U.K.: BBC cancels, then un-cancels, star soccer pundit
In “one of the most bizarre spectacles ever seen in British public life,” the country was convulsed for a full week over whether a sports announcer would keep his job, said Tom Peck in The Independent. It all started when Gary Lineker, the former soccer great turned star BBC commentator, tweeted a criticism of the government’s new plan to turn away all asylum seekers arriving illegally by boat from France. Lineker called the plan an “immeasurably cruel policy, directed at the most vulnerable people, in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s.” Conservative lawmakers howled that Lineker was violating the BBC’s requirement of impartiality, and he was yanked from the airwaves. But then the rest of the BBC’s sports crew promptly walked off the job in solidarity, which meant that the flagship Saturday night show Lineker hosts, the wildly popular Match of the Day, aired last weekend with no commentary whatsoever at a truncated 20 minutes. With programming in turmoil, BBC director Tim Davie reversed himself. Lineker was reinstated without having to apologize, while the BBC promised to revamp its impartiality rules for freelance presenters. Davie is surely wishing he had “just not made a Very Big Deal out of this.”
Lineker was reckless and out of line with his “distasteful hyperbole,” said The Times in an editorial. He’s parroted leftist talking points before, and a correction was long overdue. Sure, he’s the biggest name the BBC has—and its highest-paid star, raking in $1.6 million last year in taxpayer funds—but that’s all the more reason that his loud airing of political opinions jeopardizes “the BBC’s overall reputation for neutrality.”
Yet doesn’t Lineker have a right to free speech? asked Jane Martinson in The Guardian. He’s a soccer celebrity, not a political reporter with a duty of neutrality. “In a social media age that increasingly monetizes the ‘voice’ of personalities, it is ridiculous” for the BBC to muzzle them. But that’s the logical extension of the BBC’s current zeal for proving to Conservatives that it doesn’t have a left-wing bias; it has overcorrected and lost credibility. If anything, the broadcaster tilts right-wing. Right-wing presenters have long spouted off on politics with no penalty. And the BBC chairman, Richard Sharp, has been under a cloud since it emerged that he got his job in 2021 only after arranging a personal loan of nearly $1 million to Boris Johnson, then the Conservative prime minister.
Lost in this discussion is the point of Lineker’s comments: the boat policy, said Will Hutton in The Observer. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is going to pay France some $575 million to build a new detention center, fund a fleet to turn back migrant boats, and relocate to Rwanda any migrants who make it here. Sunak says the 40,000 migrants who crossed the English Channel to claim asylum in British waters last year amount to a crisis, but his solution is heartless and immoral. By focusing outrage on the BBC’s treatment of Lineker, we’ve let Sunak off the hook for his “cruel and illegal treatment of asylum seekers.”