150. YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN - Gary Lineker and The Myth of Impartiality
In 1994 historian, Howard Zinn, released a memoir titled You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He describes the title’s metaphor succinctly: “events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that”. The world is the moving train, and none of us can be neutral passengers. To pretend that we can is to perpetuate a myth.
Last week BBC sports presenter, Gary Lineker, was asked to step back from presenting flagship football show, Match of the Day, because tweets he’d sent out earlier in the week criticising the government’s proposed immigration policy were deemed to breach the BBC’s impartiality guidelines. The decision led to full-scale rebellion of the BBC’s football staff. Match of the Day ended up presented by no-one, showing just twenty minutes of football highlights without commentary or punditry, and other football-based programming from the corporation that weekend saw its presenters and staff effectively go on strike in support of Lineker. On the pitch, players refused to speak to BBC reporters or contribute to the weekend’s programming beyond playing their matches. By the end of the weekend’s vastly paired back programming, the BBC made a U-turn. They apologised to Lineker and, tonight, Saturday as I write this, he will be back in the presenter’s chair again, his job restored.
Many objected to the BBC’s decision to punish Lineker for his tweets. Some commented on the inconsistency of the BBC’s approach. Lineker, not a newscaster, is theoretically allowed to have - and speak openly about - his opinions as Lineker’s role does not require the illusion of impartiality one might expect from a news presenter there to, supposedly, give us unbiased and objective facts surrounding current events. Other non-news-based BBC personalities, such The Apprentice figurehead, Lord Alan Sugar, for example, tweet their views frequently and without repercussion. Why was Lineker pulled up on his comments but not others on the BBC payroll who do the same? Other objections were based around the factual accuracy of Lineker’s claim. Suella Braverman really was using “language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the '30s” when she described (falsely) Britain being allegedly “overwhelmed” by migrants arriving in small boats. Lineker was not peddling conspiracy theories or sharing dangerous misinformation, he was accurately hitting back at misleading claims from the Home Secretary in some fairly tame and qualified language. What was the big deal?
However, my philosophical issue with the incident comes not from finger-pointing “whataboutism” or fact-checking the accuracy of the tweets, but from thinking about the very premise of “impartiality” on which the charges of breaching the guidelines were based. Zinn’s comments rang in my ears throughout the whole sorry incident because, as he implied all those years ago, to not comment on the government’s policy, and their dangerous anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric, is not being “neutral” at all, it is accepting the state of the world - and therefore the policy - as it is.
One may not agree with Lineker, and one may not agree with the government, but there is no neutral and impartial position when it comes to describing the world. Every view carries its bias, whether it is a bias towards a particular set of ideas and a desire to change the current state of affairs in one way or another, or a bias towards keeping things just as they are. Reality is not neutral. It is constantly constructed and contingent on the upkeep of infinitely changeable norms, habits, and opinions. There are people benefitting from the current way things are and people disadvantaged by it. “Winners” and “losers” in the cruel parlance of our economic system (or the language of football, familiar to viewers of Match of the Day). To not comment on the state of the world today is never to be impartial. It is to implicitly state a preference - a partiality - for maintaining things exactly as they are, inflammatory immigration policies and all.
This applies to newsreaders too, for even the seeming blunt facts of “the” news are not impartial. News agendas are set by editors, institutions, spokespeople, public relations departments, commercial interests, etc. and there are always things left out of the conversation. Always choices being made about which stories to prioritise and which ones not to even report on. Arguably the myth of impartiality is part of the reason we have seen public discourse erode in recent years and any agreement on a shared truth disintegrate. Simply repeating the lies, misconceptions, and ignorance of public figures without comment, even when we know they are harmful, factually inaccurate, or otherwise misleading, has allowed for the constant exploitation of media platforms by those interested in spreading disinformation and causing epistemological mischief. Our supposedly impartial news sources have allowed a state of public knowledge where we do not even agree on the starting premise that there is a climate crisis anymore, let alone on any approaches for dealing with it. We saw during the height of the pandemic response how quickly basic public health measures became politicised and undermined, and we continue to see figures like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump - proven public liars - maintaining careers in public life which should have probably been undone by scandal years ago.
That said, the myth of impartiality is not new. Twenty years ago this month we invaded Iraq back in 2003 because our supposedly impartial media allowed Tony Blair to repeatedly claim intelligence of weapons of mass destruction without sufficient scrutiny, even when those claims were disputed at the time by knowledgable weapons inspectors, academics, experts on the region, and other intelligence officers.
This week we will be hearing the findings of the Casey Report on the London Metropolitan police force, a report believed to condemn the organisation for failure to address or change its deep-seated racism, sexism, and homophobia. Issues that have been public knowledge for those who have come into contact with its racist, sexist, or homophobic officers for decades but which seldom forms part of any “impartial” reporting on police activities outside of the handful of exposed and extreme cases. When we hear about “officers being sent to the scene” or “criminals” who “were arrested”, there is no analysis of the impact of this inherent racism, sexism, and homophobia in the actions of the police, just “impartial” acceptance that what the police do is ok. That they are the “good guys” in most situations, keeping the peace, rather than the possibility that they might be the aggressors or the problem itself. That news reporting does not tend to include deeper structural analysis of things like racism, sexism, or homo/trans/bi-phobia is a choice, not a necessity. The news could be different. That news reporting chases the tail of what is new and shiny and tends not to spend years on the same enduring stories is, likewise, a choice, not a necessity. The very structure of news reporting is, itself, partial to a particular view of the world and subject to assumptions about what citizens “need” to know and what audiences “want” to see. The news is never impartial. Every time that we pretend it is, we ignore the underlying norms it is actually endorsing and the reality it is manufacturing through omission of some things and over-emphasis of others.
Feminist philosopher, Sara Ahmed, points out “the more we challenge structures, the more we come up against them”. Walls come up, Ahmed says, “because of what you are not trying to reproduce” for “it is only the practical effort to bring about transformation that allows the wall to be apparent. To those who do not come up against it, the wall does not even appear”. When we speak out against the way the world currently is - refuse to be neutral on our speeding train - we hit the wall of being judged not “impartial” enough. When we suggest that the way things are are not the way things have to be and that other versions of the world might be possible, we hit wall after wall. When we simply accept the version of reality that has been constructed, the walls disappear again. Being silent, being “impartial”, means keeping the walls hidden.
Ahmed applies the same idea to philosophy as a discipline: “if those with privilege are those who philosophise, so much material will be missing. No amount of critical reflection, wondering or pondering will bring some things into view. Some things are not perceived because of what some people do not have to force into existence.” The blind-spots in our discipline’s history, on gender, on race, on power, for example, stem from the majority of philosophers accepted into the “canon” being, to be accepted, not the sort of philosophers coming up against walls. Those more “controversial” thinkers, raising issues about things not widely recognised as issues, are easily dismissed as somehow not doing “proper” philosophy and discover walls erected preventing their success, just as the BBC personality with views which jar against the status quo can be accused of not doing “proper” television celebrity work. It is not Gary Lineker’s place to point out walls; it is his role to keep such walls invisible, hit only by those desperate asylum seekers forced to confront our entrenched hostility as they seek refuge on our shores.
Howard Zinn, too, was dismissed in his time as not a “proper” historian by some because he chose to make visible those previously made invisible in the history of the Unites States: the “people”. Flipping the traditional historical narrative from the voices of the powerful to those of the powerless, Zinn made visible all kinds of realities hidden from the acceptable story of America’s history. And those after Zinn, inspired by his work, have continued to open up new narratives and new perspectives which even Zinn didn’t see. Zinn’s central thesis was that history isn’t neutral. It is always somebody’s history. Somebody’s version of events. By making the partiality explicit, rather than hidden, Zinn was able to present counter-narratives and remind us that “the” history of something is always really “a” history.
In teaching, too, we use the word “professional” to put up some hidden walls. We, too, are supposed to be impartial, and not share our political views with our students regardless of the fact that to not share is a view in itself. That our alleged “professional” standard of “impartiality” is deeply partial to the status quo. On this, too, Zinn is instructive. “When I became a teacher”, he says in his memoir, “I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences.”
“I have often wondered how so many teachers manage to spend a year with a group of students and never reveal who they are, what kind of lives they have led, where their ideas come from, what they believe in, or what they want for themselves, for their students, and for the world…
…In my teaching I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism, my anger at racial inequality, my belief in democratic socialism, in a rational and just distribution of the world’s wealth. I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth.
This mixing of activism and teaching, this instance that education cannot be neutral on the crucial issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order.
I would always begin my course by making it clear to my students that they would be getting my point of view, but that I would try to be fair to other points of view. I encouraged my students to disagree with me.
I didn’t pretend to an objectivity that was neither possible nor desirable. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” I would tell them…I never believed that I was imposing my views on blank slates, on innocent minds. My students had had a long period of political indoctrination before they arrived in my class - in the daily, in high school, in the mass media. Into a marketplace so long dominated by orthodoxy I wanted only to wheel my little pushcart, offering my wares along with the others, leaving students to make their own choices.”
By asking any public-facing person - Gary Lineker, an historian, a philosopher, a teacher, a journalist - to be “impartial”, we are asking them to do something both impossible and undesirable (if we are really interested in ever making the world a better place). Better than pretending impartiality to be a desirable (and possible) goal for any public figure or person in a position of trust we ought, instead, to demand of those who speak publicly that they make clear, as far as possible, their explicit and unavoidable partiality. To be hyper-aware of their biases and probable blindspots and acknowledge that other ways of seeing things might well be possible but that this is the direction from where they are coming. That they have points of view and you are free to disagree with them, but that in order to disagree meaningfully we all need to have some shared common ground where our individual subjectivities and biases can meet in order for one or both of us to put our viewpoints up for scrutiny. If we can’t do that, then all we are is our biases and there is no point in having a conversation.
In other words, if Suella Braverman thinks her immigration policy isn’t “beyond awful” or “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s” then she can show people who agree with Gary Lineker why the policy isn’t cruel, awful, or akin to the rhetoric of Nazis. What she can’t do, however, is claim that expressing an opinion in opposition to her policy makes one too politically partial to be on TV. Braverman peddles many myths - the ones about migrants in boats and the alleged compatibility of her new bill with international human rights law - but this myth, the myth of impartiality, might be the most dangerous myth of all because it is the overarching myth which facilitates and enables the dissemination and repetition of all the rest.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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