Digest 04/05/2023

Jennifer Sizeland spills the tea on how a BBC sports personality’s suspension inspired workers to boycott the public broadcaster.

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How Sports Presenters Took On The BBC

Gary Lineker, a former British soccer star and BBC sports personality, inadvertently sent the broadcaster into a meltdown after criticizing the UK government’s controversial asylum policy on Twitter. On March 7, Lineker fired off a tweet calling the policy “cruel” and comparing it to “Germany in the 30s.”

It wasn’t long before the BBC suspended him, which was followed by an immediate boycott of the public service broadcaster. His show “Match of the Day” subsequently ran without any commentators, as Lineker’s colleagues — both long-standing and guest sports personalities — joined the picket line. Former professional soccer player Ian Wright, who regularly appears on the BBC, tweeted, “Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I’ve told the BBC I won’t be doing it tomorrow. Solidarity.” The BBC lost so much talent that other shows, such as “Football Focus,” “Final Score,” and “Fighting Talk” were taken off the air, too.

Freelance presenters don’t often take on powerful broadcasters, as they risk losing work at the company. But the boycott indicates a change in dynamics at the BBC. When Lineker’s suspension became headline news, it illuminated the BBC’s flawed impartiality standards, specifically regarding political interference in the newsroom and freedom of speech. 

The fallout from his suspension also raised the question of whether presenters who don’t work explicitly on current affairs should be allowed to comment on them, and revealed how the organization’s stricter impartiality rules may be alienating its top talent, as well as staff and audiences. (This isn’t the first time sports reporters have been told to “stick to sports.”) 

Lineker was back on-air the following week, but the internal turmoil is far from over. Tim Davie, who became director general of the BBC in 2020, said in a statement that an “independent expert” would conduct an impartiality review on how the broadcaster’s existing social media guidelines apply “to freelancers outside news and current affairs.” 

The sports commentators have stood by their actions, sending a clear message to BBC management: media workers have power when they stick together.

“I legit think [Lineker has] galvanized us bottom-end employees into believing what we want to believe and not really giving a shit about the rules,” an assistant producer told Study Hall.

Study Hall spoke to four current and former BBC employees and freelancers for this story who asked to remain anonymous. They fear criticizing their employer could affect their careers.

It’s crucial for public service broadcasters like the BBC to uphold a high standard of journalistic integrity and rigor, especially during this politically complex time. The UK government is cracking down on protests — giving police unprecedented powers to restrict them — and pushingb that might be illegal. 

The boycott also highlighted the specter of governmental interference at the BBC. A parliamentary inquiry recently found that BBC Chair Richard Sharp, a prominent conservative Tory who has donated thousands of dollars to the party, facilitated a personal loan of £800,000 (USD $997,052) to former prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020. Weeks later, Johnson recommended Sharp for his current role on the BBC’s board. 

Davie is also a conservative who took the director general position that same year to restore “trust and confidence” in the BBC and to tackle “perceived left-wing bias” in the broadcaster’s comedy productions. In his first year as director general, he introduced some of the company’s most strictly-enforced social guidelines, including a ban on “virtue signaling” and public criticism of colleagues, and warned workers that using emojis may “undercut an otherwise impartial post.” Regardless of how any individual worker is contracted at BBC — whether as a freelancer, a contractor, or employed as staff — everyone is expected to follow the same rules.

These guidelines render everyone who works for the BBC in any capacity into a mouthpiece for the organization, whether they like it or not.

A former presenter-turned-producer told Study Hall that before Davie implemented the new rules, “You were allowed to have your views on social media, as long as it wasn’t on-air. Then the rules changed and we had to be impartial. For on-air talent, it’s the difference between losing your job and being unemployable.”

But these impartiality guidelines can have a chilling effect on how we report the news. The broadcaster’s social media rules, which are regularly changing to keep up with developments in online trends, now also shape its editorial guidelines. 

As a journalist at BBC during the EU referendum, commonly known as Brexit, I participated in on-screen monitoring in the newsroom. My role was to ensure on-screen balance in our coverage — that for every “Brexiter” we invited on the air, there was a “Remainer” to represent the counter-argument (and vice-versa). While this policy aimed to achieve balance, merely airing a debate between spokespeople was not enough. Their claims also needed to be thoroughly interrogated so that the public could comprehend the material implications of the proposed policy. 

Since then, the BBC has been criticized for not investigating the “Leave” campaign claims enough. To date, Brexit has cost more money than the UK’s total payments to the EU, without measurable benefits. This journalistic malpractice should be understood within the context of a broader right-wing shift among BBC leadership.  

“There is a trend over the past few years of BBC employees being suspended after pressure from the right-wing press and the government,” an ex-BBC business manager, who worked at the broadcaster and its competitors for over a decade, said.

In Davie’s first year as director general, four BBC journalists were formally disciplined for their social media use, the Press Gazette reported. 

“If we want an impartial BBC we need to have none party-aligned leaders at the top,” the former business manager said, adding that, “the more junior staff follow the impartiality guidelines but as soon as you get to senior they don’t.”  

In my nine years at BBC, I only ever worked on a contract-to-contract basis, which is true for a lot of BBC staff, making it harder to dictate when they are under BBC jurisdiction. These fixed-term contractors and freelance workers have the collective power to walk away from the BBC whenever they want to, in which case the broadcaster wouldn’t be able to function.

All the media workers who spoke to Study Hall for this story believe in the BBC — a staple in British society for over 100 years — and the incredible content its staff produces. 

The BBC’s public service broadcasting remains a model much admired worldwide; however, within the UK, trust in the BBC has also faltered since the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

And the broadcaster now faces an uncertain future. Last year, the government announced it would freeze the BBC’s licensing fee for the next two years until the license is abolished in 2027, leaving the broadcaster’s financial future and editorial independence in the government’s hands, The Guardian reported. Despite the BBC’s positive impacts on the UK economy, it may suffer death by a thousand cuts.

In a time of misinformation and culture wars, public service broadcasters must demand accountability from those in power, including within the organization. It is also a time when they are most scrutinized, which demands a strong vision of what they seek to achieve.

After the Lineker incident, presenters felt vulnerable about facing the same scrutiny he did. The company’s crackdown on social media posting leaves some workers concerned about further corporate policing of their personal opinions.  

“At what point is it freedom of speech, at what point is it opinion, and at what point is it holding a party to account? That’s where the lines are blurred with the social media policy,” a producer said. “The story becomes about the tweet and not about the policy, and that plays into the Tory government’s hands.” 

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COMINGS & GOINGS:

—Alison Herman joined Variety as a TV critic. Herman previously wrote about culture and TV for The Ringer.  

—Kendra Pierre-Louis is now a climate reporter for Bloomberg’s Climate vertical. She most recently worked as a reporter and producer for Gimlet.  

—After 10 years as a freelance writer, Josie Thaddeus-Johns is now a full-time editor at Artsy covering museums, galleries, artist profiles, and more. 

—Madeleine Ngo is returning to The New York Times’ Washington bureau as an economic policy reporter. She was previously a 2021-2022 Rosenbaum fellow. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE: 

—Following a wave of backlash over their decision to shut down The Texas Observer, board members of the Texas Democracy Foundation, the magazine’s parent nonprofit, voted to backtrack on their initial plan. In a statement addressed to the “Texas Observer Community,” the board said it has received enough “near-term pledges” to assist with an “immediate budget shortfall” and gave a shout out to “the extraordinary success of the staff’s fundraising.” 

—The Center For Investigative Reporting is laying off eight Reveal employees, six of whom are people of color. “We are deeply concerned that diversity, equity, and inclusion were not adequately prioritized during these layoffs,” the Reveal CIR Guild said in a statement.  

— Russian authorities detained Evan Gershkovich, a Moscow-based American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, on March 30, accusing him of espionage. 

—BuzzFeed is now cranking out AI-generated travel articles with help from Buzzy, an AI bot that may become our overlord one day. Suspiciously, the batch of guides, which refer to locations spanning from Amelia Island, Florida to Montreal as a “hidden gem,” were done in collaboration with human employees who aren’t usually involved in editorial. 

—Check please! Elon Musk caused the upper echelons of Media Twitter to panic when he announced that users who refuse to pay $8 a month to subscribe to Twitter Blue — a service that also includes a lifetime supply of “Glacier Freeze” flavor Gatorade — would lose their blue checks on April 1. Twitter also offers a $1,000/month “Verified Organization” package, should news outlets decide to pay for their reporters’ blue checks..Well, April 1st came and went and as of now, the only news outlet to lose its verification is The New York Times.

—Yesterday, Donald J. Trump, who once dined at the same steakhouse as Samantha Jones, pleaded not guilty to 34 felonies. And guess what? News outlets were chugging covfefe like the year was 2017, baby! The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post all live–blogged themselves into a state of carpal tunnel nirvana. From the moment the WrestleMania enthusiast left his Florida castle, CNN basically captured his every single breath: an anchor keenly observed how there were “many doors in this courtroom and many hallways to these doors.” Van Jones, a pundit who once informed viewers of the exact “moment” that Trump became president, described him as looking like a “granddad having a very bad day.” Trump, for his part, didn’t say much about the whole affair until he returned to Mar-A-Lago to recite some half-hearted remarks about how his son is tall. Sad!