Quote Originally Posted by Eric the Half a Bee View Post
The biggest issue here has to be control of the media, surely? We can all have differences of opinion on a wide range of issues, and it's a shame this thread has been derailed into yet another boring immigration slanging match.

Let's go back to the last year of the last Labour government. In opposition the Tories announced an intention to clip the wings of the BBC. Overnight, Rupert Murdoch's media empire unanimously announced its support for the Conservatives. Murdoch has long been critical of the supposed power the BBC holds. Since then, the BBC has been very reluctant to go against the Conservative party for fear of reprisals.

The BBC regularly gets opposing views on the same subject to make sure its reporting is "balanced", particularly when an item is critical of the government, yet that doesn't always work. If 100 experts agree on one thing and 1 biased individual doesn't, creating a host of lies in the process, that's not presenting the situation accurately. There have been reports of Conservative plants in the audience at Question Time. Political editors are generally Conservatives.

Any commercial broadcaster can adopt any angle it likes, so Sky, GB News etc can say what it wants (in the case of GB Bollocks it doesn't even have to be true). Channel 4 is a public service broadcaster, so again needs to be impartial. It has stood up to the Tory government more than any other broadcaster and asked tough questions of them. The government's response has been to suggest selling Channel 4 and removing its public service remit.

I don't care what side of the political spectrum someone aligns with, our public service broadcasters should be freely able to criticise and ask difficult questions of all of our politicians, political decision making and discussions etc. Any party threatening these broadcasters in order to get them to "back off" is effectively controlling our unbiased media in the country in favour of biased media that promotes them.
I'm not sure much of this is true. All TV news stations need to be impartial in the UK. There are always reports of "plants" in programmes like QT on both sides, and on Brexit (as one example) the ratio of panellists was always disproportionately against the govt position. Are political editors conservative? I don't think so. I don't think that can be said of the likes of Lewis Goodall etc.

In all honesty, I think the BBC generally does impartiality well. Loons on both sides will criticise it, which is probably a sign it's doing okay.

Ultimately inpartiality is critical to our faith in it and if Lineker has been warned numerous times by his employer and carried on, then some action was probably inevitable.

I think his tweet was preposterous, ignorant and offensive but I do think he has a right to say it, but I also understand the BBCs position here.

Hopefully one positive is that this knee jerk desire to 'cancel' people will calm down a little bit on future.