1 year ago
54
Viewers of the BBC’s most popular football programme, Match of the Day, tuned in last Saturday to find no presenter, no commentators, no analysis and no player interviews. Instead of the slickly produced hour-plus review of the day’s Premier League action, they got 20 minutes of chopped together raw match footage and nothing else.
As the Guardian’s Archie Bland tells Michael Safi, the chaos that engulfed the BBC’s sports coverage stemmed from the reaction to a tweet by the corporation’s highest-paid host, Gary Lineker. His criticism of government asylum policy led to a backlash from the rightwing press and then his suspension on Friday afternoon. Instead of carrying on without him, his colleagues began pulling out of planned programmes in solidarity and eventually the schedules had to be torn up.
On Monday the BBC editor-in-chief appeared to have brokered an agreement that would allow Lineker to return to broadcasting, along with a promise to review its social media guidelines. But questions remain about the BBC’s attitude to impartiality and to whom those rules apply, as well as more searching questions about the corporation’s relationship with the Conservative government amid fears about the future of the licence fee and the BBC’s very existence.
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