it's awesome. i actually can't believe he actually watched it. it gave me an experience to share that i can dance and i'm confident to do it. some of the moves are quite difficult for us so we had to change a few. but we've tried to be creative as much as we can. what a way to end your primary school days. i think they will remember this so much more than they will remember the saps, the exams, this is the way to go. the headlines on bbc news: sarah huckabee sanders is announced as the new white house press secretary after sean spicer resigned. a bbc investigation finds evidence of children as young as nine being groomed on the live streaming app periscope. 16 children are interviewed as part of a major child abuse investigation involving up to 70 police officers in cheltenham. an update on the market numbers

for you — here's how london's and frankfurt ended the day. and in the the united states this is how the dow and the nasdaq are getting on. now it's time for newswatch, with samira ahmed. this week, how those who present the news, made the news. hello and welcome to newswatch with me, samira ahmed. coming up, news presenters featured prominently in the bbc‘s list of its best paid on air staff. this week, are they really worth the money? and how will the bbc deal with the gap in pay revealed between men and women? wednesday was a difficult day for the bbc, as ordered by the government against its wishes,

the corporation published the names and salary bands of all its on—air employees paid more than £150,000 a year. this led to some uncomfortable interviews with those unused to being on the receiving end of questions. what do i do? on paper, absolutely nothing that justifies that huge amount of money if you compare with me with lots of other people. a doctor saves a child's life. a nurse comforts a dying person. would you do the job for less? of course. i have never doubted how lucky i am to work in there. i am just sorry. i think the bbc is really hurting today. john humphrys and jeremy vine, the two leading news presenters on the list, earning over £600,000 and £700,000 respectively. they were followed by the likes of huw edwards, on more than £550,000, andrew marr, earning over £400,000, fiona bruce, with more than £350,000, and laura kuenssberg on over £200,000, who was in the same range as andrew neil,

as wasjon sopel. many bbc outlets indulged in what some viewers felt was washing their dirty linen in public, including breakfast, with a surreally self—referential paper review presented awkwardly by on—the—list naga munchetty and not on the list charlie stayt. it's not every day the bbc brea kfast sofa ma kes the front page of the sun, but there we go. the figures are out. and many of the papers, as naga said, are looking at some of the detail and some of the discrepancies highlighted. the daily mail say mutiny — bitter recriminations of the politically correct bbc as this gulf between men and women's pay is revealed. so that's us on newswatch broadcast during breakfast, showing a clip of breakfast, featuring a newspaper front page about breakfast. apologies for adding to the self—absorption, which on wednesday prompted this from rowena kay. and another twitter user

called jerome thought: others felt the difference between men's and women's earnings revealed by the list was being pored over to access, with helen blamires asking: well, amol rajan has been reporting on this story all week at the bbc‘s media editor and hejoins me now. has it been awkward? not particularly. maybe i have a certain advantage in that i have not been here that long, so i haven't become best friends with some of the people i was reporting on. i knew i was talking about people like huw edwards who i'll have to work with, but you try very hard. you come across lots of awkward in situations in journalism. you think, how would i cover this

if it wasn't the bbc and i was somewhere else, and you do it straight down the line. you have come from newspapers like the independent. has it affected how you view the row over bbc pay? i don't think it has affected how i reviewed the row. i approach this as a hack, not as a company man. it is a juicy story. it is fantastically gossipy and exciting detail, and this is a list of names and ifind it fascinating. as an old—fashioned hack, i think this is, i would not say a sexy story, but a juicy one. a lot of viewers said there was too much self—flagellating coverage, the media talking about itself to itself at the expense of other news. i don't think it was self—flagellating. if you are the bbc, you have to cover yourself in a way that tries to be fair and objective. you have got to be tough. i was very conscious. i had two interviews with tony hall on the news at ten, two nights in a row. there was no way i was going to let the director—general get on the news at ten and not give him a hard time.

so when i was editing the packages, i'd make sure that we were seen to be giving him a hard time, but i don't think that is self—flagellation. there is an important story here, which is how public money is spent. there is a question of whether we did too much, which is complicated because it is to do with what else is on the news agenda, but i think we got it about right. there is also an accusation from some viewers that news coverage actually focused too much on the gender gap to distract from the sheer size of the salaries. were you under any pressure to report the story any way? i was under no pressure whatsoever. i can tell you hand on heart that no one tried... having been a kind of media adviser and having thought about comms in a previous job and having gone through some difficult things in myjournalistic

career like shutting a newspaper, i was thinking to myself, what is the is the line the bbc would like to put out? i am conscious that they feel they have a decent story to tell on that no one tried... if you find out at base that chris evansis if you find out at base that chris evans is paid £2.2 million, that is a big number. notjust gender but other issues revealed, like diversity and class. amol rajan, thank you. many of those who contacted newswatch expressed their dismay and disgust about the levels of salary if you are finding out that chris evans is paid £2.2 million, many of those who contacted newswatch expressed their dismay and disgust about the levels of. and there was also concern about the gender disparities in pay, with the top seven on the list all men and on the issue of race, the top 2a are all white. john rick warren had a similar are paid partly according one might

assume that people are paid partly according to show is presented. one might assume that people are paid partly according to show is presented. for instance, john humphrys and jeremy vine by present tv quiz shows, which contribute to their wage bills, trickier factors are how replaceable each person is and how much they would earn elsewhere. that cuts no ice with david goodchild, who told us: that the bbc‘s director—general lord hall

responded to all these points in an interview he gave on wednesday. he said the gender pay gap was lower at the bbc than it was nationally, and pledged equal pay on the air between men by 2020. he pointed to the increased competition to the bbc not just domestically, but from companeis such as apple and amazon, and he said he would continue efforts to reduce the on—air wage bill. we are constantly working at ensuring that we get the balance right between our public, who want to have great shows presented by stars and great presenters, and them also wanting to know that their money, and it's their money, public money, is being spent properly. and that's always a balance. well, mark damazer worked

at the bbc for many years, including as deputy director of bbc news, and he was later a bbc trustee and is now master of st peter's college oxford. he joins me in the studio. welcome to newswatch. you used to be management and make these kind of pay decisions. were you surprised by the numbers revealed ? i was surprised by the gender gap. i thought there would be a gender gap, but it was considerably more embarrassing and bigger than i had anticipated. some of the individual figures, of course, caused some surprise. not necessarily new, sometimes outside. not all of them were surprising. i can see entirely from the point of view from an average licence payer that they would have looked, on average, high. but in terms of negotiating these one by one, no, i wasn't enormously surprised. because several viewers have described some of these salaries as obscene, and they are eye—watering, aren't they? well, it's a truth and it's not necessarily a happy truth that the way people get paid across the economy is not a reflection of moral virtue or moral value. it would be hard to say that a nurse or a police woman or a fire officer isn't worth more by way of moral value than they stand in the economic hierarchy. you have to take that to one side and look at it as a market base calculation. and once you get to that and strip out the notion that these people

are intrinsically more virtuous, then the figures make some more sense. people still thinking the bbc is a public organisation and, in the end, there is no justification for a newsreader to be paid £500,000 a year. the problem with that is, if other people are paying a great deal more, i'm afraid the bbc has to operate by trying to get the best talent that they can for a price that is always likely to be discounted to what everybody else is paying. but it has to be reasonable enough to get people into those jobs, keep them and recruit new people. and it isn't always happy and this is difficult and embarrassing, but i think the bbc is right to have a policy that says — we need talent and we're going to have to pay. a lot of viewers and a lot of bbc staff, women, people from minority backgrounds, have been quite pleased to see these numbers out in the open. transparency‘s quite revealing, isn't it? yeah, so i was on the bbc trust for a couple of years and i was not an enthusiast for this, i was perfectly happy about bands in which you could locate the numbers of people but not necessarily the name. i was absolutely, and am happy, that the gender

gap has been disclosed. that's not the same as individual salaries being disclosed in this way. although i think that some good, because of the pressure that will now be on the bbc management has come out of this, because the gender gap will have to be sorted. how will it be sorted? i think it will be extremely difficult. in some cases, i think, it is likely to lead to inflation. i don't think that tony hall can admit to that, but it's going to be very hard to do this if you don't inflate some people's salaries, those people being women. and that may not be good for the bbc‘s total pay bill and it may not be good for people worrying about overpayment in general, if they think everybody‘s being paid too much, but i think women are going to have to be paid more, on average. one of the things that's likely to happen over a period of time is that some of the better paid men, not that i wish ill on any of them, but some of the better paid men may leave and it may be they will be replaced by other, dare i say it, cheaper men or women. that will, in some way, compress the gap between the males and the females.

but i think the bbc can't go on like this, even if it is true that the bbc, and i think it almost certainly is true, that the bbc‘s record is more defensible than most, if not all other broadcasters and many other big corporations in other fields of the economy. thank you very much. pleasure. thank you for all your comments this week. we're off the air for a few weeks now over the summer, but do please still share your opinions on bbc news and current affairs by calling us on 0370 010 6676. or emailing newswatch at bbc.co.uk. you can find us on twitter, @newswatchbbc, and do have a look at our website, bbc.co.uk/newswatch. that's all from us. we'll be back to hear your thoughts about bbc news coverage again in september. goodbye. good evening. the weather has been

causing some disruption today, we have had some very heavy rain and some surface flooding and strong winds across western parts of the country. the south—west of england and wales as well. he is the scene in pembrokeshire as we ended the day, big shower clouds around. setting the scene for an unsettled outlook over the next couple days. this band of rain is making its way further north eastwards into southern scotland by the early hours of saturday. following further showers, with low pressure still out in the west. those winds rotating around that every of low pressure. no showers moving to the south—west of england, into the midlands and southern england. we will continue to see showers further north, but much of scotland and northern ireland having a relatively decent sort of day. into sunday, showers will be few and far between, but it is another day of sunny scales, scattered showers, some of them bringing the odd rumble of thunder. good ba degree also warmer with

highs of 16 to 20 degrees. this is bbc world news today. our top stories: the white house press secretary, sean spicer, resigns after president trump appoints anthony scaramucci as his communications director. but the new man said there were no hard feelings. his attitude is anthony is coming in let me clear the slate for anthony, andi let me clear the slate for anthony, and i do appreciate that about sean and i do appreciate that about sean and i love him for it. but i don't have any friction with sean. torn apart by civil war, yemen is now in the grip of what aid agencies say is the worst outbreak of cholera in the world ever recorded. of cholera in the world palestinian of cholera in the world leader suspends all conflicts palestinian leader suspends all conflicts with israel amid clashes of the streets of a bbc investigation into online abuse reveals children as young as nine are being groomed using the periscope app which is owned by twitter.