BBC Pro-Govt Bias exposed over Lineker sack

This week’s newspapers and news bulletins have been dominated by a row over a tweet by the BBC football commentator and presenter Gary Lineker.

The tweet, in which Lineker compared the rhetoric used by UK Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Government on refugees to that previously used in 1930s Germany, has been the subject of multiple front pages and led the BBC’s news bulletins.

At the same time as the Government’s de facto asylum ban has been condemned by, among others, international human rights groups, the England’s Children’s Commissioner and the UN, Britain’s media has instead largely focused on a single tweet made by one BBC host.

One former BBC executive told the station that Lineker would inevitably have to be sacked for bringing the corporation’s impartiality into doubt.

Yet the treatment of Lineker, like the treatment of other former BBC hosts who felt forced to leave in recent years after coming under pressure for their supposedly ‘left-wing’ views, stands in stark contrast to the much more lenient treatment meted out to other prominent figures at the corporation.

According to By Line Times’ Adam Bienkov, Andrew Neil in particular, who helped front multiple political programs at the BBC over many years, before leaving to help launch GB News, was never subject to even a fraction of the scrutiny now being placed on Lineker. Neil, like Lineker, was a prolific user of Twitter and regularly shared his own views on everything from Brexit to climate change and the SNP.

At the same time, he was chairman of one of Britain’s leading right-wing magazines, the Spectator. Neil was allowed to keep his role at the magazine, which regularly caused significant controversy over its content on issues including race and religion, despite being in such a prominent position at the BBC.

And while he did once come under some internal pressure over a tweet he posted about the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, his use of the social media site was never the subject of a single tabloid splash or BBC bulletin.

In short, he was given a pass – in a way neither Lineker nor former BBC journalists like Lewis Goodall and Emily Maitlis ever were.

As Goodall himself said this week, as somebody who was accused of being on the left, his life was regularly “made really hard” at the corporation by BBC Board member (and former Theresa May communications chief) Sir Robbie Gibb.

None of this is a surprise to those who know the BBC well.

Prominent left-wingers in the UK often complain about the apparent dominance of right-wing voices on BBC News program and panels, while insiders at the corporation have often grumbled over the years about what they see as a right-wing bias inside the management of BBC’s Westminster operation.

Yet the BBC’s self-flagellation over Gary Lineker this week has taken matters to another level.

At a time when the Government is bringing in a new law, which even the Home Secretary has admitted is more likely than not in breach of the UK’s international obligations, Britain’s national broadcaster has instead devoted itself to seemingly endless discussion about one sports presenter’s public criticism of the policy.

Ultimately it is this imbalance in its coverage, rather than the views of any one particular individual, which represents the real crisis of impartiality at the BBC.

That is the BBC at its worst. As it has been over the past few days. As it defaults to being at the first sign of trouble, which is much of the time. This is the same organization that believes it is populated by “remainers”, having been the midwife to Brexit, by giving equivalent airtime to lies propagated by the leave team in the cause of “balance”.

This is the same organization that has encouraged much of its best talent to leave because it did not stand up to the government over the license fee settlement, leaving a hollowed-out newsroom. This is the same organization that is emasculating its international output, on TV and radio, by war-casting against Russia, downplaying Israeli genocide of Palestine, doing propaganda against China, and mis-reporting Africa.

BBC’s right wing bias has become evident. The corporation, of course, will survive this storm, but first there are a few things it is required to do to salvage what is left of its shattered impartiality myth.

According to the Guardian’s John Kampfner, the most urgent requirement in this latest of many self-inflicted meltdowns is to make peace with a football presenter who was always popular and has now been turned into a national treasure. The second is to sort out the mess that are impartiality guidelines, enforced far more assiduously on liberal than conservative employees or contractors.

The third is to remove inconsistencies and hypocrisies. You should not stop one celebrity freelance from speaking out, while allowing others to. You should not remove a journalist from a leftwing magazine from presenting shifts, while allowing one from its rightwing rival to have as many programs as he likes.

The most important task, however, it is to acquire a spine, to understand that the next time a British (or for that matter any western right wing) government minister harangues you (which will be tomorrow, the next day and the day after), you tell them to take a running jump.

Like dry rot, the fear principle is now so ingrained that it will take a long time to scrape it out. Friends in Russia, Georgia, Turkey, and all those fighting for freedom of expression, are scratching their heads at the notion of an institution long respected around the world taking its best-known sports presenter off air because he has the temerity to speak out passionately on asylum. That is not a good look for the UK.

The BBC is one of Britain’s few global selling points. To survive with any credibility and to retain what support it still has, the repair work has to begin urgently.