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Gary Lineker Getty.jpg

Gary Lineker, the BBC, and the Lie of Impartiality

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | March 14, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | March 14, 2023 |


Gary Lineker Getty.jpg

Things have gotten weird in the UK, even by our standards. Not content with being the capital city of worldwide transphobia, chopping and changing our prime ministers like they’re Henry VIII’s wives, and sinking further into a murderous cost of living crisis, we’re now in the midst of a new kind of drama. Did you hear the one about the football commentator, the Nazi language, and the BBC? Yeah, like I said, weird.

For those non-Brits who have no idea what’s going on, here’s a quick summary.

Gary Lineker is an English former footballer and sports commentator. He’s a pretty big deal here, a beloved sportsman who has spent decades being the face of Walkers Crisps and commentating on football for the BBC. The host of the corporation’s flagship footie show, Match of the Day, Lineker is the highest-paid star on BBC television, a major icon of the sport in this country who is, generally speaking, very popular. Even people who don’t care about football tend to like him.

This month, he took to Twitter to criticize the Tory government’s new plans to stop people from trying to cross the English Channel in small boats in the hope of applying for asylum. Commenting on a video message by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, he said her words were ‘beyond awful’ and that this policy was ‘directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.’

This led to outcry from the Tories, who happily voted through policies to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda rather than let them stay here. It led to the BBC taking Lineker off the air while they looked into whether or not he broke the corporation’s rules on broadcaster impartiality. Then things got even messier. Lineker’s Match of the Day co-hosts, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, decided they would not appear on Saturday’s episode of the show in solidarity with their friend. Commentators Steve Wilson, Conor McNamara, Robyn Cowen, and Steven Wyeth also announced, in a joint statement online, that they ‘[did] not feel it would be appropriate to take part in the programme.’ Attempts to find a replacement failed, and other football hosts on the BBC like Alex Scott, Jason Mohammad, Mark Chapman, and Jermaine Jenas, pulled out of their respective programmes. Match of the Day went ahead last Saturday, with no hosts or commentary, and only about 20 minutes of match footage (the average episode is about three and a half hours long.) Lineker has said he stands by what he tweeted, and rival channel reporters on Sky Sports have expressed support for his right to say what he said.

On Monday, the BBC seemed to settle the matter, with Lineker set to return to Match of the Day. BBC director general Tim Davie said an independent review of BBC social media guidelines would be carried out. The Tories are moaning that the BBC capitulated to woke mobs. Labour think the BBC needs to get more specific about its impartiality guidelines. Former BBC director-general Greg Dyke wondered if the entire affair made it seem as though the broadcaster had been bullied by the Tories into punishing Lineker.

Great Britain has been in a terrible state for over a decade, thanks to the callous ineptitude and active cruelty of the Conservative government. It’s almost impressive how the Tories find new depths of awfulness to sink to, and yet here we are. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman have launched horrific attacks on refugees and migrants hoping to find asylum in the UK. Those who cross the channel in ‘small boats’ will be punished, and Braverman has not minced her words in dehumanizing those desperate families who hope to find solace here. Braverman, who previously faced criticisms over multiple breaches of ministerial code, referred to arriving migrants as an ‘invasion.’ Her rhetoric led to an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor calling her out for using language similar to that of Nazis in 1930s Germany. Rather than back down, Braverman stood by her cruelty. A reminder that Braverman is not only a British Indian woman but is married to a Jewish man, has two children who attend synagogue, and once described her husband as a ‘very proud member of the Jewish community.’ She’s also faced criticism for using the ‘cultural Marxism’ dog-whistle, which has a long anti-Semitic history.

Impartiality is not impossible. It’s a crucial part of journalism and a basic detail of life that we’ve all utilized multiple times over the years. There’s a reason it is so prized, to the point of fetish, by many. The problem is with how this simple concept has become bastardized to unrecognizability, often at the behest of those who should know better. It’s not impartial to give equal time and unchallenged space to two opposing viewpoints on any given matter. That’s a debate, not journalism. To report all gossip equally is to empower the lie. When we see topics like climate change, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and so on, distilled to a two-person rant where the moderator does not offer a sliver of accountability, truth can never prevail. There’s no cutesy dispute to be had over whether climate change exists. We know it does. The vast majority of scientists agree on that front. So, to find the one weirdo who opposes the facts, then give them the same amplification as one person representing decades of research, only benefits the lies.

But this is the preferred impartiality of organizations like the modern-day BBC, a screeching brand of smarmy faux-centrism that lets the liars go unchallenged and pretends it’s pure neutrality. One of the reasons the Conservative Party has so thoroughly gutted and demeaned British public broadcasting is because it can’t spin its increasingly fascistic policies as just another opinion. Anyone that calls out rhetoric that shares uncanny levels of DNA with Nazism must be impartial in their eyes, even if that includes multiple experts on the Holocaust. The terrifying rightward slide of European politics becomes just another set of ideas to be given the same level of unchallenged space as stories about celebrities or animals.

And that still assumes that this warped version of impartiality is applied evenly. Gary Lineker wasn’t taken to task for tweeting ‘bin Corbyn’. Jeremy Clarkson never faced repercussions while working for the BBC when he spent years spewing racism, sexism, homophobia, and writing that striking public sector workers should be shot to death in front of their families. Political journalist Laura Kuenssberg has been repeatedly called out by her own contemporaries for her pro-Tory bias and access-driven approach to her job. The current BBC Chairman, Richard Sharp, was taken to task by a parliamentary committee for facilitating an £800,000 loan guarantee for Boris Johnson, something he failed to declare when applying for his current job. Tim Davie, the most important person at the BBC, unsuccessfully stood as a councillor for the Conservative Party in Hammersmith in 1993 and was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Association in the 1990s.

It should not be considered a breach of impartiality for anyone, much less a football commentator, to call a spade a spade. We know how the Nazis dehumanized minority groups by referring to them in parasitic terms. We saw this with Trump too, and myriad other right-wing demagogues who all use the same playbook. So, when such things, such moments of crushing reality, are punished as displays of bias by people who do nothing to hide their own agenda, how can we not come to the most disheartening of conclusions about our politics and media? And if our supposed bastion of truth is this eager to throw their highest-paid star under the bus, how high are the odds that they’ll do the same thing to a lowly reporter just trying to hold the government to account?