Newsnight needs to regain its balance
The BBC’S ailing current affairs show has lost its authority – and a tendency to lean to the Left hasn’t helped
BBC2’S Newsnight has been on the skids for a long time – even before its most famous anchor, Jeremy Paxman, jumped ship (or was encouraged to do so) in 2014. Back in 2001 it boasted an average nightly audience of 1,068,000. Now the figure is about half that. From time to time there are rumours that the BBC is going to shake up the programme, or even replace it with something else, but these ideas invariably come to nothing.
One school of thought contends that Newsnight is a victim of forces beyond its control. It’s said that in the age of 24-hour rolling news people are less interested in a single current affairs programme than they used to be. But is this true? ITV recently launched its own equivalent, called After the News, by way of a short-term experiment, and immediately won an audience that was slightly bigger than Newsnight’s. It’s not clear whether ITV has plans to revive its show, but it has plainly spotted a gap that the BBC is not adequately filling.
The main problem is that Newsnight lacks authority. For all his absurdities, this was a quality Jeremy Paxman had in abundance. His replacement, Evan Davis, is a subtle and clever interviewer but he is not a heavyweight. Nor are the alternative presenters or many of the specialists (I exclude the political editor, Nick Watt, who is a well-informed and substantial figure, and Mark Urban, the veteran diplomatic editor). On some nights, when Davis is absent, and one of the younger specialists is expounding, one really does feel that one has ended up with the Fourth XI.
It’s possible, though, that things will change as a result of two resignations. James Harding, the BBC’S head of news, is leaving at the end of the year to set up his own media company. And Ian Katz, editor of Newsnight since 2013, is departing to become the head of been politically biased on air, but it’s hardly surprising that the programme often has a Leftish feel, which is another factor undermining its authority.
Who is the best informed and most authoritative interviewer on the BBC? For my money, it is Andrew Neil, who introduces the excellent, though littlewatched, Daily Politics on BBC2, and BBC1’S almost equally obscure This Week. But because he is a former editor of the right-of-centre Sunday Times, and believed to hold Right-wing views, he has never been admitted to the inner sanctum of Newsnight despite concealing his private opinions effectively. I have no idea whether Neil would be interested in fronting the programme but it says a lot about the BBC – and helps to explain why Newsnight feels increasingly marginal – that its best presenter has been ostracised because he isn’t deemed to hold the correct views.