Sky News: Presenters & Rotas

You very much will be seeing SJ on Sunrise; she'll co-pres alongside Jacquie Beltrao from Leicester on Tuesday with Eamonn back at base.

And yes, before you ask, there were contingency plans for what would happen if they didn't seal the deal tonight, but, as you might imagine, I'm not at liberty to discuss those.

Sarah-Jane mentioned on Twitter earlier that she is from the East Midlands, so it's a dream for her to cover a Premier League team from her area not seen since Nottingham Forest in the 80s.

As a reasonably regular visitor to the city I am well pleased they have won the premier league, so I can imagine Sarah is well pleased.

My mistake, it seemed Sarah is on Sunrise but still on location

First time I've seen Beth Rigby, one of the new political correspondents, this morning.

Well thank goodness for that - I won't miss him on health - he often seems to get very basic facts wrong in his reporting.

Only yesterday he was reporting that "patients are no more likely to die at the weekend than on weekdays" - when in fact nobody is disputing the clear fact that fewer patients in NHS hospitals die at the weekends than on weekdays. His report should have been about number of deaths in people admitted at the weekends.

Glancing through my to Sky, though, my personal favourite was the repeated assertion (I'm sure I remember it being his) in Feb 2014 that flood water contains "60 times the amount of safe bacteria", when in fact he meant "60 times the safe amount of bacteria" - exactly the opposite message.

I can't comment on the second instance, but will defend him on the first, as I personally clipped up and wrote the descriptive material around the report for our digital platforms yesterday.


The point of the piece was that the government's assertion about a higher proportion of people dying at weekends was ONLY correct as a natural mathematical consequence of fewer people being admitted at that time of the week - that it's a hollow political point. In essence, it put across the exact point you're making.

But that's exactly it - the Government hasn't made any assertion about a higher proportion of people dying at weekends, and the study didn't contest anything about dying at weekends - that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

The first line of the article on the Sky News website (still) says that the research said patients were "no more likely to die at the weekend than on weekdays" - that simply isn't what it said.

But hey-ho, I'm dragging this thread wildly off topic, so I'll put a sock in it.

I've removed a number of recent posts as I feel they were drifting too much into speculation regarding a presenter's personal life/privacy, which is not permitted.

Good call - thank you.

Sophy Ridge is covering for JT between 5-7.

Unless mentioned above, Isabel Webster returns to Sunrise in June.