Of course, Mr. Lineker, 62, is no ordinary contractor. He is perhaps the BBC’s biggest name, a beloved sports figure who has made a smooth transition from the playing field to the broadcast counter, where he has been a weekly fixture since 1999, Analyze matches and chat with other retired sports stars. He’s the BBC’s highest-paid online personality, earning £1.35 million, around $1.6 million, in 2022.
But Mr Lineker, who grew up in a working-class family in Leicester, has never kept his views on social issues a secret. When the government announced a strict new immigration plan to cut asylum seekers, he posted on Twitter“This is just an incredibly cruel policy aimed at the most vulnerable in language no different from the policy Germany used in the 30s, and I am out of order?”
UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is leading a policy to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats, said Mr Lineker’s comments downplayed the brutality of the Holocaust. Other Conservative lawmakers say he has abused his BBC platform — not for the first time — to voice political views.
“We need to make sure we maintain our faith in the independence and impartiality of the BBC,” the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said Sunday to a BBC journalist, Laura Kuenssberg.
The BBC is not the only media organization that has been plagued by questions about political expression and social media. Tensions have flared in British newspapers, as well as at The Washington Post and The New York Times, over Twitter posts by journalists, sometimes critical of their own owners.
“This was a time of social change, when public attitudes toward the media and Social media is changing rapidly. “Editing teams around the world are racing to catch up.”
What makes Mr Lineker’s case particularly complicated is both his employment status – he is a contractor, not a full-time employee, working for BBC Sports, not BBC News – and the broadcaster This model enforces its social media guidelines, which critics say is arbitrary at best and hypocritical at worst.
