The show is not serious enough, says ex-editor

A FORMER Today editor claims the programme is not serious enough and is falling short of its ambition to set the news agenda.

Roger Mosey, ex-head of BBC television news, said it had become more of a magazine than a news showcase. It follows an extended programme on London Fashion Week.

Writing in the Spectator, Mr Mosey, now master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, said that while ‘broadening the agenda’ was a good thing, Today was not the ‘place to experiment’.

He claims resources were diverted to covering Fashion Week rather than the North Korean missile crisis that is threatening to bring the world to the brink of war. Mr Mosey also referred to a programme devoted to the tech industry in California and said there was concern that new editor, former Evening Standard boss Sarah Sands, would prefer it to be more a ‘magazine, than the news section’.

Today should be where the ‘bile in the debate’ about Brexit is discussed and the decisions ‘rigorously analysed’, he said.

‘It cannot lose its commitment to breaking news, which is the reason why such large audiences tune in each morning.’