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Evan Davis is no Paxman
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Davis is okay as a genial interviewer, but it looked like he has been told to do a Paxman and get aggressive, but that is a total failure because only Paxman can do a Paxman.
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i disagree, davis is not paxman nor is he meant to be. he has his own style. i like him on newsnight.
Careful now, if he reads this you'll have him in floods of tears.
So far as Davis goes, his treatment of Owen Patterson (leaving the EU, 24 Nov) was unprofessional. He kept interrupting and it was plain that he had a personal agenda that he wasn't prepared to let go of. He's OK on the lightweight, non-confrontational, stuff but he's not up to dealing with "hot" issues.
He's also been quoted as saying:
"I think Newsnight should be the group of clever friends you want to sit down with in the pub at the end of a long day and make sense of what is going on in the world.”
Though it would appear (from what he's done to NN) that his idea of "clever friends" are people who agree with him - and that NN should be more like his Guardian "features" than a hard-nosed analytical news and current affairs programme.
If true those remarks are very patronising.
I have not watched it since Paxman went Davis does indeed have no authority in his voice , or the character to challenge.
Lightweight on the radio now appears so on Newsnight.
I heard him a lot on the Today programme and I recognize what you are saying.
But I watched him on Newsnight last night and I thought he was outstanding.
Maybe because Eddie Mair is perfectly happy at Radio 4.
It's the Guardian/BBC smug London metropolitan broadcasting self styled "elite"
Patronising is what they do.
Along with about 60 million other people I don't read The Guardian:D
Neither do I.
The fact that that a Guardian "journalist" has taken over Newsnight is evidence that the BBC is hopelessly unrepresentative.
The Director of BBC News is also an ex-newspaper editor, seems odd to have two people with no broadcasting experience in senior positions in a broadcasting organisation.The Director of News was heavily stamped on by Tony Hall when he started recruiting people from ITV and elsewhere without going through the agreed procedures; Hall also called a six-month moratorium on redundancies being proposed by the self-same person, hardly an auspicious start to a new job, even the BBC's head of HR said it was unfair !
I disagree. He went too soft on Patterson IMO. Patterson wanted to keep repeating the same PR BS point. He wouldn't answer the bloody fundamental question which was "what about the people happy with the status quo".
It's not at all unusual for people in broadcasting to have come from print journalism, both on air and behind the scenes. In fact, many of the very best presenters, interviewers and producers have. Print journalism is a very good grounding basis for discovering what makes a good story and how to tailor it for your audience.
The trouble with Katz, and this has been said by many who work with him, is that he has a very Guardianista view of the world. That's the sphere he mixes in, that's the sort of dinner parties he goes to, and it has increasingly been reflected in Newsnight's output.
That presents some interesting challenges in the UK, where the press is permitted to have a poltical slant (and where just about all the papers do), but where the TV news channels can't. It takes quite a skilled journalist to switch off their political leanings when they appear on screen. Sky News for example sail very close to the wind on occasions, although I don't believe Ofcom have found they have crossed it too often, if at all. But I can't imagine Adam Boulton, Kay Burley et al are reading the Socialist Worker in their spare time.
I was a little surprised to read Paxman admitted he's a Tory in an interview earlier this year, although maybe that wasn't news to those who watched Newsnight etc more often than I did.
And that's a bad thing?