Kay Burley: Are we being ‘pathetic’?

Over 56,000 people have signed a www.change.org petition to sack Kay Burley, the Sky News presenter who caused a storm following her interview with Nick Varney, Chief Executive at Alton Towers about the rollercoaster, The Smiler, crash which seriously injured 4 people, including a young woman who had to have her leg amputated.

There have been floods of support for the victims and disgust at Alton Towers about how they handled the crash on the scene, however, the interview between Nick Varney and Kay Burley have disgusted people in the opposite direction to what you would think. Kay Burley has been branded a bully as she was described as interrogating Nick Varney about issues relating to the crash. As a journalist she had every right to ask tough questions. After all, a fun day out at a theme park should not have ended like this and Piers Morgan has come out in her defence calling the public’s reaction ‘pathetic’. Is Kay Burley’s method what is expected in journalism? Or has this become old fashioned and we are in need of more neutral journalism?

Nick Varney looked and sounded genuinely upset about what had happened. The fact he was prepared to do a live TV interview at all, in my view, showed more credibility than many organisations who hide behind a statement. Some of the big corporates and public sector organisations are the worst for this. Even when someone has died, they prefer to produce a couple of bland and generic paragraphs which do little to empathise with those concerned or reassure the rest of us who have to continue using the service.

Having done many TV live interviews as a reporter, I know that you are expected to give the interviewee a tough time in a case like this. I say ‘expected’ because in most cases this is what the audience want. We, as journalists, should hold interviewees to account. That is our job. It isn’t personal. It is business.

However the question is; did Kay Burley cross the line from giving him a much deserved tough time to a personalised and bullying interrogation and if you believe she did, then should she be sacked? I would argue that sacking her would not achieve anything. In fact she probably did Nick Varney a favour as he came across as a much more sympathetic figure than the situation warranted. He kept calm. He sounded measured and genuine. When she started demanding information about whether or not someone had lost their leg (it later turned out to be true), he quite rightly said he wasn’t going to discuss that on TV. 

It was at that point, I would suggest, that the interview started to go wrong for Kay Burley. She was within her rights to ask about it but to continue to interrogate him about something so personal was unnecessary. The audience would not have wanted it and neither would the family of the person involved. Nick Varney said he was not going to talk about it and he was right. How would you like it if a national TV programme was talking about the injuries to a member of your family before you chose to go public?

You only have to look at the comments under the online petition to see that most people felt Nick Varney came across as well as could be expected. Kay Burley on the other hand has been reviled. Some of the comments sadly smack of nasty sexist remarks which I thought we had left behind in the 1980s. 

Kay Burley is an acquired taste. If you are going to do an interview with her – particularly a live one – then you should be aware of what you are letting yourself in for. She has built her reputation on that and is unlikely to stop now. As an interviewee you should go in prepared for this or not go in at all.