EXCLUSIVE: Senior BBC journalists are furious at Gary Lineker’s “egregious” breach of impartiality rules after he compared UK government asylum policy to 1930s Nazi Germany.
Deadline has spoken to a number of sources in the BBC newsroom who said that their mission to cover news objectively had been damaged by Lineker’s tweets on Tuesday.
They urged Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, to take action against the Match of the Day host. Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, railed at “beyond awful” government plans to stop small boats carrying asylum seekers from arriving on British shores.
He later added: “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” One BBC presenter said it was “such an egregious breach” of the broadcaster’s standards on impartiality, which were made a top priority by Davie when he took office in 2020.
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