Weekly Digest: BBC turmoil, NYT testing new daily news podcast

The BBC found itself embroiled in a crisis in recent days over the corporation’s decision to suspend Gary Lineker, one of its most prominent hosts, because of his tweet criticising the UK government’s immigration policy. 

Here’s the sequence of events that played out over the past week:

• The UK government introduced a plan aimed at blocking undocumented migrants from entering the country on small boats, a controversial policy criticised by the UN among others.
• Gary Lineker, a former football player and now a sporting broadcaster (and the BBC’s highest-paid presenter), harshly criticised the policy on Twitter.
• The BBC suspended Lineker, citing a violation of the corporation’s social media use policy; Lineker stood by his comments
• The suspension caused widespread condemnation; notably, the BBC’s sports programming was disrupted over the weekend as Lineker colleagues refused to come on air in solidarity with the presenter.
• On Monday the BBC was forced to reinstate Lineker “without requiring him to make any significant concessions”, as The Guardian summarises.

The turmoil caused a lot of attention in the UK (on a level similar to the migration policy in question itself, if not more) and raised renewed questions around the publicly funded corporation’s impartiality – in simplified terms, the BBC is criticised by some conservatives as left-leaning and by some liberals as too concerned with the accusations of being left-leaning. Besides, the BBC has found itself at the centre of other scandals recently, particularly the cloud over potential ethical violation in the appointment of the corporation’s current chair Richard Sharp.

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The New York Times is testing a new daily news podcast, with plans to launch it later this year, according to reporting by Axios. The podcast is called “The Headlines” and will feature a brief look into the day’s biggest headlines.

The company has engaged dozens of reports from across the world to work on launching the program, Axios reports. The new podcast will be shorter than “The Daily”, The New York Times’s flagship news show.

The show will build on the success of “The Daily”, which is currently one of the most popular news podcasts in the world, gathering multiple millions of downloads every day. As Axios notes, “[m]ore news companies [including Reuters and The Washington Post] are launching short, daily news shows as a way to capture the attention of busy, and often younger, listeners”.

Source of the cover photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/CbSk32bMPDR/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

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