Journalistic Spinelessness

I've been following the Gary Lineker-refugee bill controversy in the UK for the last three days with an attention I usually reserve for football tournaments or prestige TV dramas. I'm pretty heavily on Lineker's side, even to the point of being a little tired of even his defenders saying he maybe shouldn't have compared the UK government's asylum-seekers bill to Nazi Germany: I agree with takes that the comparison is over-used and risks diluting the meaning of the Holocaust, but at the same time if you have a dystopian bill like the one the UK Home Office is pushing, you have to be able to describe it accurately.

More interesting than the question of what language to use is how the BBC has reacted to the whole thing. Beyond people pointing out all the times that freelance BBC presenters have expressed right-wing sympathies, the move to suspend Lineker for not apologizing shows how terrified the corporation is of criticism from right-wingers.

It's partly justified, because there's a large, right-wing print industry (mostly led by Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets but not exclusively) that pounces on any misstep by the BBC. On top of that, Conservative party ministers have been contributing to this atmosphere for years as well, by threatening to privatize it or seating sympathetic administrators on its various management boards.

But there's also a sense of a crisis that didn't have to happen: for one thing, they didn't have to suspend him, and more importantly, they didn't have to then lie that he'd "agreed to step back" from presenting duties. They could have weathered a few days of criticism and then the raging beast that is alt-right social media would have moved on to something else. And for another, that inchoate mass of rageful protoplasm that is the alt-right wouldn't be happy with anything the BBC does, just because they see it as in thrall to the left in whatever it does.

This is a problem that other news outlets face. The New York Times has come in for criticism of its lukewarm handling of culture-war and white-nationalism stories in the last few years, because it's seen as moderating its positions to avoid criticism from bad-faith actors on the right. It even went so far as to ban its journalists from appearing on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC, for fear that alt-right outlets would use it as evidence of how far left the Times has gone.

Except: the Ben Shapiro's and Breitbarts and whoever else are going to say that about the Times no matter what it does. And, as a commentator pointed out on Twitter, this ban just gave the Times's rivals, like the Washington Post, all the speaking slots on Maddow's show that would have gone to the Times. This meant that the Post could talk about its own reporting, and essentially promote itself, while the Times cowered in its offices and pissed off the people who would normally be supporting it.

Both these cases get at the point that, in many cases, centrism is just as problematic as airing extreme views. What's the "centrist" approach to issues like abortion or the death penalty? Do you advocate for only half of women's or LGBTQ rights, or do you air equal amounts of pro-Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter reporting?

Some people (probably on the right, and certainly not very sophisticated) insist that if a reporter's viewpoint is in the article, then the reporter has failed. That's probably okay for human interest pieces (although this NYT restaurant review will never not be hilarious), but the act of reporting demonstrates where the outlet's and the reporter's interests lie: a paper that doesn't believe climate change is real won't report on it. An article should probably not be a harangue, but if we're reporting that climate scientists believe the increase in strong hurricanes and droughts is caused by global warming, then that's probably because we agree with that position.

Most importantly, trying to hew to a too-centrist approach risks amplifying voices you shouldn't: if it's raining outside, do you "balance" the meteorologist's opinion with someone who says that it's not, in fact, raining? Or it risks confusing the issue by presenting two sides to stories that don't really have two sides.

It's easy for me to say the BBC and the NYT should grow some spine and report honestly, because the culture is such that they're probably inundated with threats all the time. But when they make self-defeating decisions like these, like suspending possibly the most-loved man in Britain for saying what the legitimate opposition party hasn't found the balls to say, then maybe it's time they re-evaluated some editorial choices?