BBC sports program Match of the Day, one of the most successful and long-lived of the chain, is broadcast this Saturday without a presenter or commentators. They have refused to participate just like the presenter of the midday football program and so many presenters and sports reporters from the public environment that the BBC 5 radio station has had to interrupt its regular programming. They protest the suspension of Gary Lineker, who was a Barça player between 1986 and 1989 and who has been presenting the star program of the football matchday since 1999.
The United Kingdom is willing to punish refugees who reach its shores even if they break international law
Further
Meanwhile, with exhaustive coverage on TV, radio and the web, the BBC interviews expert voices, politicians and one of its former directors about the “discredit” that the public medium itself is suffering.
The BBC suspended Lineker this Friday for “breaching” its “standards” of impartiality by criticizing on Twitter the new immigration law proposed by the British Government, which will prohibit refugees from making an asylum application if they arrive in the country by crossing the channel of the Unauthorized stain. The law has been criticized by the UN for possible violation of the 1951 refugee convention that the United Kingdom signed and helped write and which expressly prohibits hindering asylum seekers because of the way in which they reach a country. The convention includes this caveat because refugees often do not have the time or the way to complete the previous procedures due to the desperation of their situation fleeing from war, persecution and discrimination.
The tweets
Lineker, who only reports on football on his show, tweeted this Tuesday “this is more than horrible” with a video in which the Minister of the Interior, Suella Braverman, announced that she would stop “the boats”, complaining about the money it costs to host refugees and accused thousands of people of making “an illegal trip” for which they will be deported to Rwanda or another country considered “safe.”
The former footballer added in another tweet: “There is not a huge wave of arrivals. We host far fewer refugees than other large European countries. This is just unconscionably cruel policy targeting the most vulnerable people in language no different than what Germany used in the 1930s. Am I being inappropriate?
Good heavens, this is beyond awful. https://t.co/f0fTgWXBwp
— Gary Lineker ???????? (@GaryLineker) March 7, 2023
The words of the sports presenter are similar to the reproaches of the UN, the European Commission and International Amnesty on the substance and on the tone of the Minister of the Interior. Introducing the bill in the House of Commons, Braverman said those arriving on British shores are mostly Albanian men under the age of 40 “rich enough to pay the criminal gangs” who bring them in and who they “game the system” against the British authorities.
Most of the people identified in small boats in the canal in recent months are from Albania and Afghanistan (a country cited by the minister as among those protected), and also from Iran, Iraq and Syria, among other nationalities. Since 2018, most asylum claims have been approved as legitimate. During the debate in the House of Commons, several deputies asked Braverman to tone down the “inflammatory” tone that puts these people “in danger”.
‘Could I ask her to please tone down her inflammatory language – it’s putting those people at risk’
Labour’s John McDonnell says Suella Braverman’s language around asylum seekers could be harmful https://t.co/J9a4WeWJFV pic.twitter.com/8gqPiPDV2j
— ITV News (@itvnews) March 7, 2023
Lineker has criticized the Conservative Party on Twitter before, for example over its Russian oligarch donors. But his comments this week have been the subject of several tabloid front pages. Daily Mail and the conservative newspaper Daily Telegraph. The BBC promised to “talk” to him, but ultimately decided to suspend him after Lineker refused to delete the tweet. In 2021, the former footballer said that the director general of the BBC I had never called him to reprove him for a tweet.
The rules
The BBC, a public outlet that is financed by a separate royalty that anyone watching linear or digital television has to pay, has a long and detailed guide to rules that includes instructions to preserve impartiality and to ensure that its journalists are not perceived as partisan.
“The BBC is committed to achieving due impartiality,” the text says. “This commitment is fundamental to our reputation, our values and the trust of audiences. The term ‘due’ means that the fairness must be adequate and appropriate for the product taking into account the subject matter and nature of the content, the likely expectations of the audience and any signals that may influence that expectation”.
The BBC also stresses that “due impartiality” is not “a simple matter of ‘balancing’ between opposing points of view” but is about considering “a broad perspective” and doing work that is “inclusive”. “It does not require absolute neutrality on every issue or the separation of fundamental democratic principles, such as the right to vote, freedom of expression and the rule of law,” says the network.
Lineker could take advantage of the fact that his opinion refers to a matter of defense of fundamental democratic principles, which the United Kingdom supported in the UN refugee convention of 1951 and in the European convention of human rights of which it remains part, although the minister now says that she cannot be certain that the new law will comply with international law.
But the most controversial part of Lineker’s disapproval is that he is not a reporter nor does he host a current political show. He is dedicated to sports coverage in a space separated from the news and where no political issue is touched.
When it comes to the opinion of its journalists and commentators, the BBC says that “the risk is highest when expressions of opinion overlap with the individual’s area of work” and that “the risk is lowest when the individual is expressing points of public view on an unrelated area; for example, a sports or science presenter expressing views on politics or the arts.” He also stresses that special care must be taken with “controversial issues.”
double standards
In any case, the BBC has not in the past suspended entertainment show hosts who write for outlets with clearly partisan editorial lines. The most recent case is that of Jeremy Clarkson, the presenter of a famous motor show that he wrote a few weeks ago in the tabloid The Sun that she hated actress and former royal Meghan Markle and imagined being insulted and having excrement thrown at her as she rode naked through British cities.
The expression of openly partisan points of view has multiple examples in the case of employees of spaces that are not newscasts or news programs. Alan Sugar, quiz host The Apprentice, which airs on the BBC, said Boris Johnson should be “in jail” for his “lies” in the Brexit campaign and then called for him to vote in the 2019 election.
“There’s a long-standing precedent that says at the BBC if you’re an entertainment or sports presenter then you’re not bound by the same rules,” Greg Dyke, a former director, told BBC Radio 4 Saturday morning. of the public medium between 2000 and 2004. “The real problem today is that the BBC is blowing up its own credibility by doing this.”
Dyke, who has never criticized his former network before, complains that the decision creates the impression that the BBC “has bowed to government pressure” especially at a sensitive time because of the position of its own president.
Dyke highlighted, in fact, the most serious conflict of interest right now on the BBC, which involves the current president, Richard Sharp, a former banker who is under investigation for helping former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to obtain a loan of 800,000 pounds ( more than 900,000 euros) shortly before being appointed to the position in February 2021, as revealed by the Sunday Times. The process is being investigated by Parliament and by the BBC itself, but Sharp remains in his position.
The current debate, which the BBC is covering up to the minute, including a live blog on its website with constant updates, has led to how this public medium applies its revered standards.
“The problem is that the BBC has rules but they don’t apply them fairly,” Patience Wheatcroft, a former head of conservative editorial media, also said on the morning of the channel. Wall Street Journal y Sunday Telegraph. The journalist, who is now a member of the House of Lords, also described the British government’s “rhetoric” on refugees as “deeply depressing”.
The data
Trust in the BBC remains high, but has fallen in recent years: 55% of those surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford say they trust the British public media, but those who say they do not they have gone from 11% in 2018 to 26% in 2022. Those who are distrustful are mostly men, have lower levels of academic training and tend to be less interested in the news, according to data from the 2022 report. More than half of those who say they distrust the BBC are Conservative voters and two-thirds voted for Brexit in 2016.
In that same survey on the use of social networks and impartiality in several countries, the majority in the United Kingdom believe that journalists should limit themselves to “giving information” on social networks. Among the countries analyzed, the exceptions are Brazil and Japan, where those surveyed are in favor of journalists giving their opinions online.
In the United Kingdom, a division is observed according to ideology on the aspiration of neutrality according to the issues according to the data of the Digital News Report from the same institute in 2021. Thus, most of the British who identify with the right say that the media should try to “be neutral on all issues”, while those who identify with the left say that “it does not make sense” that the media to be neutral on “some issues”.
Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, acknowledged the difficulties of his aspiration in a colloquium organized in collaboration with the Reuters Institute in February 2022. “By choosing impartiality and objective reporting you always fall short. The issue is how close you are. Making an effort to explore it is a valid thing. The challenge facing the BBC on impartiality is making sure that culturally we open ourselves up to as open a debate as possible and that we don’t have significant blind spots in terms of public debates and differing opinions,” said Davie, who has not yet spoken. on the Lineker affair.
“Twitter is not a meaningful sample,” he said then. “You have to be very careful about where you get your idea of what are broad points of view. And it’s gotten harder in a world where people are self-publishing versus the broadcast and research-based world. It’s a fight”.