BBC boss says ‘follow the rules' after latest Lineker row
Rats, linked to disease and dirt, has been used to represent Jews in antisemitic propaganda throughout history, including by the Nazis in 1930s Germany.
Lineker's agent told the BBC the presenter immediately deleted the post when he learned about the image's symbolism, which he had previously not appreciated.
Mr Davie, after giving a wide-ranging speech, speaking of trust, disinformation and impartiality, was asked if Lineker had broken the BBC's rules.
Mr Davie, speaking at The Lowry arts centre in Salford, said: 'The BBC's reputation is held by everyone and when someone makes a mistake, it costs us.
'And I think we absolutely need people to be the exemplars of BBC values and follow our social media policies, simple as that.'
Charity, the Campaign Against Antisemitism has called for Lineker to be sacked.
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: 'Gary Lineker really has the worst luck when it comes to campaigning for his causes without aligning himself with extremists and antisemites.
'Not only does this video deliberately misrepresent Zionism — the belief that Jews have the same right to self-determination as everyone else — but it adds a rat emoji in doing so.
'Perhaps Mr Lineker is not as naive or accident prone as he might like us to believe.
'As the BBC's highest-paid presenter and owner of a major media enterprise, maybe he knows exactly what he's doing.
'We will be submitting a complaint to the BBC over this latest post. Having looked the other way until now, at this point, it is clear that Mr Lineker's continued association with the BBC is untenable. He must go.'
Lineker was temporarily suspended from the BBC in March 2023 after an impartiality row over comments he made criticising the then-government's new asylum policy.
And he was among 500 other high-profile figures who signed an open letter in February urging the BBC, to re-broadcast a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, to BBC iPlayer.
The documentary was pulled from the BBC'S streaming service in February after it emerged its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
The corporation has apologised and admitted 'serious flaws' in the making of the film and the matter is still subject to an internal investigation.
Last November Lineker announced he would be stepping down from presenting Match Of The Day, but will still host World Cup and FA Cup coverage.
Lineker is the co-founder of Goalhanger Podcasts, makers of the popular The Rest is History series and its spin-offs about Politics, Football, Entertainment and Money.
Lineker's agent has been contacted by PA Media for comment.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
38 minutes ago
- New Statesman
What does Adam Curtis know?
Photo byOn or about May 1979, the British character changed. That, in a sentence, is the argument of Adam Curtis's new documentary series Shifty. The election of Margaret Thatcher was the beginning of a revolution she helped accelerate but could never control, one involving economics, physics and ideology. Our nation – fretful, immiserated, lonely – was created in the two decades that followed. The adjectives most often used to describe Curtis's recent work tend to be related to drugs: hallucinatory, trance-like, psychedelic. They are apt. Though his earlier films featured interviews and televisual strictures, now he works through a combination of montage and caption, ditching even the nasal narration that once characterised his work. Some storylines he pursues for a full episode, others receive a mere 30 seconds of fame. The effect is disorientating, a constant swaying between plot and subplot. But sudden contrast is Curtis's fetish: gentlemen in cricket whites beneath skeletal electric pylons; shots of glass-and-steel towers immediately followed by a horse dying in a field. However, despite this reputation for experimentation, you get the sense that the scenes he is most drawn to are sober, humdrum, everyday. So, while you have Thatcher scuttling about laying tables for state banquets and trying to force monetarism to work, you also get nightclubs, barbers and police interviews – all the inventory of history from below. Sometimes you wonder where such moving footage comes from: who was letting documentarians into their house parties in 1981? But no matter. Such is the capaciousness of the BBC's archive that serves as Curtis's quarry, he doesn't have to show or tell you. You simply see. When he's doing history from above, though, Curtis is, by his own standards, dealing with a conventional arc. We move in a familiar sequence from Thatcher to Big Bang, from deindustrialisation to MDMA, from mass politics to mass atomisation. Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting historiography of the recent past that this feels more like restatement than reinterpretation. Thatcher is no longer seen as Britain's saviour on the right or left. We all know the bankers are crooked and the politicians are powerless. And did anyone else hear that Max Clifford was a wrong 'un? However, these familiarities are diversified by much more Curtis-like swerves into the strange and the eccentric. Like the story of Stephen Knight, a local reporter who became a national figure for claiming in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that the Victorian murders were linked to both the Freemasonry movement and the British royal family. Knight went on to write another conspiratorial book about the Freemasons before his early death from a brain tumour. Though Knight is scarcely remembered today, for Curtis he is illustrative of a paranoid society growing fearful and sceptical of its elites. The title of this series ('shifty') is a description of what happens 'in societies when the foundations of power begin to move'. It's something we all feel – almost to the point that you wonder if it is truly confined to the last two decades of the 20th century in Britain. The Sixties and Seventies – with their own depressive introspection, aristocratic crack-up, and stewing industrial conflict – could surely have served as part of the same canvas. At times Curtis overstretches himself, conflating the late-20th century with modernity in the broadest terms. Aside from Mrs Thatcher, Curtis's main protagonist is probably Stephen Hawking, whose hyper-rational analysis of the cosmos Curtis places in parallel with the penetration of market forces into the soul of Britain. It is difficult to see these phenomena as coterminous. At other moments, his captions are slightly strident, almost drunkenly so: 'The concept of privatisation had been invented by the Nazis.' 'Do you really believe that, sir, or are you just trying to make us think?' So Dakin asks his teacher Irwin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys as he hears the mythos of the First World War being swept away. I would ask Curtis the same question. But in Bennett's play, the boys learn that sincerity and iconoclasm are both necessary instincts. As a rare historian who is willing to prioritise sweep, argument and craft over the accumulation of credible detail, we are fortunate to have Adam Curtis. Shifty BBC iPlayer [See also: Amol Rajan's Ganges vanity project] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Rhyl Journal
an hour ago
- Rhyl Journal
‘Premature' to decide whether MI5 should face contempt probe, judges rule
In 2022, then-attorney general Suella Braverman went to the High Court to stop the broadcaster airing a programme that would name a man who has allegedly abused two women and is a covert human intelligence source. An injunction was made in April 2022 to prevent the corporation disclosing information likely to identify the man, referred to only as 'X', though Mr Justice Chamberlain said the BBC could still air the programme and the key issues, without identifying him. But at a hearing earlier this year, the London court was told that part of the written evidence provided by MI5 was false. Lawyers for the BBC told the court the 'low threshold' for launching contempt proceedings against MI5 and a number of individuals, for not being fully transparent with the court, had been met. In a decision on Wednesday, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said that a further investigation should be carried out and that it would be 'premature to reach any conclusions on whether to initiate contempt proceedings against any individual'. The senior judge said that the new investigation should be carried out on behalf of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. Baroness Carr, sitting with Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Chamberlain, also said: 'The investigations carried out by MI5 to date suffer from serious procedural deficiencies. 'Their conclusions cannot presently be relied on.' The written witness evidence, now accepted to have been false, said the Security Service had maintained its policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) the identities of intelligence sources. However, MI5 disclosed X's status to a BBC reporter, but then said it had kept to the NCND policy. Lawyers on behalf of MI5 apologised earlier this year and carried out two investigations, which concluded the false evidence was given due to a series of mistakes with no deliberate attempt by any staff member to mislead. In Wednesday's 26-page ruling, the three judges said they were not 'satisfied' with the investigations or their conclusions. They added: 'It is regrettable that MI5's explanations to this court were given in a piecemeal and unsatisfactory way — and only following the repeated intervention of the court.' In the programme about X, the BBC alleged the intelligence source was a misogynistic neo-Nazi who attacked his girlfriend, referred to by the pseudonym Beth, with a machete. Beth is bringing related legal action in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), with the judges finding on Wednesday that the specialist tribunal – which investigates allegations against the UK intelligence services – was also misled. Baroness Carr later said: 'Whilst we accept the genuineness of the apologies proffered on behalf of MI5, the fact remains that this case has raised serious issues. 'MI5 gave false evidence to three courts. This was compounded by inadequate attempts to explain the circumstances.' Following the ruling, MI5 director-general Sir Ken McCallum said: 'I wish to repeat my full and unreserved apology for the errors made in these proceedings. 'We take our duty to provide truthful, accurate and complete information with the utmost seriousness. 'Resolving this matter to the court's satisfaction is of the highest priority for MI5 and we are committed to co-operating fully with the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office and the court. 'MI5 is now embarked on a programme of work to learn all lessons and implement changes to ensure this does not happen again. This programme will build in external challenge and expertise – with independent assurance to the Home Secretary on our progress. 'MI5's job is to keep the country safe. Maintaining the trust of the courts is essential to that mission.' A BBC spokesperson said: 'We are pleased this decision has been reached and that the key role of our journalist Daniel De Simone in bringing this to light has been acknowledged by the judges. 'We believe our journalism on this story has always been in the highest public interest.'
Glasgow Times
an hour ago
- Glasgow Times
‘Premature' to decide whether MI5 should face contempt probe, judges rule
In 2022, then-attorney general Suella Braverman went to the High Court to stop the broadcaster airing a programme that would name a man who has allegedly abused two women and is a covert human intelligence source. An injunction was made in April 2022 to prevent the corporation disclosing information likely to identify the man, referred to only as 'X', though Mr Justice Chamberlain said the BBC could still air the programme and the key issues, without identifying him. But at a hearing earlier this year, the London court was told that part of the written evidence provided by MI5 was false. Lawyers for the BBC told the court the 'low threshold' for launching contempt proceedings against MI5 and a number of individuals, for not being fully transparent with the court, had been met. In a decision on Wednesday, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said that a further investigation should be carried out and that it would be 'premature to reach any conclusions on whether to initiate contempt proceedings against any individual'. The senior judge said that the new investigation should be carried out on behalf of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. Baroness Carr, sitting with Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Chamberlain, also said: 'The investigations carried out by MI5 to date suffer from serious procedural deficiencies. 'Their conclusions cannot presently be relied on.' The written witness evidence, now accepted to have been false, said the Security Service had maintained its policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) the identities of intelligence sources. However, MI5 disclosed X's status to a BBC reporter, but then said it had kept to the NCND policy. Lawyers on behalf of MI5 apologised earlier this year and carried out two investigations, which concluded the false evidence was given due to a series of mistakes with no deliberate attempt by any staff member to mislead. In Wednesday's 26-page ruling, the three judges said they were not 'satisfied' with the investigations or their conclusions. They added: 'It is regrettable that MI5's explanations to this court were given in a piecemeal and unsatisfactory way — and only following the repeated intervention of the court.' In the programme about X, the BBC alleged the intelligence source was a misogynistic neo-Nazi who attacked his girlfriend, referred to by the pseudonym Beth, with a machete. Beth is bringing related legal action in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), with the judges finding on Wednesday that the specialist tribunal – which investigates allegations against the UK intelligence services – was also misled. Baroness Carr later said: 'Whilst we accept the genuineness of the apologies proffered on behalf of MI5, the fact remains that this case has raised serious issues. 'MI5 gave false evidence to three courts. This was compounded by inadequate attempts to explain the circumstances.' Following the ruling, MI5 director-general Sir Ken McCallum said: 'I wish to repeat my full and unreserved apology for the errors made in these proceedings. 'We take our duty to provide truthful, accurate and complete information with the utmost seriousness. 'Resolving this matter to the court's satisfaction is of the highest priority for MI5 and we are committed to co-operating fully with the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office and the court. 'MI5 is now embarked on a programme of work to learn all lessons and implement changes to ensure this does not happen again. This programme will build in external challenge and expertise – with independent assurance to the Home Secretary on our progress. 'MI5's job is to keep the country safe. Maintaining the trust of the courts is essential to that mission.'
