Impartiality in the age of social media
WHEN BBC journalist and presenter Clive Myrie was in Guernsey last week, he told local media students that anyone who was ‘determined, worked hard and was interested in the world’ could succeed in the news business.
But following the high-profile furore surrounding Gary Lineker’s suspension, those students might well be wondering if a career in the media is quite that straightforward.
How is it possible that a single tweet from a sports presenter and former footballer could plunge the BBC into such chaos, sparking a mass walk-out of stars and forcing it to drastically reduce its sports coverage over the weekend?
Whether or not you agree with the content of the tweet, the real debate is whether anyone associated with the national broadcaster should be allowed to voice a personal opinion at all.
In an era when anyone can create their own public platform via social media and when the cult of celebrity has become entrenched in our culture, it has become increasingly common for those reporting the news to become the news themselves.
The real danger here, though, is that the personal lives and opinions of these celebrities come to overshadow the important stories they are trying to report on.
Lineker is not even a news journalist, but the fact that he dared to speak his mind about politics on a public platform – and refused to apologise for it – has had the unintended consequence of distracting from the very issue he was opining about in the first place: the UK’s controversial immigration policy.