Confident and assertive: Krishnan Guru-MurthyTime Hillel

Krishnan Guru-Murthy is not a man concerned with making friends. In one of Guru-Murthy's less viral, less explosive interviews, discussing the nature of role models, Samuel L. Jackson describes himself as “a professional”. You could apply this label equally to Guru-Murthy himself. Channel 4's second longest serving presenter after Jon Snow, Guru-Murthy is a man trained from the earliest stages of his career in news journalism: getting to the point, getting the answers, and getting that all done before you've had time to interrupt him.

This training started well before he began his time at Oxford studying PPE, which he jokingly refers to as “basically the only degree you can do while holding down a full time job”. He describes applying for work experience at the BBC during the summer before his A level results, still with the full intention of studying medicine in the autumn. But when the two weeks work experience finished and the BBC offered him a job, he was forced to re-evaluate his priorities. He took the job, took a year out and changed his degree to PPE.

Humanities students would undoubtedly agree with Guru-Murthy when he says that the ability to process a large amount of information in a limited period of time, mould it into an essay and then defend it in a supervision is a learned skill, and one that has served him well in his career. It is interesting that he mentions the idea of ‘defending’ your essay, the supervision as an adversarial, confrontational situation. Does he think this experience influenced his interviewing style? “Good god, no! The tutors I had were not what you would regard as...incisive.”

He dismisses the question and moves on. Yet it's hard not to draw parallels. I suggest that he is sick of talking about the three most viral of his interviews, with Richard Ayoade, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Downey Jr, and he laughs quietly in agreement. He has tweeted, blogged, even written think pieces for the Guardian about the moment Downey Jr stormed out, the moment when Tarantino exuberantly declared, “I'm shutting your butt down”. But it's hard not to keep talking about them, and not just for the reasons Guru-Murthy claims: that they're tabloid fodder, that a video of a famous person losing it is prime click-bait material.

According to him, his job in all interviews is to reveal something interesting. “And if you can't reveal anything, reveal their attitude. Show their contempt for the public by not answering the question”. In the case of media-trained politicians, this is particularly invaluable. Jim Devine MP was grilled so precisely and comprehensively about his expenses by Guru-Murthy in 2010 that the televised interview on Channel 4 was used as evidence in his prosecution for fraud. But when you are asking Robert Downey Jr about his incarceration, drug abuse and difficult relationship with his father, is a more sensitive touch required?

Again, he dismisses the question. Moves on. He maintains that he is not there to flatter anyone's ego, that Channel 4 is after serious discussion and that all interviewees are primed with a rough outline of topics beforehand. He's far from convinced that there's any specific impact a change of tone can make. Yet Krishnan Guru-Murthy, distinguished and accomplished reporter though he is, seems to have a knack for getting under people's skin. See to his interview with Jeremy Corbyn, who, frustrated, looks at him incredulously and asks, “Can you let me finish? I'm not ignoring the question, if you'd give me a minute I'll answer it.” Watching the Union's event unfold in the chamber, I saw similarities. Guru-Murthy jumps on the end of audience member's questions and occupies the space he has given in a manner which VICE may have called, as they did in their interview with him in August, “confident, assertive and a touch pompous”.

But perhaps Guru-Murthy is right to be exasperated that the internet, in all its clickbait-fuelled, viral-hungry glory, has distorted our consideration of his career. A career that is indeed impressive. He covered the Arab Spring for Channel 4, and as presenter of Unreported World has been responsible for bringing us stories that the rest of the mainstream media leaves behind: the shocking stories of young women in Afghanistan slashed in the neck by their fathers for refusing to marry their uncles, families in Cambodia separated for decades by the Khmer Rouge under the supposition that no loyalty to family should transcend loyalty to the state. He says it's almost impossible to pin down the story which has struck him the most, but when pressed he talks about his experiences covering the Balkan war. “It was the first real war that I'd been to. I was very young and it was very striking and very moving, and very scary. It was a big story right on Europe's doorstep.”

And let's not forget that another clip of Guru-Murthy went viral on facebook a few weeks ago. It didn't involve fractious movie stars or bruised egos. We saw Guru-Murthy on the coast of the Greek Island Lesbos. As he conducted his piece to camera on the refugee crisis, a boat no more really than a dingy filled with refugees started to make its way ashore. They were safe, but they were panicked, stumbling and falling over one another in confusion.

Guru-Murthy abandons his piece and begins helping them ashore. He received a backlash for compromising his journalistic neutrality but even more praise for his display of humanity and compassion, qualities often so lacking from mainstream media's coverage of this human tragedy on a massive scale. In the clip, you hear his voice break, “Oh my god!”, as a small child's head appears to hit the rocks below. Luckily the child is ok. Empathy is a difficult virtue to place in a context of journalistic objectivity, but Guru-Murthy, who refrains from mentioning anything of this entire episode in either the interviews with journalists or the main event in the chamber, insists that it has a place in telling the truth. If you are going to truly understand what is happening in the news, he says, you need to understand how it's affecting this person there, that person here, what the impact of these events is on real people. Otherwise it becomes meaningless.

The Tab's correspondent tells Guru-Murthy about their own personal run-in with Robert Downey Jr, in which they asked him questions about rather personal parts of his anatomy. Does Guru-Murthy think there's a limit to what you can expect stars not to walk out on? “If you work for some ludicrous gossip rag and you happen to be sitting in front of Robert Downey Jr, you might ask something that is pertinent to your readers.” Krishnan Guru-Murthy, incisive until the last.