The BBC

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq9k6ptX0AEtaBr?format=jpg&name=900x900

I feel like Matt has bowed to some heavy political pressure here and his natural comedic instincts would have led him more towards themes of MOTD being an improvement without any presenters.

Nailed it

"this is good actually" I say as I tune into the still-image flickbook no commentary 20 minute long ersatz Match of the Day in solidarity with the BBC brass's heroic war against the woke stasi

they should just lugubriously scroll through the BBC sport liveblog on screen for 20 minutes

This Have Your Say comment saying "never a pen! VAR lost the plot! What has the game come to" by a Man Utd fan from Cambridge is certainly better insight than what Ian Wright usually serves up, writes one Mike Giggler from Essex

There is no doubt that the Tory government are loathsome. They are right-wing slags and sleazeballs, but they cannot be compared to the Nazis.

Dunphy in full on pundit mode is calling Lineker an attention seeker!

never seen so many arses in one weekend

xp yeah that’s a melt opinion, he did also say:

Eamon Dunphy has warned the BBC that they need to “back off rapidly” in their controversial dispute with football presenter Gary Lineker.

The popular Match of the Day presenter was suspended by the broadcaster after a tweet in which he compared language in the British government’s new immigration Bill to 1930s Nazi Germany.

The BBC was forced to apologise to fans after a mass exodus of presenters, pundits and commentators in support of Lineker led to hours of football coverage being cancelled.

“I think the thing the BBC should worry about is the solidarity of other people who know and work with Lineker,” said Dunphy.

“The solidarity they’ve shown is extraordinary. The very fact is that the BBC’s entire soccer output yesterday had gone off air — every single element — the results, everything, nobody was prepared to work.”

The colourful pundit, who hosts the popular podcast The Stand added that he doesn’t believe he would have experienced the same widespread support if he had landed in similar hot water.

“If I got in to trouble with RTE on this kind of issue the last person I would expect to show solidarity would be George f**king Hamilton.”

I needed some kind of balance here anyway, and at least he's funny. I've not forgotten about the days when Gary was "politically homeless" and I bear grudges longer than most elephants do.

bill flinging the pen across the desk in eamons hour of need

Darragh please he’s dead

he left his life

for a young wun

motd tonight will be 20 minutes of "match highlights" simulated by Kevin Tom's Football Manager, zx spectrum version

What on earth? pic.twitter.com/H1lsg84ScT

— Jonny Sharples (@JonnyGabriel) March 11, 2023

https://t.co/H0CNgnObAF pic.twitter.com/pdhVAO6xlb

— Samplo Corvodina (@TreborRhurbarb) March 11, 2023

LOL like John Redwood has ever watched football in his life.

"Good replays so you could see what happened and understand penalty calls"

even Jimmy Hill is snickering at this from hell

This 3 minute clip from 2021 is still being widely shared. It's helpful if you want to understand how Gary Lineker feels about the issue of refugees, about his relationship with the BBC - and about the idea of the BBC telling him what he can and can't tweet. pic.twitter.com/f5EWdx68tQ

— Ros Atkins (@BBCRosAtkins) March 12, 2023

That Andrew Neil was--and continues to be--seen as some kind of honest broker journalist is all the evidence you need that this brand of 'impartiality' is a complete crock of steaming horseshit

— Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) March 12, 2023

You could do it dressed up like Ian Wright

— RabFace (@RabFace1888) March 11, 2023

Guessing that was a reply to David Baddiel?

it was. Dave is doing wryly above it all banter on the whole Lineker thing because dehumanising speech only matters if it's about him

As far as I know, the only soccer pundit to broadcast on the BBC this weekend was Pat Nevin, late Sunday afternoon.

:(

Pat Nevin opens his BBC 5 Live commentary. Says he used to be a union chairman & only turned up on condition he could speak out. Says 'freedom of speech means we get to speak'. Says he doesn't use social media and 'this is my platform.'

constructive scabbing with the caveat that he doesn't use social media, well when he has a new book to plug he does actually use social media.

Lineker will be back. An independent enquiry will be set-up to look at social media use lol

Basically the 'restrictions' to current affairs staff will be enforced to freelancers.

Lineker melts and everything will resolve itself, luckily it's a no fault renewal of the wedding vows

Not so sure. Lineker hasn’t indicated he’ll back down on this sort of thing (despite it being in his contract). And the BBC has lost Eddie Mair, Maitlis, Sopel, J O’B, Lewis Goodall, Fi and Jane, etc all at least in part because they felt hamstrung by this stuff. So there’s reason for both sides to take a more liberal view. But the counterweight to that is the DG’s making neutrality central to his vision of the BBC “brand”. I still don’t see how that circle gets squared really.

i don't think Lineker will back down on this tweet but i can see him agreeing new contractual terms for the future. we'll have to see, of course. as far as future neutrality in general i'd imagine this largely gets swept under the carpet and Davie hopes the next social media storm doesn't take place on his watch. neither of the sides that don't believe in the BBC's current neutrality are gonna buy in to some new social contract

is lineker a personality who works for the bbc or a bbc personality? he was famous before motd

and is it in his contract? what happens if you sign a contract and then they change the rules? (the policy was changed in 2020 apparently)

and if you only enforce the ambiguous rules when you like, is that impartiality?

(the policy that's been linked in that tweet has a clause specifically about sports people commenting on public affairs being "lower" in terms of impact and less important)

He signed his contract in 2020 and it was in line with the new policy which says that certain figures are so big and so well known that it vaults them back up the table. But yes the enforcement feels pretty selective. Alex Karakatsinis who writes the excellent Copaganda newsletter puts it like this: "If you express political views consistent with wealthy or powerful interests, the rules are not enforced. If you express views that identify with the marginalized, you are crushed."

He goes on to make that point that selective enforcement is actually part of the point as it allows senior bureaucrats to boast about their great policies while looking the other way when their allies break them. Talking about his beat, policing, he says: "Most people don’t realize that one of the most important strategies of modernizing police forces (and strategies of politicians and courts crafting police legal doctrine) in the 20th century was to diffuse discretion to violate written protocols down the policing bureaucracy because it makes plausible deniability of leadership more effective, meaningful accountability of the institution more difficult, and focus on systemic change rather than individual bad apples almost impossible."

NEW: BBC Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce said she will step back from her role as an ambassador for the charity Refuge following claims she had trivialised domestic violence during a discussion about Stanley Johnson on last Thursday’s show.

— Nadine White. (@Nadine_Writes) March 13, 2023

Good, that was completely disgusting.

Wish she had been sacked, but you gotta take your wins.

Hope Refuge had some sharp words for her.

Good. Let someone else do BBCQT for a bit too.

it would take a lot more than a presenter change to make QT redeemable

It is weird how hard it is to imagine a good version of QT. But yes excellent news from Refuge.

it's a weird throwback to another era even tho i think it started in the 70s? that idea that the opinions of the great and the good are of value simply because they are great and good

i guess before social media people needed opportunities to squawk their favourite received opinions outside of newspaper letters pages

Tracer Hand: "And the BBC has lost Eddie Mair, Maitlis, Sopel, J O’B, Lewis Goodall, Fi and Jane, etc all at least in part because they felt hamstrung by this stuff"

I didn't even know that James O'Brien was on the BBC! Thought he was just a radio shock jock of some kind.

And I don't know who Fi and Jane are.

Mair and Goodall are quite good (even very good?). Sopel has been OK at times. Maitlis is a great example of someone that liberals think is a great broadcasting talent, who is dire.

Andrew Marr made a big deal of leaving the BBC to speak his mind, but I don't know what new views he has thus spouted.

Forgot about Marr, you're right. Yes the irony is that, with a couple of exceptions, after these people leave they never seem to offer many opinions of their own at all. Sopel and Maitlis on the News Agents, for instance, are indistinguishable from what they did on their BBC podcast.

Fi and Jane = Fiona Glover and Jane Garvey, who did Woman's Hour and the Fortunately podcast and many other things on Radio 4. They now have a show on Times Radio.

Maitlis is also on the GC spectrum, bleh.

I have some sympathy with her because she’s had a stalker up in her business virtually her entire adult life.

Marr is a right deeply nasty little fucker, as seen that time the mask slipped right off him when Shami Chakrabarti was a guest, she should have advised him to not have a stroke, dearie!

Xp a trans stalker?

Really disliked this as well, total nonsense. Regardless of how I feel about Barry G’s rambling! You can be assured the government never got 1% of that derision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNZZS7GFRz0

rolling her eyes at democractic processes