Media storm around a television personality speaks volumes about why the UK's a dysfunctional state

[Celerity]

Impartiality and public-service media

https://www.socialeurope.eu/impartiality-and-public-service-media


Gary Lineker—not as he will be seen tonight (BBC)

It is difficult for outsiders to appreciate how significant it is that Gary Lineker, a former England footballer, will not be permitted to present tonight’s Match of the Day on BBC television, following comments by him on the British government’s xenophobia towards refugees. To get a handle on this we need to call in aid the late Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘risk society’. What Beck meant was that we now live in a world of ‘side-effects’, in which capitalism is constantly reacting unpredictably against itself, rather than just replacing tradition, throwing up unanticipated and unsettling phenomena—and leading some to react by retreating into ‘constructed certitudes’ drawn from the past.

One of those unanticipated phenomena was the ‘social media’ which have emerged in this century as a successor to the offline ‘public sphere’ Jürgen Habermas conceptualised in the last. Those Californian corporations include Twitter, on which Lineker has had a strong presence while being a longstanding anchorperson for the Match of the Day weekend reflection by the classic British public-service broadcaster on top-flight English football.

Lineker has become the centre of a media storm because of a Tweet he posted this week critical of the Conservative government’s proposed legislation—in recognised defiance of the United Nations Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights—to deport asylum-seekers fetching up from the English Channel, including to Rwanda, rather than permit them to make asylum claims and to address those on their individual merits, as those international obligations require. These asylum-seekers, mainly fleeing conflict-ravaged societies such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, are the flotsam and jetsam of Beck’s globalised ‘world at risk’, in which capitalism can no longer guarantee a stable, liveable existence but rather evokes all kinds of reactions, some fundamentalist, amid the insecurity it engenders.

Link to tweet

The intensity of the debate in Britain has been exacerbated by the argument that it has been Lineker’s Tweet, rather than the human dignity of asylum-seekers put at hazard by the government, which has been the source of headlines this week—not just in the corporate right-wing press but also on the part of the BBC itself. Emotions have been further dialled up by the recent revelation that the current chair of the board of the BBC, an institution whose reputation stands on its independence of government, assisted in brokering a loan to the last-but-one prime minister, Boris Johnson—who has a notoriously spendthrift lifestyle—while he was a candidate for the position.

‘Impartial’ reporting......

snip

UPDATE

BBC seeks to end crisis by reinstating Gary Lineker

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/bbc-says-gary-lineker-return-presenting-2023-03-13/

[tanyev]

1. "a world of 'side-effects', in which capitalism is constantly reacting unpredictably against itself"

Really? Because it looks a lot more like fascism is constantly attacking capitalism.

[Celerity]

2. fascism uses crony and gangster capitalism to help further its aims

It often works in the interest of the wealthy capitalists and their private property and continued profiteering. Furthermore, when it incorporates socialistic elements, it often comes in the form of corporate socialism.

[tanyev]

3. I guess my quibble is mostly with the word unpredictable in that quote.

If one acknowledges that fascism is on the attack right now, then the things that are happening are very predictable.

[Celerity]

5. forms of capitalism often work against themselves with or without a fascistic threat involved

[Conjuay]

4. "Like a safe third country,

like RWANDA.”

Rwanda is best known for genocide, Honey.