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BBC must remind stars that impartiality applies to Twitter, says former head of news

BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis at the Hay Festival 2019 - Jay Williams
BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis at the Hay Festival 2019 - Jay Williams

BBC news and current affairs presenters have forgotten that impartiality rules apply to Twitter, a former head of news has said.

Speaking in light of the row over Emily Maitlis, Mark Damazer said he was taken aback to read some of the partisan views shared by BBC stars on social media.

Ms Maitlis makes no secret of her opinions about the Government, retweeting the Labour Party’s statement that: “There cannot be one rule for Dominic Cummings and another for the British people.”

She tweeted to her 370,000 followers that Mr Cummings had lost “any right to tell others they are out of touch/elite/missing the public mood… He has become the thing he loathed.” And this week she shared a tweet in which supporter said that her views “deserve more respect from her employers”.

Mark Damazer, who worked on Newsnight before becoming the BBC’s head of current affairs and controller of Radio 4, said BBC management must rein in their stars on social media.

“The existing impartiality guide - all of which is written down, all of which at one stage these people knew about and most still do - applies to Twitter just as it applies to what they’re broadcasting on the Today programme or the 10 O’Clock News or Newsnight," he told the Sunday Telegraph.

“I follow quite a few BBC people and I’ve come across stuff which I don’t think they should be writing. These are news and current affairs people and they give away too many hints and clues which suggest a [political] predisposition, and I don’t think that is good."

The basic rule, Mr Damazer said, is that “if you are voicing a mere opinion which is judgmental - then don’t.”

In a column for the New Statesman, he wrote: “The BBC needs to have a conversation, or even a constructive row, with its top news talent to stop the excesses. I don’t think many of them will choose to walk out.”

Another former BBC News executive, Richard Sambrook, has been hired by the corporation to review social media use by staff and official programme accounts. The BBC insisted that the review was commissioned before the Maitlis controversy.

Mr Damazer said it would be wrong to ban BBC staff from using Twitter, as it is now a source of breaking news. And he said more lenient rules apply for non-news presenters who voice controversial opinions on social media, such as Gary Lineker and Chris Packham.

Ms Maitlis was publicly reprimanded for an extraordinary monologue on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight. In it, she stated as fact that Mr Cummings had broken lockdown rules, and said the British public had been left feeling like fools.

Some of Ms Maitlis’s supporters have claimed that Newsnight is a magazine programme and therefore not subject to stringent impartiality rules.

But Mr Damazer, who left the BBC in 2010 to become Master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, said: “The programme is a current affairs programme rather than a straight news programme, but it sits absolutely four square in the middle of the BBC’s obligations to impartiality.

“I think Emily is extremely good. But I’m in no doubt that turning the opening of a programme into something that looked like an opinion column is not a way of convincing an audience, even an audience as sophisticated as Newsnight’s, that it is going to be a dispassionate and fair-minded look at the issue of the day.”

Other BBC employees who have been accused of bias before include News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards and Gary Lineker, who presents Match of the Day.

Mr Edwards faced criticism after liking a tweet saying “Vote Labour for the National Health Service" in the build up to the 2019 General Election.

Mr Edwards responded with a Tweet saying it wasn't an offence to back the NHS : "Yeah I liked a tweet which seemed to be a celebration of our wonderful @nhs —apologies for not watching right to the end. But apologise for supporting the NHS? Never."

Meanwhile, Mr Lineker has become well known for his anti-Brexit stance from his Twitter posts, with one saying Britain had won "the Golden Dumbass award".

The BBC said that as Mr Lineker is not involved in any news or political output, any expression of his personal political views does not affect the broadcaster's impartiality.