What Rylan and Lineker Teach Us About Modern Communication
What can BBC Radio 2 host Rylan and former BBC Match of the Day host Gary Lineker teach us about the challenges of modern communication?
A few years back Lineker made a comparison between language used by the then government around migration and the language used in 1930s Germany.
He was suspended from Match of the Day but his co-presenters backed him up and the show was famously broadcast with no host or analysis.
A few days ago Rylan appeared on ITVs This Morning and shared factually incorrect information about asylum seekers that drew support from figures like Tommy Robinson.
Lineker faced a huge co-ordinated backlash from Conservative MPs and right-wing media.
At the time, the BBC Director General Tim Davie said that:
“When it comes to presenters, I just say that 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 exemplars of the BBC values…”
Rylan has had to dodge a bit of social media flak but the BBC appears to have no issue with his factual inaccuracies.
Seems odd?
Well what’s worse is that if people do put pressure on the BBC to rebuke Rylan then they and the BBC will be accused of wokeism and cancel culture.
Picking fights in the culture war is generally a bad idea and quite possibly why there’s no coordinated response to Rylan’s comments.
His framing on This Morning and in his subsequent tweets are not unreasonable and in fact offer a route to understanding why public concern about migration is so high at a time when costs of living keep going up and standards of living keep going down. Ryland and Lineker have previously teamed up for charity fundraisers to support minority groups.
But the bottom line is that it’s almost impossible to correct the narrative or hold people to account for spreading false information.
Let it go unchallenged and allow damaging narratives to grow.
Challenge it and feed other damaging narratives.
It’s lose, lose - so what do you do?