Another Wark on the Biased Side

Unkind souls used to refer to Kirsty Wark as 'Slursty Wark'. She was certainly on fine sense-mangling form last night, ending with:

Thanks very much indeed for all of us for watching.

Earlier she'd read out the Daily Mail's headline and 'misgendered' the elderly man fatally stabbed in Ealing. :

And let's take a look at some of the front pages, beginning with the Daily Mail. 'What kind of monster kills an 87 year old woman in a scooter?'...that was the person on the mobility scooter...is the story on their front page.

That all followed an interview about the RAF diversity row where a man and a woman were interviewed. Both were strongly on-message but the man briefly said something that strayed from the true path and Kirsty came down on him like a ton of bricks. He then returned to saying 'the right thing' again, now overcompensating for the 'rightness' by being even more on-message than earlier. [If Col Richard Kemp had been on instead I'm sure he'd have held his ground].  

Those kind of one-sided challenges are par for the course, of course. What's so annoying watching Kirsty Wark interview though is how often she interrupts just so she can get her next question in. She has her 'little list' of pre-prepared questions and nothing's going to stop her ploughing through them, never mind if the flow of the discussion keeps being diverted or comes to a juddering half, as it did once last night. 

One odd thing about the programme's treatment of the story might stand out to anyone who's been hearing about it elsewhere, that the senior RAF recruitment officer who resigned in protest at an "effective pause" on offering jobs to white male recruits in favour of women and ethnic minorities [as Sky reported it] is a woman - which, in this case, is surely relevant. Newsnight was oddly coy about stating it though:

• The RAF's recruitment chief hit quits over diversity targets.
• "Impossible diversity targets" - that was was the reason, it came to light today, which was cited by the head of RAF recruitment for resigning from the service.
• But it now finds itself at the centre of a row after one of its senior officers resigned.
• Dr Sophy Antrobus, do you think the RAF chief recruiter was right to resign?

Viewers might have thought it was a moaning man until Kirsty Wark let slip a “she” very late on.