Emily Maitlis tries too hard not to be teachery on her new podcast

The competition between news-led podcasts is nearing boiling point. If you tuned in to The Media Show on Radio 4 last Wednesday, you’d have felt the tension between the podcasters leading the guard: Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics, Jon Sopel of The News Agents, plus his executive producer, Dino Sofos, Nosheen Iqbal of the Guardian’s Today in Focus, and Adam Boulton, who has just launched a politics show with Kate McCann on Times Radio.

Kiran Moodley and Minnie Stephenson might reasonably have joined this line-up as they launch a new series of their news pod with Channel 4 this week. The Fourcast, like The News Agents (where Sopel is joined by Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall), will cover a mixture of geopolitics and home stories, but on a weekly basis; The News Agents is daily. Both will be accompanied by video and, in the case of The News Agents, TikTok content. And let’s not forget there’s Newscast on BBC Sounds.

The feeling among these zealous newscasters is not that radio is dead, exactly, nor that TV has had its day. It’s more that the culture of headlines and soundbites now associated with them, compounded by social media, has altered the way we digest hard news. The thing about a podcast is you can’t half-listen to it. The intimacy of the format makes it the perfect conduit for in-depth analysis you will actually take in.

The News Agents stretches this idea by layering interviews and commentary in a sophisticated, almost book-like manner, which rewards close listening. The first episode, on the FBI raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, moved between conversations with Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former director of communications, Mick Mulvaney, his former chief of staff, a law professor, and reflections from the podcast hosts themselves.

The episode was hooked on a prediction made by a US senator the night before that there would be riots in the event of Trump’s prosecution. More pressing, perhaps, was the desire to hook in the existing fanbase of Sopel and Maitlis’s previous podcast, Americast, with an America-themed opener. It could be no accident that the BBC released a fresh series of that podcast with a ‘new administration’ of presenters the very week The News Agents debuted. The topic of the first episode? Mar-a-Lago. As I said, the competition is hot.

For their new venture Sopel and Maitlis are clearly keen to slough their suits. They joke that ‘news agents’ means something different in the UK (‘Fags, mags and a Twix’) from in the US (spies with dictaphones), and you can’t help but picture ‘Sopes’ as Austin Powers to Maitlis’s Miss Moneypenny, only with more clout and less cojones. They try a bit too hard not to be teachery. So Maitlis asks questions she already knows the answer to, and Sopel fesses up to stealing ashtrays from hotel rooms, while Lewis dissects jargon at the blackboard and listeners throw out questions from the back row.

This makes The News Agents very different in tone from The Americast. In content, though? It’s equally serious. While The Rest Is Politics tends to offer the insider’s view of how to tackle problems at No. 10, The News Agents retains the wide panorama of a news programme, while sinking its teeth into the small print. The main thing that puzzled me about the first episode was why no one raised the matter of Trump’s age with regards to the prospect of a prison sentence galvanising a future presidential campaign.

The podcast is still young and it remains to be seen whether the sort of matiness that sees Maitlis repeatedly address Scaramucci as ‘The Mooch’ will grate, or help draw out the more buttoned-up interviewees.