“The entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack”: The best of the worst of Kay Burley

A remarkable thing happened in May 2010.

Amidst all the political horsetrading and negotiations going on to resolve the post-electoral hung parliament, a protest movement took to the streets of London calling for revolution of our democratic structure. Hundreds of people motivated to get up, take to the streets and make their voices heard. It was the purest, most raw form of democracy in action.

That’s, of course, except for viewers of Sky News – where the whole thing was portrayed as an irrelevance and an irritance. And chief among its critics was the channel’s doyenne of digital, Kay Burley, hectoring 38 Degrees‘ David Babbs – one of the people behind the protest:

Which made what happened shortly afterwards so much funnier. Because the crowd, reacting either to word online of her attacks on the demonstration, or to Sky News’ perceived pro-Tory bias during the election, turned on the satellite broadcaster and La Burley instead:

‘Sack Kay Burley’ also became a trending topic on Twitter, and for the next wee while Sky was forced to drop it’s outside broadcast from Westminster and return to the studio. When they returned at 5pm, it was with a new presenter – Andrew Wilson – and a notable lack of anyone nearby.

Of course, Burley has been in the headlines recently almost as much as she has been reading them. Sadly, one moment that’s impossible to track down online – almost as if someone is trying to remove evidence of it happening – came during her stint anchoring Sky News’ 9/11 coverage, where she breathlessly proclaimed “If you’re just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack”, thus simultaneously displaying failings in scale, geography and Latin…

Thankfully, however, other classic moments of La Burley’s ‘unique’ style of broadcasting are easy to find. Such as this memorable moment from 2008, when she asked the wife of ‘Ipswich Ripper‘ Steve Wright if he would have murdered those five prostitutes had the couple enjoyed a better sex life.

Or the famous ambush of Peter Andre, which left the singer tearful and lead to scores of complaints to Ofcom – complaints the watchdog, unsurprisingly, brushed off as her merely being ‘persistent and probing’.

More evidence of Burley’s persistent and probing nature, of course, came in 2008 when she pinned a photographer up against a wall by the throat during a tussle outside Naomi Campbell’s court hearing, as pictured in the Daily Mail:

It was the same sensitivity that saw Burley – herself a Catholic – wonder almost mockingly why US vice president Joe Biden had a mark on his forehead on Ash Wednesday, and to joke that he must have ‘having a go on those teatrays down the luge or something’…

Tactfully, she made the remark just a couple of days after a fatality on just such a course at the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Obviously poor Kay has the odd memory lapse – understandable in a career as busy and successful as hers. Which is perhaps why she claimed in her autobiography to have been the one to break the news to Sky viewers that Princess Diana had died in a Parish car crash.

In the book she wrote:

The magnitude of what I was announcing hit home. I spoke slowly, struggling to keep my emotions in check.

But what’s this? Study the footage and it’s clear Martin Staniforth, her Sky News colleague, actually broke the news first. Kay just confirmed it – 20 minutes later.

But that’s just mere semantics, really, isn’t it?

Or how about this celebrated face-off with LBC‘s James O’Brien, over a row the broadcaster had had with footballer Frank Lampard on his radio show. As you can see, Burley gives O’Brien a proper going-over in the interview, displaying a remarkable knowledge of the Lampards’ family life which puts lesser hacks to shame.

Afterwards Burley insisted the interview had put both sides of the story and that said ‘I pride myself on impartial journalism.’ Although interestingly she does fail to disclose that her ex-husband is Frank Lampard’s agent, which might explain quite why she knows more about the Chelsea and England star than the rest of us mortals.

But it’s not always one way traffic, as poor La Burley found when interviewing Chris Bryant MP over the phone hacking debate in the Commons.  Challenging him to back up his claims, the Member of Parliament for the Rhondda promptly did, defying the Doyenne of Digital and issuing a brilliantly cutting response.

At times, Bryant’s schooling of the Queen of the Ice was getting dangerously close to ‘Ginger, get the popcorn‘ territory – presumably why she was thrown an interviewee-shaped piñata to beat later on in the day.

And indeed, fast forward a few months as the fallout from the hacking scandal continues to dominate the media and make its impact felt across the entire Murdoch empire, and the MP gets a rare chance to ask for an apology from the Queen Bee of Isleworth.  Does he get it?

Oddly, while Chris Bryant is right to big up Sky’s largely impartial coverage of the Murdoch situation, he clearly missed out this spectacular moment when La Burley decided she was Paxman and would ask the same question about Vince Cable 20000 times.

Still, should we expect any less?  Tact and subtlety is, after all, not her strongest point – as displayed during the horrific terrorist attack in Oslo in July 2011.

Whatever language you’re listening to, incompetent probably means the same thing too, Kay.

Still, there’s always Dancing on Ice to fall back on, eh?