New BBC boss Tim Davie ‘prepared to fire stars’ who break impartiality rules
The BBC’s new director general today said he is prepared to fire high-profile figures who break the broadcaster’s devout impartiality rules on social media.
In his first major move at the helm, Tim Davie, who took up the post earlier this month, said the corporation will publish new social media rules next month which will outline plans to axe staff who repeatedly fail to comply.
“I am prepared to take the appropriate disciplinary action, all the way to termination,” he told MPs at the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee this morning.
Davie said the BBC would “take people off Twitter” if necessary, adding: “If they want to work for the BBC, we could suspend their Twitter account, absolutely…. I know people want to see hard action on this.”
Celebrity presenters
Davie’s comments came after widespread criticism of some of the BBC’s most high-profile TV presenters, who have attracted controversy for airing their political views.
Gary Lineker, who is the BBC’s highest-paid employee with an annual salary of £1.75m in 2019, has repeatedly courted criticism over his left-wing and anti-Brexit tweets.
Speaking in the Commons today, Davie said the Match of the Day presenter had “always got a flavoursome turn of phrase”, but “understands his responsibilities as a person within the BBC”.
The BBC boss added that the impartiality bar “will be higher for news and current affairs” staff, adding that there will “also be a bar for those people working as BBC talent across the organisation, across genres”.
It comes after Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis was slammed for breaching impartiality rules earlier this year, when she told audiences that the PM’s chief aide Dominic Cummings had broken lockdown rules as “fact, rather than opinion”.
New BBC chair
In his first parliamentary grilling as director general of the BBC, Davie refused to comment on reports that the Prime Minister is keen to appoint Lord Moore, former Daily Telegraph editor, as the next BBC chairman.
“I don’t run the appointment process for my boss. I put my trust in the process,” said Davie.
Rumours of the PM’s choice of Lord Moore for the job, who has previously positioned himself as an arch critic of the BBC, attracted furious backlash across the country.
Moore has repeatedly called for the abolition of the licence fee, and was fined £262 by a court in 2010 for refusing to pay it.
Earlier this year, Moore said the licence fee was “the greatest single wrong on which the BBC rests” and an “offence to freedom”.
He has previously compared the BBC’s public funding model to “compulsory tithes” for the Christian Church that forced people to pay for “a public religion whether they believed in it or not”.
Julian Knight, Tory MP and chair of DCMS committee, told Davie he would be writing to the culture secretary to raise concerns about how the recruitment process, given reports that Moore is the current frontrunner despite the fact the job has not yet been publicly advertised.