Newsnight doomed itself

Whither Newsnight? Or do I mean wither, Newsnight – shortly to be reduced to a 30-minute debate show shorn of more than half its staff.

As a teenage news and politics junkie, I grew up on this programme, watching it from its 1979 inception and through its 1980s heyday when that broadcasting giant Sir John Tusa was the main anchorman. Just three years after Tusa departed in 1986, Jeremy Paxman became a presenter and Newsnight’s indispensability was thus preserved. So it is hard not to be saddened by the latest swingeing cuts imposed on the programme by BBC high-ups. And yet, that is a feat I have found myself achieving; not the merest flicker of regret at their decision to transfer it to broadcasting’s end-of-life ward. 

Because those who took charge of it post-Paxman’s departure trashed the brand. Out went fearless and even-handed exposure and in came a televised version of the comment department of the Guardian. Perhaps it was Brexit that sent them mad. Paxman left in the same month that Ukip won the 2014 European elections. Two years later, Britain voted to leave the EU. 

Under the editorship of the long-time Guardianista Ian Katz, Newsnight often seemed to me to be a branch of the Remain campaign, especially during the four-year interregnum between its referendum defeat and our actual departure from the EU. We Brexiteers were regarded as villainous bigots, while pro-EU politicians were almost never pressed on the negation of democracy that their Brexit-blocking antics entailed.

Indeed, Emily Maitlis famously once pondered aloud on screen whether our EU membership was so important that the whole idea of democracy should be set aside to protect it. ‘At what point do you say, actually democracy is not as important as the future economy?’ asked the queen of side-eye.

Most popular

Patrick O’Flynn

Reform is rattling the establishment

Maitlis, who became the main anchor, scored a notable scoop with her interview of Prince Andrew. But time and again she allowed her own soft left metropolitan bias to bubble to the surface on air, earning rebukes for such varied infractions as her anti-Dominic Cummings monologue and her incessant hectoring of our own poor defenceless wallflower Rod Liddle. 

Lately Victoria Derbyshire has done her best to hold the show together on an already-reduced budget. Back in the days when I was running the Ukip press office, we regarded her as particularly hostile to our anti-Brussels agenda even by BBC standards. But, fair play, she has been a trouper for the show. Mark Urban, its long-time and highly distinguished expert on defence and foreign policy issues, probably deserves a medal for refusing to desert his post.

But it is gone already. Jeremy Paxman’s final show in 2014 attracted an audience of 1.1 million viewers; nowadays, Newsnight is lucky to pull in more than 300,000. You can’t blame people for switching off: the show relentlessly dishes up a dreary and incessant diet of Wokeism and items shot through with leftist assumptions sustained by obvious Groupthink among the editorial team.

Imagine for instance attending an editorial meeting and suggesting an item about the economically damaging surge of people absenting themselves from employment on grounds of their mental health. Imagine raising suspicions that a high proportion of them may simply be swinging the lead and calling for a piece to be broadcast to raise the alarm. It’s a live issue – Matthew Parris wrote about it in the Times at the weekend and I have featured it on my own Substack. But it is inconceivable that the modern Newsnight would run such a piece from such a standpoint. Because there is only one authorised way of referring to mental health within the BBC current affairs world and that is with uncritical sympathy for those reporting struggles with it (isn’t Owen Farrell so very brave by the way?).

This wearying lack of opinion diversity applies to many other issues as well. The zenith of tediousness was hit a few weeks ago when a Newsnight discussion panel featuring three guests was convened to discuss the distasteful, Tourette’s-style outburst by Laurence Fox on GB News about who would wish to climb into bed with a young female pundit who had displeased him. All three of the panellists agreed that the whole channel was a menace and two of them explicitly called for it to be closed down.

It isn’t being closed of course. In fact it is doing rather well. But very soon, once its final threadbare iteration is shown to be a flop, Newsnight will be.