Editorial Freedoms

Anyone with no interest in football and not a regular consumer of Match of the Day (MOTD), may have been perplexed at the outrage created by the BBC telling Gary Linekar to take 'gardening leave', or whatever euphemism is used these days. Even if football really isn't your thing, it is significant that the BBC asked a freelance presenter, such as Linekar, to cease and desist from using their own personal social media account, to say something critical about the government.
The day that a national broadcasting outlet, using 'impartiality' as its catch all mantra, has the gall to sanction a presenter whilst themselves having a Chairman, Richard Sharp, so closely aligned to former Prime Minister Boris Johnston that he even helped him expedite a loan of £800,000, is a day that we should all be alarmed!
The BBC, may need to think of another means of funding itself, as the threat of having the license fee revoked is a perennial one that conservative governments can hang over it, in order to extract maximum servile allegiance.
The BBC will always have to walk the tightrope of editorial queasiness, a fear of upsetting No 10 by daring to question its more strident policies. But editorial freedom is a hard won right that we must preserve at all costs, without it we cannot trust the information we are given.
We pride ourselves in being an open and accepting society but that only works when the government cannot dictate, for their own ends, what our broadcasters and media say or publish.
Editorial freedom is too precious to see it highjacked by political interference. One presenter's social media account has, however, exposed the pressures that are brought to bear regularly on that freedom.
The media have an obligation not only to seek truth but also to speak truth without the fear of interference.