As the BBC crisis snowballs, it is obvious that director general Tim Davie and those who pushed him into error misread the public mood
Impartiality is a knotty old concept, and one of the trickiest things about it is that it relies on the idea that you can safely find the middle ground. Witness the agonised attempts by the BBC and the Labour party to land on that sweet spot of unimpeachable banality after radical centrist firebrand Gary Lineker’s tweets became a rightwing media obsession this week. Instead of establishing themselves as the trusted representatives of the median voter or viewer, they have ceded moral authority to a man who spent last Sunday commentating on Nottingham Forest v Everton.
That’s Steve Wilson, one of the Match of the Day commentators who on Friday announced that they would be stepping back from their duties this weekend in solidarity with Lineker. Post-match analysis and player interviews will also be missing. The version of the BBC’s football highlights show that will be on air as a result – and the enforced dropping of Saturday’s Football Focus after its presenter Alex Scott, pulled out – is the natural endpoint of the position that the corporation has so painfully staked out for itself: a (political!) football fizzing about without much sense of why, or what the stakes are. Give up on meaningful analysis in pursuit of neutrality and the result is a version of events which is uncontroversial, certainly, but also difficult to understand.
