Stop ‘ liking’ anti-Radio 2 tweets, BBC staff told
BBC staff working on Radio 2 have been warned against upsetting presenters by ‘ liking’ tweets criticising the station’s output.
Bosses told employees it was ‘challenging’ for DJs to see colleagues giving approval to social media posts that claim Radio 2 is ‘going down the toilet’ and was ‘much better in the old days’.
A string of older presenters have left or been sidelined at the station in recent years, with younger hosts being drafted in to replace them. Critics have accused station chiefs of chasing younger listeners and alienating swathes of its loyal audience.
Radio 2 boss Helen Thomas made the comments during an online meeting with BBC staff who produce news programmes for the station.
She is understood to have told staff to be ‘aware’ of the posts they were liking or retweeting, no matter what their own views were on what was happening at Radio 2. Ms Thomas, who was announced as head of the station in 2020, said it could be ‘challenging’ for presenters to see social media posts which suggested Radio 2 was ‘much better in the old days’ had been ‘liked’.
Another manager, Julian Vaccari – a senior news editor in the BBC radio newsroom – said there had been a few tweets people had liked, which used phrases like ‘things are going down the toilet at Radio 2’.
Ken Bruce, 72, quit the station last year to join Greatest Hits Radio, replaced by Vernon Kay, 49. And Steve Wright, 69, had his afternoon show axed in 2022, taken over by former Radio 1 presenter Scott Mills, 50. An insider said they believed Ms Thomas had been given orders to make the station younger and more diverse.
And sources contrasted staff’s treatment at Radio 2 with the BBC’s handling of Gary Lineker over political online posts.
A BBC source said the meeting had been about ‘something completely different’ with a group of people that were not ‘Radio 2 staffers’. But they were ‘reminded that it wasn’t constructive to be liking tweets moaning about the station’. Radio 2 declined to comment.