Stephen glover
programmes at Channel Four, where he will exchange his BBC salary of £151,600 for one north of half a million pounds. This is a great promotion for Katz and surprising too, as the Newsnight job was his first in television. He had previously been deputy editor of the Guardian.
The job of appointing Katz’s successor will fall to the new head of news, who could well be Fran Unsworth, Harding’s deputy as well as the director of the World Service, and described as a safe pair of hands. Whether she or someone else lands the job (vacant at the time of writing), I would like to make a plea: that the new editor of Newsnight should not be another Guardian retread or someone with predictably Left-wing views.
Ian Katz hailed from that paper, as did Nick Watts, and Watts’s predecessor, Allegra Stratton. Over the years, the programme has been the redoubt of a succession of Leftists including its one-time economics editor, the Corbynista Paul Mason, and former political editor Michael Crick. Whoever makes appointments to Newsnight subscribes to the bizarre dictum of Hugo Young, the late Guardian columnist, who once argued that centre-left journalists could be trusted to be objective on the BBC whereas centre-right journalists could not. I don’t suggest that all the Newsnight Lefties I’ve mentioned have
The Comment Awards are the brainchild of brilliant self-publicist Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. I think it’s fair to say that such credibility as they enjoy among journalists will have dwindled as a result of the latest crop of awards.
Of 17 categories, the fervently antiBrexit Financial Times won in six, while the almost equally pro-remain Guardian walked off with five. The only right-ofcentre title to win an award was the Mail on Sunday – Oliver Holt for sports commentator of the year – and that happens to be anti-brexit too. No awards whatsoever for the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail or Sun.
I’ve no doubt that, just like Julia Hobsbawm, the judges were scrupulously even-handed, and it is just one of the oddities of life that all the best columnists should work for the FT, Guardian and various left-of-centre publications.
The Oldie