BBC boss prompts jeers as he calls Lineker ‘one of our finest’ at Q&A
The BBC’s Rhodri Talfan Davies also controversially claimed ‘the word terrorism often can get in the way of our journalism’
GARY LINEKER is one of the BBC’s “finest” staff members, a top executive at the corporation has claimed amid jeers from a Jewish audience during a question-and-answer session last week.
In a further controversial statement, Director of Nations Rhodri Talfan Davies also said that “the word terrorism often can get in the way of our journalism” in response to a question about why the BBC initially refused to describe Hamas as a terror group,
Davies told the session – held to address accusations of bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war – that in his “personal view”, Lineker, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen were “some of the finest reporters at the BBC”.
Following audible derision among the crowd at this suggestion, Davies said: “It’s very clear in this room that there are people with different views.”
Lineker, who presents the BBC’s flagship football programme Match of the Day and is its highest-paid star, has shared a post that called for Israel to be banned from international football and lamented the killing of a Palestinian footballer who was later revealed to be Hamas terrorist.
His controversial tweets have been defended on the grounds that he is a presenter – not a journalist – and so subject to different impartiality rules.
Responding to the JC after the event, the BBC said that Davies did not mean to describe Lineker as a journalist.
More than 500 people attended the event at Manchester’s King David School, which also featured BBC Radio 5 Live controller Heidi Dawson.
The meeting was arranged by the Northern Advocacy Group: NAG for Israel, an organisation set up by Manchester community leaders in the wake of the October 7 massacre. JC columnist and broadcaster Angela Epstein chaired the conversation, which was the second time the Jewish community had been invited to meet the BBC since the start of the war.
Davies said in his address: “I have to tell you that reporting on the Middle East and the polarisation in society there and the polarisation between states and between people is the toughest journalistic ground.”
He added: “If you think that Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen get up in the morning and try to spin a lie, you don’t understand their integrity.” He added the corporation was “lucky” to have them. Davies told the audience: “You need us to get it right [...] we need to remind ourselves every day that the decisions we make are critical because we are a standard-setter and because your expectation of us is higher than of anybody else.”
He was asked about a recent controversial BBC report that claimed medical staff were stripped, beaten and tortured by Israeli forces during a raid on Nasser Hospital.
Davies said: “Access to Gaza for journalists is very severely restricted. Our teams both in the UK, in Jerusalem and in the rest of the Middle East are reliant on sources within Gaza, administration sources in the IDF and the Israeli government.
“We are having to piece together the situation on the ground in Gaza and it is incredibly challenging.
“When we talk about whether the BBC is getting it right or wrong in Gaza, if we could get permission to get into Gaza then that would transform the quality and the breadth of what we could do on the ground.”
He noted that the corporation describes Hamas as “a terrorist group as proscribed by the UK and US governments” adding that “the reason why is we are a global broadcaster”. According to Davies, the using word “terrorist” can mean that “one side of the debate or one side of the conflict immediately assumes we’re biased against them.
“We have no issue in describing exactly what happened on October 7, we used the word massacre [...] But we don’t use the word terrorism without proscription,” Davies said.
Journalist Adam
They were both being completely defensive
Cailler, who was present, said: “The overall feeling from the audience was that the two of them were not listening to anything that was being said and were extremely defensive the whole time.
“Rhodri was extremely defensive and was interested in trying to back his journalists and back all the people that we know have been making an absolute ass of this, like Jeremy Bowen, like Gary Lineker. “To sit in front of a room of hundreds Jewish people and say that people like Gary Lineker and Jeremy Bowen are some of the finest reporters that the BBC have, it’s just a slap in the face.
“You may as well have just stood up and walked out at that point because you’ve completely lost the room.”
Davies told the room he would be meeting BBC director general Tim Davie and would raise the points presented to him.
NAG member and former Labour MP Ivan Lewis pointed out that a key commitment to taking such concerns seriously will be “whether the BBC will review their use of dubious sources and biased journalists and continue a meaningful dialogue with NAG and the wider community, which we sincerely hope they do”.
Lewis suggested that BBC executives should attend another meeting in 12 months and “evaluate whether we think that things have improved in any way”.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We always welcome constructive feedback about any of our coverage.”