. And I remember thinking it's so interesting to see this titan of news being so moved by something, you know, decades after he first came into journalism. And I remember talking to him about it. And he said quite rightly that, you know, if you stop being moved, by the stories you're covering, that's when you should leave journalism really.

So I think it's really important to feel emotions and share the emotions of the people you're interviewing. But you also have to sort of hold it back a bit as well professionally. That must be quite hard sometimes. Yeah, I remember once in the pandemic, quite early on in the pandemic, do you remember that awful time when people were being buried and you know there were hasma there were people in hazmat suits around the graves and it seems

extraordinary now that we allowed that to happen but it was there was a 13 year old I think it was who actually died not far from here and there was a terrible picture of this little coffin and these people in hazmat suits round the coffin and I remember I hadn't seen it before we went live because it the pictures came in very late and that was our what we call pre-titled pictures so those were the pictures in the headline and I remember just feeling as I was reading it looking at the pictures

for the first time thinking oh my god this is just heartbreaking so yeah that the emotion was definitely there in my voice but there just needs to be a little bit of you know take a deep breath

and hold back a little bit because you're there after all to be the kind of authoritative of the in control voice. See, he keeps up more than how we're on the grass. Yeah, she does. He's a free-range dog.

He's a surface snob. Well, I suppose if you've got little paws, it's probably quite hard going along concrete, isn't it? What's angry, Kathy, like? Are you a shoutter or do you simmer? I'm not a shouter. I'm definitely a cryer rather than a shouter. I cry at the drop of a hat

with weepy films. I can imagine you are quite steely though. Yeah, because I'm not, I'm definitely not aggressive, aggressive. I'm really not a shouter and I don't like shouting confrontations. Yeah. But I will basically get my way very quietly. And yes, that's a little bit annoying, I'm sure. But yeah, I'll just keep badgering away until I sort of get the outcome I want really.

I think Raymond's a bit passive aggressive. Really. I mean, you know, he's basically wants to be carried, and he hasn't barked to ask to be carried, but he's just made it quite clear he's not going any further. Yeah. Yeah, I think I identify with Raymond's passive aggressiveness, although, yeah.

He's a bit lazier than me. Let's just be honest. Yeah, you're very dynamic. You're very... I'm very whip it. But that's a good thing, is it? I think I probably need to get better at just sitting, Raymond-like, for a full hour where I'm not looking at my phone or thinking about anything or planning anything. I think that would be good.

But, you know, my inner Raymond will surface at some point. What do you, I often ask people at the end of this podcast, what do you most, if you left the room and you just overheard the tail end of friends talking about you, What would you most want to hear them saying? Oh no, that's terrifying. I hope that friends would say that I'm dynamic and lively and vivacious but also generous and caring. I think the less nice version would be I'm a bit impatient. I try and do too much and in the end it all, you know, something suffers.

I spread myself too thin and that's to the detriment of people around me. Oh dear, that's a bit depressing thought to end on. A lot of people when you ask them that question, they don't even want to go there. Oh, I think I'm under no illusions that I'm a flawed person. We're all flawed and I suppose... I think knowing you're... I think we are all flawed but I think there are people who are aware of that and people that aren't. And the best you can hope for is to be aware of that. aware of that. Yeah. And you see I've also, I've passively aggressively brought you

around to the exit that I wanted to exit from which is actually miles away from the exit you need to exit from. Yeah but nevertheless. That's another flaw. It's been like therapy session. Look he's like a little baby. Oh he's got slightly muddy paws. Do you know I don't know this is helpful or if maybe you don't want to hear it but you're slightly different to how I imagine. Oh what did you think now a lot of people say that. I think there's a lightness to you. and a sort of slight, free-spirited, a bit mischievous even, which I hadn't expected.

Yeah, most people say, because on the news, you know, it's quite serious most of what I present on the news. So people, sometimes when they meet me, go, oh, you're much more fun than I thought you would be. Because, you know, because you can't show a lot of fun on the news. I mean, occasionally I get to do a story where we can have a laugh and that's good, but yeah, that's all me. It's just you can't have a laugh while you're talking about death and destruction and let's face it, most of the stories are about death and destruction at the moment.

Yes, whereas walking Raymond, we can have fun. I wonder if one day, though, you might get your whipet. What do you think? Well... Do the girls... You've got two girls, haven't you, by the way? I've got two girls. I mean, I completely respect that you have a dog in London.

I would find it difficult having a dog in London. Not least because I'd worry about all the fierce dogs that my little dog would encounter. And also I'm, yeah, while I'm working, I think while I'm working as hard as I'm working, I think it would be hard for me to combine that with the dog because I'm very, I'm just not at home enough. The fear is that once I stop working so hard, I might be travelling quite a lot. Yeah. And that's not very compatible with the dog.

Let's face it. Cathy Newman is never going to stop. Kathy, it's been such a pleasure and a privilege. It's been great fun. And Raymond's been really cooperative. I should say again, I so, I mean, I always, I love all your. writing but this book really spoke to me and it really made me it was so thought provoking and fascinating and I absolutely loved it have you read some bits to Raymond I do sometimes read to him my books aloud in lead and that's so sweet because I

think he enjoys it I talk to share all the time do you yeah all the time I keep up a whole conversation Raymond's a real feminist as well I can see that? He's a male ally. He's such an ally. Raymond, have you enjoyed knitting Kathy Newman? Oh, he even, that was the first little bark. Was that a bark or a wimper? Say goodbye to Kathy. Bye-bye, Raymond. Does he get a doggie treat now? His treat is your company. Poor Raymond. I really hope you enjoyed that episode of Walking the Dog. We'd love it if you subscribed and do you'll win us next time on Walking the Dog wherever you get your podcasts.