Over the course of just a couple of days, the BBC has managed to put its entire football at risk over a draconian interpretation of ‘impartiality’ rules.
Oh good grief, whatever have you done? In the space of just a few short days, the BBC has managed to torpedo much of what was left of the goodwill shown towards it as an impartial broadcaster and trash the reputation of some of their longest-running and perhaps most beloved sporting brands.
It wasn’t just them trying to make Gary Lineker humiliate himself on social media. It wasn’t just that the BBC’s own guidelines gave him the room to comment on politcal matters. It wasn’t just that they then suspended him. It wasn’t just that they then scrabbled on, despite being told by practically everyone associated with this edition of Match of the Day that they wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t just that they then announced that they would just continue without any host or analyst. It was all of the above, and that’s without even starting on the actual subject matter upon which Lineker was commenting in the first place.
So, what do their actual guidelines on this sort of thing actually say? Lineker is a freelancer and not a BBC employee, but section 15.3.13 of the BBC’s own guidelines on Conflicts of Interest says the following:
“Where individuals identify themselves as being linked with the BBC, or are programme makers, editorial staff, reporters or presenters primarily associated with the BBC, their public expressions of opinion have the potential to compromise the BBC’s impartiality and damage its reputation. This includes the use of social media and writing letters to the press. Opinions expressed on social media are put into the public domain, can be shared, and are searchable.”
This would appear to include the Match of the Day presenter, but then immediately afterwards the guidelines also say this:
The risk is greater where the public expressions of opinion overlap with the area of the individual’s work. The risk is lower where an individual is expressing views publicly on an unrelated area, for example a sports or science presenter expressing views on politics or the arts.
And this would quite specifically seem to give him a pass on expressing what was likely a fairly common opinion among millions of the population. But on this occasion, why has that all been overlooked in favour of seeking to curry favour with the political hard right? It’s easy to get trapped into deliberately distracting semantic debates about ‘Nazism vs fascism’ or whatever, when one of the most worrying things about all of this is that saying what he said came in response to the actual language being used by the government when it comes to refugees.
He isn’t an extremist. They are the extremists and they are, as ever seems to be the case, projecting. Other questions arise too, such as why it was acceptable for the BBC’s coverage of the World Cup to be critical while it’s not acceptable for people in a private capacity to be critical of this country’s own government.
The more politically-savvy will already be aware of the changes that have come at the BBC in recent years. Chair Richard Sharp, a previous Tory donor, had made the introductions between Boris Johnson and one of the former prime minister’s distant cousins, who became a guarantor for a substantial loan.
Another board member is Sir Robbie Gibb, former head of communications at 10 Downing Street – think Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, only a Tory – who was described by former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who is shaping the broadcaster’s news output by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”.
Director-General Tim Davie is a former Deputy Chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party and activist. Director of News John McAndrew is a former Director of News and Director of News Programming at GB News whose last job before joining the BBC was acting as the launch editor for the Channel 4 show The Andrew Neil Show.
Many of the less politically savvy will still be aware that other ‘presenters primarily associated with the BBC’ such as, say, Alan Sugar have never faced any questions over their political comments on social media. So which is it? What is the difference between Alan Sugar hamming it up on The Apprentice and Gary Lineker fronting weekly highlights for Premier League football?
We don’t have to go back very far to see other examples of there being one rule for one end of the political spectrum and one for the other. Issues over the make-up of both the guests and studio audience for flagship political show Question Time have been well-known for a long time.
Andrew Neil was the editor of right-wing political magazine The Spectator while fronting high-profile political programmes on the BBC, and never seemed afraid shy of making a political comment or two then. Here he is, for example, hosting The Politics Show while wearing an Adam Smith Institute – a right-wing think tank – tie in 2017.
And this sort of comment hasn’t even been barred from football. Back in the 1980s and earlier, it was not uncommon for football pundits to offer solutions to rampant hooliganism by reintroducing national service or bringing back the birch. This sort of reactionary conservatism was never far from the surface of a lot of football coverage in days gone by, and broadly speaking it was treated with a shrug of the shoulders.
If this line in the sand that the BBC has over the free expression of the personal opinions of those who work for them or are employed by them, then the BBC should actually try enforcing their own guidelines equally. Otherwise, the BBC itself starts to lack credibility as being anything other than an explicitly partisan spokesbody for the government. And if that’s what the BBC is now, then the very least they could do is be honest about it with those who pay for them to exist – us – rather than trying to continue to claim some sort of moral high ground as a high water mark of impartiality when in truth it seems that these strings are being pulled behind the scenes.
Meanwhile back in the football world, the actual Match of the Day is at the time of writing falling apart before our very eyes. It had already been confirmed that the show would go ahead without hosting or punditry and it wasn’t difficult to see the reason why. Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, then Jermaine Jenas and Micah Richards. Others followed.
Then followed confirmation that the BBC’s commentators would be withdrawing their work. And then there were reports that players would be refusing to do post-match interviews with them after the matches, explicitly supported by the PFA. By Saturday morning, the poison had spread to Football Focus, the Saturday lunchtime preview show, was replaced with an episode of Bargain Hunters with the news that Alex Scott would also be refusing to work for the BBC. When Jason Mohammad confirmed that he would also be withdrawing Final Score, the results round-up show, started to look vulnerable too. It wasn’t even limited to radio, either. Mark Chapman and Dion Dublin withdrew from BBC Radio 5Live’s coverage, too.
This was, if anything, a surprisingly loud and unified voice, and it spoke volumes for the times in which we live. It is absolutely true to say that all the media space taken up by this story would be better used discussing the matter of refugees, but that conversation is only worth having if it’s honest and humane.
The fact that all these voices have spoken with one does say something. When it’s simply all the commentators, all the players and all the pundits, this can’t be pinned on the “wokerati” or any other such made-up nonsense. The most optimistic reading of all of this is that the senior management have disastrously overplayed their hand, and that their positions are now untenable. Time will tell.
And for what remains a large number of people, Match of the Day truly is beloved. It doesn’t pull in anything like the audiences that it did when it accounted for one of the two hours of league football broadcast all week, but it retains national treasure status to this day and for the senior management of the company to do this to the show feels like an act of vandalism being carried out upon something that stretches beyond ‘mere’ football.
Match of the Day was there for the good times, but also for the bad. Its music introduced the horrific broadcast on the night of the Heysel Stadium disaster in May 1985. The edition of the show broadcast on the night of the Hillsborough disaster was unlike anything ever seen before or, thankfully, since. Football reaches into our hearts and connects us to our inner child in a way that nothing else can. Small wonder that all of this feels personal, when something that means so much to so many people joins the list of collateral damage in their pathetic ‘culture wars’.
Quite where the BBC’s football output goes from here is anybody’s guess. Who will be the first to break rank and forever be tarnished as a ‘scab’? Will those parachuted into these senior management positions be able to withstand the growing scrutiny of their positions at the top of the BBC? Because if there’s anyone that has trashed its reputation as a result of the last couple of days or so, it’s the corporation itself rather than those amongst its ranks who’ve stood up and said ‘enough’.