Such was the case with an interview published in last week’s Sunday Times by the journalist Decca Aitkenhead. Her subject was Professor Jordan Peterson, and, like everything to do with Peterson, the interview has kicked up a fair amount of fuss — principally because it was so mean and hostile.

Peterson has been exceptionally ill of late. Since he withdrew from public life 18 months ago, he has almost died a number of times. He has since recovered, and will next month publish the sequel to his phenomenal bestseller ’12 Rules for Life’.

A fortnight ago, we spoke together publicly for the first time since his illness and discussed a number of themes, ranging from last month’s storming of the Capitol to the meaning of life. Despite the terrible health issues he has had to endure, I was relieved to find Jordan in fine working order. As ever, he was thoughtful, engaged and intricately knowledgeable.

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Our conversation lasted just under two hours, but — as is usually the case with Jordan — it left me wanting more, as is the way with any serious discussion. Although hers was an interview with Peterson, rather than a discussion, it is obvious that Aitkenhead, who has spent much of her career at the Guardian, had a very different aim.

In the fallout since the interview, the Peterson family have made public the messages that The Sunday Times sent in an attempt to persuade Peterson to do the interview. These communications talked of the sympathy that the journalist felt towards Peterson after his ill-health. A commissioning editor at the paper wished him well and described how the profile piece “would cover his life and career to date”. The paper promised: “We run longform features, telling the whole story, rather than short flashy headlines.”

The resulting piece was headlined: “Jordan Peterson on his depression, drug dependency and Russian rehab hell” — which while not “short” is hardly the opposite of “flashy”.

The same standards appear to have been applied to the piece’s accuracy. During the interview, Aitkenhead made a number of serious errors — including the claim that Peterson had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was immediately repeated in newspapers around the world, before the Peterson family posted a recording of the interview, showing that it was incorrect. Ordinarily accusing someone of schizophrenia would be a major issue; that it has only formed a part of the discussion surely says something about the relentless hostility of the rest of the interview.

Atikenhead seemed unsympathetic to Peterson’s illness. And a considerable portion of the interview is dedicated to disparaging Mikhaila, who had helped to facilitate the interview. As is clear from the recording, a number of Aitkenhead’s claims  — such as that Mikhaila at one point “interrupts sharply… raises her voice and waves her arms” — are what a benevolent editor might call “colour”, but what other people might call “exaggeration”.

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And it is the ‘colour’ that Aitkenhead pumps into the piece that is so revealing. For example, we are told that Mikhaila talks “with the zealous, spiky conviction of a President Trump press spokeswoman”. Why — of all the women in the world — might that imprecise example come to mind, other than to try and force a link between Trump and Peterson? Elsewhere, there is little subtlety: “Parallels with Donald Trump come to mind; another unhappy man closed off from his emotions, projecting strong man mythology while hunkered down in a bunker with his family against the world.”

Such a comparison is so inexact as to be wilful. Regardless of whether Donald Trump is “closed off from his emotions”  — and that never seems to have been his problem — Peterson’s connection to his own emotions, and indeed his fragility while speaking in public, is one of the traits that makes him most unusual. I have seen large auditoriums hold their breath as they have heard Peterson’s voice teeter on the edge of tears. But that needn’t bother Aitkenhead, who seems more intent on carrying out hits.

That would certainly explain her diagnosis of Peterson’s recent battle with various prescription drugs: “I wonder whether toxic masculinity might have been a culprit.” But how does such a claim bring any value to her piece? Why use the term “toxic masculinity”, as though it is a genuine medical condition which can only be diagnosed by journalists of a certain political persuasion?

The problem with all this is that not only does it reveal an interviewer’s ideological motivations, but, more importantly, it means that the reader doesn’t learn anything of value. Of course, the fact that Jordan Peterson has been ill is of some interest.  But it is the least interesting “interesting thing” about him.

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Yet the same mistakes continue to be played out over and over again — each time being replicated almost exactly. In her piece, Aitkenhead refers in passing to the now infamous exchange between Peterson and Channel 4’s Cathy Newman: “His explosive confrontation with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News in 2018 resulted in the network calling in security experts after some of his supporters posted abuse and threats online.”

In fact, that exchange was a rare glitch in the media matrix. Channel 4 sent their interviewer in to do the usual, crass and ill-informed hatchet job. She was meant to put words into her interviewee’s mouths, deliberately misrepresent his thoughts and then send him packing, only for Peterson to expertly turn the tables, reducing his interviewer to silence. But as this latest incident demonstrates, Channel 4’s failure seems to have done little to discourage journalists from burnishing their portfolios with hit-jobs.

In the end, what’s most striking about Peterson’s Sunday Times interview is how it proves that a certain type of journalist simply won’t give up. Even after all these years, the attempt to bring Peterson down continues. But by continuing their crusade, his detractors continue to ignore the most interesting thing about him: why it is that Peterson has made such a difference to peoples’ lives.

For that is an unusual phenomenon; unusual on such a scale that you’d think a journalist might care to find out what is going on here. Yet once again, the person sent to do over Peterson was not acting as a journalist, but as an ideological opponent hoping to finally take him out. And once again, the person who came off worse was not the subject of the interview, but its author.

This following has made him into a global superstar psychologist and theologian. There’s no one else quite like him — some people have even started wondering why he doesn’t have a female equivalent. This singularity is a lot for any one man to carry without some weirdness getting in, and now Peterson is on the cusp of a comeback, with a new book on its way, it seems like a good time to reckon with just how weird things have got.

There’s the all-beef diet, developed by his daughter and then adopted by him, with enthusiastic testimony about its cure-all powers. Then there is the claim he was once kept awake for 25 days by accidentally consuming some vinegar (a sad downside, apparently, of the all-beef diet). More troublingly, there are the eight days he spent in a medically-induced coma in Russia earlier this year to treat a “physical dependence” on tranquilisers.

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More curious is the fact that he became the world’s most significant public intellectual, having published precisely one academic book 18 years ago — a book which contains more pictures of dragons than legible sentences. (I’m not joking about the dragons.) In this book (Maps of Meaning) he describes going to a maximum security prison dressed in “long wool cape, circa 1890, which I had bought in Portugal, and a pair of tall leather boots”. Unsurprisingly, the get-up attracts attention, and Peterson finds himself “surrounded by shoddy men, some of whom were extremely large and tough-looking”.

Extraordinarily, he has ascended to the position of the liberal Left’s number one enemy. When Penguin announced that it would be publishing a sequel to his wildly successful 2018 self-help manual Twelve Rules for Life (to be called Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life), some members of staff were so distraught that they cried.

Even weirder, the staff seemed to think that leaking this information would be persuasive. (Peterson’s own position on crying, from Twelve Rules, is this: “Anger-crying is often an act of dominance, and should be dealt with as such.”) But that’s still not the weirdest thing. Is it that people think he’s not just “an icon of hate speech” but also stupid? He might seem absurd; but he’s not stupid.

Watching Cathy Newman interview him for Channel 4 news is like watching someone show up to a knife fight with a pair of safety scissors: the more she tries to rattle him, the more rattled she looks, and all her efforts to get him to confess that he is in fact a massive sexist are easy for him to skirt around. Who you think wins depends greatly on who you agreed with at the start, but there’s no Frost/Nixon killer blow here.

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Peterson’s prominence — both as hero and villain — is unusual, but not difficult to account for. People of all political persuasions need him, whether they’re looking to him as the unflappable gladiator squaring up to postmodernist corruption, or anointing him the avatar of the basest reactionary tendencies. So while there are surprising aspects to his celebrity and his notoriety, we’re still in the realm of the explicable rather than the strictly weird.

No, the weirdest thing about Jordan Peterson is that he is actually a woman. Obviously I don’t mean he’s a woman in the literal sense of being female, and nor do I think that he has some kind of feminine essence waiting to be uncovered. In fact, one of the things that made Peterson famous was his stand against enshrining gender identity in Canadian law, a legal change which he said could be responded to in two ways: “One is silent slavery with all the repression and resentment that that will generate, and the other is outright conflict. Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.”

This is a typical bit of Peterson rhetoric. What he’s actually saying here is that he’s going to continue perceiving — and probably referring — to people as male or female, depending on how they appear to him. This is a banal pronouncement, even if present conditions make it an inflammatory one, but he leaps into the register of high drama: “Silent slavery”; “foundation of Western civilization.” It’s the linguistic equivalent of wearing a Victorian cape on a prison visit, and I’ll leave you to decide whether that counts as bathos or as camp.

The same jolts of tone are everywhere in Twelve Rules. Its lessons are fundamentally prosaic ones about self-reliance and social integration: Peterson boils them down at one point to “adopt as much responsibility as possible for ourselves, society and the world”, which I’m sure I’ve also read on the label of some hemp soap I bought once. A life lived by the Peterson precepts might be one in which you think about your health, keep your home tidy and maybe get involved in local politics or do some volunteer conservation. At bottom, what he’s recommending is basic good citizenship.

But in order to recommend it, he uses the language of existential struggle. This isn’t just about leading a decent, balanced life: it’s about “shoulder[ing] the burden of Being” and “tak[ing] the heroic path”. It’s not just tidying up, it’s applying the force of Order (personified as “the Wise King and Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression”) against the terrifying swarm of Chaos (defined as “the new and unpredictable emerging suddenly in the midst of the commonplace familiar” and represented by “Mother Nature”).

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Oh yes, and order is “masculine” (“symbolically”, he hedges, unconvincingly), while chaos is “presented imaginatively as feminine”. There isn’t, it should be noted, any particular reason for this gendering: it’s just the way Peterson has decided things should be. And even though he claims to be seeking a “balance” of these two principles, it’s hard to get around the fact that the book is subtitled An Antidote to Chaos. I mean, no one ever recommended an antidote to something they thought was good.

This is where — however much he might pirouette around it — the sexism of Peterson’s worldview comes through, because if men are order and women are chaos, and order needs to dominate chaos, there’s a pretty obvious conclusion for sexual politics. When he really gets into his stride, you’ll find him describing “the terror young men feel towards attractive women, who are nature itself,” which I guess means that if you’re a woman and he thinks you’re fit, you might as well be soil, so who knows what’s a compliment anymore.

For some of Peterson’s fanbase, the sexism is surely the point. But I wonder whether there are others for whom this relentless assertion of masculine authority (bathos or camp? You decide) is more condiment than main dish, making palatable the fact that Peterson is actually quite a feminised figure. Think about it: who else can fill stadiums by telling people to sort out their drawers or learn self-respect? Who else shills eating plans? Peterson doesn’t have an obvious female counterpart because there are so many of them that none could gain his preeminence: Oprah, Gwyneth, Marie Kondo. Being a lifestyle guru is woman’s work, even if you are a man and you throw around some gratuitous Jung.

Young men don’t want to hear “tidy your room and grow up and how will you ever get a nice girlfriend if you slouch around like that?” from their mothers, but they’ll pay to take it from Peterson — so long as he wraps it in some just-so stories about lobster hierarchy. His insistence on “taking responsibility” reminds me of nothing so much as me going Full Matriarch and chasing some teenagers down a tram stop, waving the litter they’d dropped. For his fans, Jordan Peterson is their mum: she might have some odd beliefs and go in for faddy diets, but at bottom, doesn’t she just love them and want what’s best for them.

Blessed with the power to dilate at length on the solutions to all problems, when they bother to ask a question you can tell by the narrowing of the eyes that they already knew the answer and are only asking the in the hope that the interrogee does not.

How blessed we were to have such beings. And how much the current crisis has exposed them.

Take Cathy Newman. During the present crisis the Channel 4 anchor has continued to try her usual journalistic schtick in a situation with no appetite for it. Seeking to remain rude as well as relevant, she tweeted following a Downing Street press conference in the middle of last month that “Today all the talk from the amigos is about ramping up testing.”

I suppose it is fine to use a derogatory and demeaning name for the Prime Minister if you really must, but why deride the country’s two leading experts on the virus in the same way?

What had these medical experts done that allowed Newman to dismiss them in such a silly and inaccurate manner? And weren’t people like Newman precisely the sort who spent recent years pretending that Michael Gove once said that this country had “had enough of experts” and that this unfinished sentence was the vital lens through which one might understand the ignorance and absurdity of the masses. I digress — as did Newman, who went on: “A few days ago it was all about limiting it to those already ill. Big change.”

Of course, what Newman was doing here is what a large number of journalists – most prominently Piers Morgan – have been trying to do since the corona pandemic began, which is to continue playing the same games that the media has become obsessed with in recent years.

Political games of their own invention. Not just ‘gotcha’ journalism, but a journalism which has invented a set of tropes to keep any story running for as long as possible. Among the most popular is the ‘U-turn’. It is impossible to chart precisely when the U-turn became such a common journalistic device, or when this morally-neutral action became a synonym for something disgraceful.

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As all drivers will know, a U-turn is in fact a handy little manoeuvre. When driving down a road at the end of which you see a wall there are a couple of options before you. One might (a) continue driving towards the wall, proud that you have not altered your initial principles or compromised yourself in any way, or (b) One might perform a U-turn and continue on with the day.

So it is with governments. If, in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis the government decides — based on the latest expert advice — that it should change its thinking, then this is not necessarily some great scandal, even if some redundant parts of the media continue to shout ‘Gotcha!’ as they spot the ‘U-turn’.

Others continue to pretend that there is no situation so complex that they cannot land on the nub of the matter in super-quick time. Of all the people left exposed for having played this game none has been shown up so badly as Robert Peston.

Ordinarily Peston is to be found on ITV, presenting a show whose viewers are generally treated to some second or third-rate figure like Emily Thornberry attempting to demonstrate why they should be Prime Minister. It is unwatchable stuff, even for political obsessives.

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Well-remunerated though the job may be, however, there is a price to pay for fronting these programmes. One is the feeling that since you are up there you must be up there for a reason, and that although you don’t always feel like you know much you must do — or you wouldn’t be up there, would you?

I know a journalist who was once introduced by accident as an ‘aviation expert’ on a programme and had that momentary flicker “Well if I’m being introduced as an aviation expert then I must in fact be an aviation expert.”

Since the beginning of this crisis Peston has been attempting, less successfully than Piers Morgan it must be said, to show himself to be the one who still knows the crucial questions to ask. No area of oversight or ignorance can ever be conceded or otherwise admitted to. Why does Britain do less testing than Germany? Why does [insert country name] have better provisions than [insert other country name]? On and on it goes, not to get to any truth but to play the old game that journalists of Peston’s generation and ilk have been playing for years.

Deprived of any story that would allow them to be Bernstein and Woodward, they had to make do instead with showing that they knew more than, say, Chris Grayling and could by constant interruption expose such a person as not being sufficiently on top of their brief.

What is so beautiful about Peston’s interview this week with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam is that even when he is shown up Peston cannot shut up. Because his primary goal is to ensure that he does not come out of it looking bad, or as though he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  Each time he opens his mouth it is clear once again that he is trying to ‘gotcha’ the Deputy Chief Medical Officer based on information that he, Peston, has clearly crammed up on only minutes earlier.

Even now, after the interview has gone viral, Peston is trying to mop up on social media in a way that is positively Newman-esque — by pretending that he is a victim. “I was slightly taken aback at the ferocity of the Deputy Chief Medical Officer’s response,” he declared.

People can judge for themselves whether van Tam was ferocious or just calm and patient, but the ego will not let it go, and so he continued: “Just to be clear, I do understand the difference between an antibody and an antigen test. What I wanted to gauge was whether this rapid antibody test could help solve the problem of insufficient PCR (antigen) testing capacity. This was not an unreasonable line of inquiry, in…”

And on he went.

It is tempting to say that this is an unprecedented situation and so the media is doing the best it can — but that isn’t the case. Instead the same style of journalism has been on display and been revealed to be vapid.

After the killing of Qassem Soleimani in January there was a noisy if less virulent outbreak of the same problem. Presenters and pundits who had barely if ever heard of the Iranian general filled the airwaves with their golden insights.

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“Was this a Franz Ferdinand moment?” was the sort of ‘clever’ question they asked repeatedly. No it clearly wasn’t, but the charade carried on regardless, with the presumption that nobody would remember next week, and besides which, something else would come along soon.

As indeed it has.

Of course there is, and must be, a place in every society for people asking awkward questions. But asking awkward, difficult questions is a different thing from asking the wrong questions, or asking questions which are ill-informed. And perhaps, during an epidemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, and in which very difficult decisions must be made based on highly complex scientific calculations, that kind of gotcha journalism is no longer a public service but a public nuisance.

Journalism is at a difficult enough juncture, and there are many people in the trade who know a great deal. But the whole profession would be enormously helped if its most prominent representatives stopped giving off the impression of thinking that the primary problem with real experts is that they don’t listen to journalists enough.

Like all changes, there were some people who regretted them, feeling that Day’s interrogative style went too far. They felt that the relation between interviewer and interviewee could do with taking a step backwards to those deferential times. But it never happened. The move away from deference turned out to be a one-way street – albeit one that Day himself ended up worrying about.

Latterly, people would blame the interviewing styles of Jeremy Paxman, John Humphries and others on Day. Where he had led they had merely followed. But the man himself clearly felt unhappy about this.

In that late interview, he explained his problem with that style. It was, specifically, when broadcasters would accuse their interviewee of lying. If you believe that your subject is lying, Day said, then your job is to show that they are lying. It is not simply a matter of saying to them, to their face, “You are lying”.

As she delivered the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival this week, the head of Channel 4 News demonstrated that major figures in the television industry certainly no longer see things that way. In her remarks, Dorothy Byrne said that television producers should be more willing to directly accuse politicians. “If we continue to be so polite, how will our viewers know that politicians are lying,” she asked.

There is quite a minefield of presumptions in that one question. First, it assumes that politicians regularly lie – a presumption that we may allow to pass for now. Byrne also assumes that the viewer is unable to notice when a politician lies and cannot (without the intermediary of Channel 4 or others) understand what politicians are and are not saying. But thirdly – and perhaps most problematically – Byrne assumes that it is the job of the interviewer or journalist to be ‘impolite’ and to point out that the politician is lying. Is that such a good idea?

There is a whole conference of problems there. For instance, Byrne presumes that the interviewer is in a position to identify what is true and what is not. Yet in the transparent age in which we live, few journalists are granted – or, perhaps, deserve – the right to be the arbiters of what is true or what is not.

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For instance, let’s look at the stable of campaigning journalists who make up the regular presenting team on Channel 4 News. Plucking only a couple of examples, these include Cathy Newman, who four years ago made headlines when she claimed that she had been ushered out of a mosque. The claim stirred up various people online. And only after CCTV footage was released was it clear that Newman’s version of events was completely at odds with what had actually happened.

Worshippers at that mosque, along with the wider public who were told a fib by Cathy Newman, may well wonder whether she is the right person to decide whether various politicians are liars or not.

Likewise, Jon Snow, the grand old man of the Channel 4 newsroom. He may not be regarded by everybody as the most impartial, balanced person able to go around making judgements about politicians and the truthfulness of their claims. He has, in the very recent past, been accused of being nakedly partisan in his views on members of the Conservative party and has by no means demonstrated impartiality when it has come to certain foreign disputes.

This media and social media environment is one in which everybody can have their flaws exposed; it’s hard for any journalist to look so pure that the public will simply take it on trust when they accuse a politician of lying.

There’s a larger problem, however, at the heart of Byrne’s argument. In her speech she criticised Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn for avoiding interviews on the main news programmes. In criticising the Prime Minister’s recent reliance on social media videos as his way to speak directly to the public, Byrne said that this reminded her of someone. She was thinking specifically of Vladimir Putin, who she said “also likes to talk directly to the nation”.

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Boris Johnson may or may not be correct in choosing to avoid being interviewed by Cathy Newman or Jon Snow on a regular basis. But he is certainly right if he presumes that such an interview would not be conducted in good faith. It would be conducted by an interviewer who is known to have particular political biases. And he might now add to that the fact that it would be conducted on a channel whose news head has compared him to Vladimir Putin. Not exactly the way to mend trust between the politicians and the media, is it?

Avoiding the conventional media is one of the signature techniques of successful politicians today. Donald Trump’s successful race to the White House would most likely never have been possible had he not been able to speak directly to his voters and potential voters (while deranging those who did not support him) using Twitter.

Likewise, Matteo Salvini has managed to double his potential share of the vote in Italy in under a year and a half partly through his regular, relaxed and freewheeling social media streamed videos beamed straight to the nation. Boris Johnson’s decision to address the public through videos is not so different from Theresa May’s regular video updates. His are simply more interesting, enjoyable and clear to watch.

Perhaps it is inevitable that broadcasters watch this move away from their platforms and regard it as an aberration – including an ethical aberration which deserves the comparison with Vladimir Putin. But at least some of the responsibility for that exodus must be shouldered by the broadcasters themselves.

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Consider this thought experiment. If Boris Johnson were to agree to an interview with Jon Snow, what would the interviewer and the head of news consider a victory? Would Byrne and Snow consider it a victory if Johnson used his considerable erudition, knowledge and charm to persuade the British public that a no-deal Brexit is no problem? Would they consider it a victory if, over the course of the interview, the Prime Minister had an opportunity to lay-out his vision for a post-Brexit Britain?

I do not think that anyone would be presuming to be a mind-reader if they concluded that, no, neither Byrne nor Snow would chalk that up as their idea of a ‘successful’ interview. It is almost certainly fair to say that ‘holding Boris Johnson to account’ would consist of haranguing him constantly, rarely allowing him to get more than a sentence out uninterrupted, accusing him of terrible things to his face, trying to embarrass him and – dream of dreams – getting him to say something embarrassing or wrong which could subsequently be reported across the world’s press as ‘Boris Johnson exposed as liar in Channel 4 News interview’. That is the story they want, and there is ever-less effort at Channel 4 and other channels to disguise that fact.

A president or prime minister’s unwillingness to face regular questioning from mainstream broadcasters is something that could cause many problems – including untruths – to foment in the years ahead. But broadcasters such as Channel 4 should not be surprised at this turn of events. The politicians have been driven away by a media which has forgotten some of the basic rules. Including that golden rule that Robin Day knew: show, don’t tell. And certainly don’t harangue.