PM's tactics muzzle media

Some of Mr Howard's favourite interviewers are considered to be especially gentle with him. Others see themselves as "entertainers" rather than journalists. Few have the policy experience of a veteran press gallery reporter.

Even if they do ask probing questions, as Neil Mitchell has noted, John Howard is a particularly effective "manipulator of interviews. He is very, very good at steering an interview in the direction he wants it to go."

How does he do this? I studied Mr Howard's television and radio interviews in March 2003 when he was arguing the case for Australia to be involved in the Iraq war. One of his key techniques is repetition. Mr Howard repeats one line, with only minor variations, over and over. On Iraq it was: "If Iraq is allowed to retain chemical and biological weapons, other rogue states will develop theirs. The more rogue states that have them, the greater the risk that they will get into the hands of terrorists."

He managed to repeat this regardless of the question being asked and even when no question had been asked at all.

This is what media advisers call staying on message, and it is not unusual in a veteran politician. George W. Bush and Tony Blair did the same. Mr Bush also repeated words such as "terrorism" and "threat" while Mr Blair mentioned WMD in every speech he gave at the time.

In interviews, Mr Howard's media skills make it difficult to question him effectively. Regardless of their ingenuity, interviewers consistently get the same answers. The Prime Minister is also skilled at evading questions he doesn't want to answer. He does this by challenging the relevance of the question, chastising the interviewer for using a "hypothetical" or making the interviewer sound impolite ("Just let me finish" or "Well, can I answer the question?").

The radio interview is the Prime Minister's favourite medium. He is very effective in it and he's argued that it's a more democratic way to talk to the public. But it is also a way of taking his message out of reach of the press gallery, and the way politicians have limited and controlled media access has had a major impact on how Australian politics is reported.

In Australia, the press gallery is now frequently accused of acting as "a pack", of writing the same stories, using the same angles. But this may be because they have to rely on the same pool of material.