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BBC Verify, the new fact-checking service inside the BBC, was launched last year with much fanfare and at great expense. Its verdicts are pushed across all the corporation’s channels. So why is it getting so many things wrong? And where is the accountability for these arbiters of truth? UnHerd Investigations Editor, David Rose, subjects Verify to some fact-checking of his own…
On 6 August, at the height of the riots that swept Britain after the Southport murders, BBC Verify revealed “one of the most shocking” outbreaks of violence: a racist attack on Humberside. According to Verify, “an angry mob of white men surrounded and attacked a car with men of Asian heritage inside.” Some of the attackers “threw bricks and shouted racist slurs. One performed the Nazi salute.”
The Verify team deployed its OSINT (open source intelligence) skills and facial recognition software to compare images from the scene with social media profiles. Soon enough, they’d identified and named two of the alleged attackers. Yet despite having no less than four writers on the story — just one of many Verify articles to boast multiple bylines — this gaggle of reporters initially failed to spot the most important fact of all.
That only became clear later, in a note added at the bottom of the BBC website once the story had been published. “An earlier version of this article identified the men in the car as of Asian heritage,” it said. “Humberside Police has since told the BBC they are Eastern European.” To put it differently, the victims on Humberside were as white as their attackers. Whatever else the incident was, then, it certainly wasn’t a straightforward case of white racism against non-white targets. Later, the BBC also changed the headline.
If journalism is the first draft of history, often produced at speed, it’s inevitable that reporters sometimes get things wrong. But just as the 6 August story suffered from a glaring and arguably story-ending error, BBC Verify seems to suffer more mistakes than most. Having examined more than 200 stories listed on BBC Verify’s website, and produced between its launch in May 2023 and 5 October this year, we found 12 that were later corrected, clarified or withdrawn. That’s about one in 20.
For an outfit like BBC Verify, an expensive new unit established to combat disinformation, that’s awkward enough. That’s doubly true when journalists elsewhere in the corporation face redundancy, with £24 million annual cuts to the BBC News budget forcing executives to axe well-regarded programmes and shed 130 staff. Yet beyond these individual embarrassments, or the strange focus on Verify to the detriment of other reporting, the real story here is what BBC Verify says about the contemporary BBC’s approach to journalism — and how it often seems to put shallow, memeable newsgathering ahead of the facts.
BBC Verify was born in an age of disinformation, in which “fake news” spread by platforms such as TikTok has eroded trust in “legacy media” — and diminished its audience. A high-level BBC insider says that from the moment Deborah Turness was appointed chief executive of BBC News in 2022, she tried to persuade her senior colleagues that the way to restore both was to set up a unit to challenge the spread of disinformation and report the facts. She got her way, and BBC Verify was the result.
Despite being founded around 18 months ago, Verify has quickly come to dominate BBC News output. Boasting over 60 dedicated journalists, it enjoys a special corner of the BBC website, with each story it publishes highlighted by a BBC Verify logo. Covering everything from war (“What satellite images reveal about Israel’s strikes on Iran”) to climate change (“No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’”), online content is dovetailed by Verified Live, which airs weekdays on BBC News. No less striking, Verify has also made stars of several BBC journalists. One example is Ros Atkins, the BBC’s analysis editor. Another is Marianna Spring, a disinformation correspondent who’s appeared everywhere from Breakfast to Radio 4, and so become one of the corporation’s most recognisable faces.
Given all this coverage, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Verify should also enjoy praise from executives. “BBC Verify is transparency in action — fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth,” is how Turness put it. As Verify’s creator has added, its staff aren’t just ordinary journalists. Rather, they’re “a highly specialised team with a range of forensic and OSINT capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques”.
Last month Turness sent a message to every BBC journalist making further grandiose claims. In the note, seen by UnHerd, she said Verify was “on the front line” of the corporation’s “fight for truth”, and its “forensic teams” were “setting the standard for transparent journalism”. Such enthusiasm is clearly echoed in the accounting department too: the BBC has said the salary bill for Verify’s 63 staff is £3.2 million a year.
Yet amid the plaudits and the paychecks, just how accurate is Verify’s reporting?
Certainly, that the unit has had to correct, clarify or withdraw about one in 20 stories isn’t a good start. “The BBC claims that BBC Verify is on the frontline of the ‘fight for truth’ — but the fact it has been forced to correct 5% of its stories suggests otherwise,” explains Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. “That is a very high number for any news organisation, and the BBC should be upholding the highest of standards.”
Nor do things look much better once you dig a little deeper. Like the Humberside story, after all, some mistakes involve that most sensitive of subjects: race. On 25 February, for instance, BBC Verify published a troubling exposé. Its author, Maryam Ahmed, had used advanced statistical techniques to compare thousands of car insurance quotes, finding that drivers in racially diverse areas were having to pay much higher premiums — an average of 33% more than people from places that were mainly white.
It seemed the motor insurance industry was racist, for behind the disparity lay what the BBC called an “ethnicity penalty”. Even if differing levels of accidents, crime and economic prosperity were taken into account, “areas with a high number of people from ethnic minorities saw higher prices”, the article said. It went on to quote a demand from Citizens Advice that the Financial Conduct Authority “get off the sidelines and investigate why people of colour are being charged so much more”.
Seven months later, the BBC quietly replaced the article with an embarrassing statement. It now transpired there was no “ethnicity penalty” after all. The BBC “had not established why premiums were higher”, because it had failed to see “the limitations of the data we used”. The story “did not meet our normal editorial standards” and was therefore being deleted.
And if that’s echoed by errors in other domestic stories — among other things, that includes a muddle over high speed railways — the unit has arguably faced its biggest problems very far from Britain. Since the Hamas attack of October 2023, indeed, the Middle East has proved something of a theme for the unit: our analysis shows that in the year since the attack, about a fifth of the stories listed on its website have focused on the region.
And if Cohen says this suggests an “unhealthy obsession” with events in Israel, some of Verify’s claims on this most controversial of conflicts don’t stand up.
Early in the war, on 17 October last year, an explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza triggered furious controversy, after the BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said on air that it was “hard to see” what could have caused it other than an Israeli airstrike.
Israel insisted that the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket, but according to Donnison, these might kill “half a dozen — maybe a few more”, and “when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of this scale”. In its reports that evening, the BBC echoed a claim by Hamas that it had killed 500 people. In fact, the hospital itself had not been hit: the blast was in the car park outside, and the death toll, according to both Western governments and Human Rights Watch, was far lower than 500.
BBC Verify published three successive items on the event, culminating in a lengthy article on 26 October that carried the bylines of no fewer than 12 of its staff.
By this time, the Biden administration and numerous independent experts had concluded that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket, launched from inside Gaza. Rishi Sunak, the then-prime minister, had told Parliament this was likely true, based on the “deep knowledge and analysis of our intelligence and weapons experts”. Yet BBC Verify continued to maintain the cause of the blast was still “contested” — and that, as Hamas still claims, it might have been an Israeli strike.
Verify’s assertion relied on analysis by an organisation called Forensic Architecture, which the BBC somewhat obliquely described as a “UK-based organisation which investigates human rights abuses”.
What it failed to mention was that Forensic Architecture’s advisory board includes Ryvka Barnard, the deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; and that it has a long record of issuing reports critical of Israel. At the same time, Forensic Architecture has often worked with Al Haq, a Palestinian group designated a terrorist organisation by Israel. After the October 7 attacks, meanwhile, Al Haq staff issued numerous statements describing them as legitimate acts of resistance. One of its leaders urged his social media followers to support the “jihad”.
Despite all this, Verify’s initial story is still online — complete with the claim that the origin of the hospital blast remains “contested”. That’s even as the story now includes a clarification at the bottom conceding that Forensic Architecture itself now admits “they had been wrong” about the specifics of the attack.
Nor is this Verify’s only Gaza story to be based on dubious sources. On 1 March, it published a report into the deaths of 112 Gazans, who’d died the previous day while food was being distributed from a convoy of aid trucks. Hamas claimed most of the dead had been shot by the IDF; Israel that they’d been crushed in a stampede.
The six named Verify staff accredited in its report analysed satellite photos, videos and drone footage. It seems OSINT wasn’t much help, as they still weren’t able to draw any definitive conclusions. In the end, Verify relied on an old-fashioned human source. A Palestinian named Mahmoud Awadeyah told the reporters he’d seen what happened: a deliberate attack on desperate civilians by Israeli soldiers.
Beyond Awadeyah’s testimony, Verify’s story contained no other evidence this was true. More to the point, other research suggests that he may not be a reliable source for such serious allegations. For one thing, he has worked for Tasnim, a news agency controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On the same day as the murder of seven Jews outside a Jerusalem synagogue, meanwhile, Awadeyah tweeted about “A state of rejoicing, exuberance, and mosques confirmed with exuberance.” The same message included an emoji of a contented-looking face with a halo. He’s also posted photos of himself with Khalil Al Bahtini, a leader of the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and mourned his “sincerity and loyalty” when the latter was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Twelve days after the Verify piece was published, the BBC appended yet another “clarification” — noting that “this piece has been amended to make clear Mahmoud Awadeyah’s current employment” for a Lebanese news station called Al Mayadeen. For its part, Verify also noted Al Mayadeen’s sympathies to groups fighting Israel. But even that’s not the full story: Al Mayadeen openly supports Iran, Hezbollah and the murderous Assad regime in Syria.
Cohen, for his part, is amazed that the BBC didn’t feel the need to explain that an eyewitness source was employed by a pro-Iranian outlet. “This is a good example of bias by omission,” he says. “Without all the facts and context clearly presented, the BBC is misleading audiences.”
And if Verify has been caught out by its sources in other areas too — an expert quoted in support of a wealth tax has campaigned for just such a policy, even as his background wasn’t made clear — reporting on riots or war at least feels worthy in principle.
Elsewhere, though, the unit seems content paddling in distinctly shallow waters. On 7 May, for instance, Spring presented a filmed segment describing a fake picture on Instagram. This was significant, she said, because AI-generated forgeries often involved politicians, and so could potentially influence elections. In the event, though, the picture she highlighted wasn’t of Donald Trump or Joe Biden — but rather of the singer Katy Perry, doing nothing more than standing in a floral dress she hadn’t actually worn. Undaunted, Spring justified her prime time report by saying it was “a reminder to put our social media sleuthing to the test”.
Nor is this the only story that feels like it could have been left to the tabloids. On 17 October, BBC Verify published a story about a supposed “wave of cases” involving an alleged drug called Devil’s Breath. The article explained that it was apparently a travel sickness remedy, which could “be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged”. Perhaps it can. Yet Verify admitted there was “no evidence” it had been administered in the cases it examined, though it “has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam”. Even if it had been used in Britain, meanwhile, this would have been “difficult to establish”.
Sometimes, Verify even “proves” things that no one seriously disputes. One example came on 7 September, when it published images showing Israel had been building a new road along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Three weeks later, it analysed videos of the airstrike that killed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. The fact that solar panels were seen facing away from the bombed building suggested that the attack had come from the south: in other words from Israel. Who knew?
Combined with those monumental bylines — even a straightforward story about flooding in Libya involved a dozen staff — and that £3.2 million wage bill begins to feel oddly high. Indeed, Verify might cost the BBC even more than that. Notwithstanding the unit’s focus on transparency, when we asked the corporation about the rest of its budget, for costs such as travel and OSINT software, a spokeswoman said they weren’t available because they’re “accounted for as part of the overall BBC News budget”.
Such munificence might matter less if the BBC was rolling in money. As it is, the corporation is seriously cash-strapped, a situation that’s obliged managers to cancel some of its most respected shows. Newsnight, for one, is now a shadow of its former self, shorn of filmed reports and investigations. HARDtalk, an in-depth interview programme, is vanishing too, despite first going on air back in 1997. Together with those 130 redundancies, and the high-level BBC insider is unsurprisingly upset about the corporation’s apparent focus on BBC Verify, especially when they suspect it’s indulged as Deborah Turness’s baby. “Because she is the head of news, it can only ever be declared a success,” he explains. “Its triumph is pre-ordained.” It hardly helps, the insider adds, that other sections of BBC News actually have to correct stories far less often than Verify — even as they “they don’t presume to be more truthful than anyone else”.
Nor do things seem likely to change going forward. In late October, mere days after BBC director-general Tim Davie made a speech about the growing threat of “misinformation” from foreign powers, the corporation had ordered four of its most seasoned foreign correspondents back to Britain to save money. All had years of experience, backed by foreign language skills, of reporting on authoritarian regimes including China, Russia and North Korea. Now, though, they’d been told to cover news in Britain.
Within the BBC, the news was received with dismay. The Times quoted a staffer saying they had been “told to return at a time when the amount of propaganda we are up against is astounding. None of them costs very much money and strategically, it doesn’t make sense when you look at the big, looming stories.” But in the new BBC, it seems that on-the-ground reporting, battling to get at the truth, is destined to be replaced by analysis of videos shot by amateurs on mobile phones — all carried out by BBC Verify in London.
Certainly, the corporation clearly remains optimistic about the unit.
We asked the BBC to comment on everything in this article. Its spokeswoman told us: “By their very nature, BBC Verify stories are heavy in facts and detail on contentious topics which can sometimes require clarifications and updates, and occasionally corrections, which we do in an openly transparent way. Often pieces are updated to show our workings to audiences — showing them how stories develop as new information comes to light. We do not recognise the flawed calculations that attempt to describe updated pieces with transparent workings as corrected articles.
“We are proud of the vital work that BBC Verify is doing, and our audience research shows that people value this offering and are actively seeking out BBC Verify stories to help them understand events.”
Regarding the false claim that the victims of the attack on the car during the riots were of Asian heritage, the spokesperson said: “The story used a range of technology, on the ground reports and social media to piece together how the violence escalated in Humberside that day. When we became aware of the new information we amended the story swiftly and transparently. We stand by the story as an accurate account of what happened.”
As for the now-deleted article about “racist” car insurance, the spokeswoman said that “we have been transparent in saying this story did not meet our normal editorial guidelines and why we withdrew the article”. She also defended the report claiming Israel had massacred Gazans when they tried to get food, despite relying on a single source who’d worked for a pro-Iran TV channel. “The fact,” she said, “that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony.”
Not everyone at the corporation is so bullish. Our BBC insider was unimpressed by these comments, saying he was dismayed that even when Verify had admitted that fundamental elements of major stories were wrong, they’d nonetheless stayed online. As he puts it: “This is misleading and dishonest.”
Beyond the finances, questions about the unit surely remain. Scanning our analysis of the stories on BBC Verify’s website, it’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s selective with its targets: evidence, perhaps, of a certain Left-leaning bias. It doesn’t, for instance, examine claims made by Hamas with anything like the frequency and rigour it applies to Israel. During the UK election, meanwhile, it dismissed Reform UK’s manifesto by saying its promises had been described as impossible by “experts”, “economists” and “analysts” — without naming or quoting any of them. As was noted last week, meanwhile, it failed to measure the Budget, and the tax increases it contained, against Labour’s pledges during the election.
Especially when the corporation is tightening its belt elsewhere, it’s little wonder Cohen remains sceptical. “At a time when the BBC is having to cut jobs and save a lot of money,” he concludes, “the track record of BBC Verify seems very hard to justify.”
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SubscribeFrom the BBC Website, regarding the launch of BBC Verify:
“BBC Verify comprises about 60 journalists who will form a highly specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips.They’ll be fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and – crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.”What they actually meant:
“BBC Vilify comprises several thousand ‘journalists’ who will form a grossly partisan operation with a range of bien pensant opinions and contacts with like minded echo-chamber occupants at their fingertips – most of whom are old chums from University.
They’ll be making sure that everything you see and hear sits within the narrow, approved sub-Blairite BBC worldview and – crucially – they’ll counter or misinterpret any story that doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative – with a view to smearing anyone they consider a threat to their agenda.”
A pox on them.
I would also have loved to see the list of “well regarded BBC News programmes” that were axed.
Let’s not forget that their bias receives no criticism from their fellow tribespeople at “BBC Protect” …. AKA Ofcom.
What I don’t understand is how anyone can “fight for the truth” in an era when truth itself is subjective. If we keep changing the definitions of words of foundational concepts, such as marriage, sex, man or woman, where does truth reside any more?
Is there, do you think, anyone in a position of executive or editorial authority at the BBC – or indeed the media as a whole, both political parties or the Civil Service – who did not go to Oxford University at the same time as all the rest of them and absorb the same blinkered and completely unrealistic academic worldview?
The country desperately needs to draw its elites from a much wider gene pool.
Knowing the degrees they studied might well reveal their incredible knowledge of the Arts and Humanities and, perhaps, the Social Sciences, especially History, all sorts, and Politics, but little of wealth creating industries and STEM subjects, in general.
Sadly yes, spot on. Yet another tool to spread propaganda.
Oh! You cynic! They do all the things they say “to explain complex stories” to suit their ideological truths.
We live in a curated reality, where narrative trumps objective truth – with the BBC acting as narrative-stewards, rather than just bringing us the news.
We all need media channels to access information about what is going on around the world – but if you’re an uncritical news-consumer, or if you limit yourself to only a handful of news sources or accept what the internet gives you without a healthy dose of scepticism, then your impression of the world is mediated by organisations that will only bring you stories that sit within a certain acceptable framework, or they’ll “interpret” them in such a way that you end up with a (cynically and deliberately) skewed version of the truth.
As a result, many millions of people believe they live in a world that bears no relation to the real one they actually inhabit.
We are explaining “complex stories” in order to show that even when we are wrong, we are right.
If BBC Verify is not sure of its facts, it should not publish. Wait until you are sure. If you are missing data, say so. If you are only partly sure, make that clear. Identify witnesses and their biases. Who fact-checks the “fact-checkers”, after all?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The underlying assumption of the establishment media is that opinion is shaped by facts. The reality is that there are an awful lot of facts to choose from – and the selection of those facts can easily be shaped by opinion.
Listen to Sarah Smith’s coverage of the US election for the Today programme. Everything she describes is probably verifiable fact – but the result is still dangerously misleading.
There is lying by omission.
There’s plenty of evidence that the Sun greatly influences the Earth’s climate and weather, but Meteorologists know little about Solar Physics, Plasmas and Electromagnetic theory, so it isn’t mentioned.
That falls more under the category of “lieing by remit”. The IPCC (the go-to source for most) was charged only with seeking evidence for man-made origins (and a view on what to do about it). This led to the equally egregious flaw of equating two quite opposing probabilities – the high probability that the identified effects would happen if the man-made hypothesis was true with the much lower probability that the effects could arise only from the hypothesised man-made cause. Missing are other causes like the one mentioned here and just plain random fluctuations, and the probability-reducing impact of counter evidence like changes in effects pre-dating changes in the hypothesised cause. The non-recognition of the narrowness of the IPCC remit has done and is doing untold harm.
It’s always been a bit like that. Decades ago I heard it described as choosing whether to show film of Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, or showing film of Israeli soldiers shooting at those throwing the rocks.
Once upon a time Journalists were taught how to avoid such biases. These days I suspect such training is considered as a ‘how to’ guide.
Ofcom.
No they don’t. Ofcom has only a limited remit covering a small part of the BBC – and the Blob want to keep it that way. Given that most of Ofcom used to work at the BBC, they wouldn’t use any new powers anyway.
But that’s what you would do if you’re primary goal was confirming facts. If your goal was to spread your worldview as fast as possible and make sure you’ve got your finger on the scale… Well you’ve seen what you would do in that case
Great to see Unherd fighting back against the regime media who’ve set their acolytes in the field of misinformation against this platform.
Just perhaps, there’s something in the air now the new leader of the Conservative Party has been elected. It’s not enough – nowhere near enough – just to try to survive the left-leaning onslaught we’ve witnessed in the msm for the past decade, or longer. It does require pushback, and BBC Verify is a great place to start.
Once people have read the initial news item, they move on, misinformed. Who bothers to return to the same item to check if it’s been amended? The damage has been done, and the BBC knows it. But who actually trusts the BBC or other similarly regime-oriented outlets any more? I’d suggest they themselves are damaged beyond repair.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. – Winston Churchill
It was Mark Twain, not Churchill, and they were boots, not pants. Get it right; what do you think this – the BBC?
boots on
It was neither Winston Churchill nor Mark Twain.
Quote Investigator concludes its investigation with these words:
Source and full report: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
Thank you Jack. This sort of insight is why I subscribe.
Lovely to see a well sourced comment. No doubt the BBC will have a place for you in their new verifying unit should you wish.
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” — Mark Twain.
In short, if someone with alleged authority says “trust me” it is unwise to do so. Unsurprisingly most people don’t nowadays.
Trust me, I’m a doctor 🙂
If the fight against disinformation” is the latest rubber ring the legacy media are clinging to, trying to save themselves from oblivion then, at best, they aren’t doing very well at it. At worst, they are making things worse for themselves.
While on holiday I made the mistake of tuning into CNN and saw one of their “fact checks”. If you can call it that.
They showed a 15-second clip of Elon Musk at a rally someplace, obviously complaining about the risk that non-US citizens will be able to place votes in tomorrow’s election.
For starters, this clip was so short – you didn’t know what Musk had said before or after so it was difficult to understand the context.
The first question for me was whether such a clip taken out of context is worth a fact-check.
But anyway, the basic issue was at least clear: the risk (that’s present in any election) that people who aren’t entitled to vote manage to cast votes. So the “fact check” was about what safeguards the US has in place to counter it and therefore why Musk was saying something which could be seen as disinformation and which therefore needed fact-checking.
The “fact-check” was basically the journalist saying that yes, the US has plenty of safeguards and that therefore Musk had no reason to be standing there making an issue out of the risk.
At no point was the viewer given any examples of such safeguards, how they operate, who ensures that they are complied with, statistics about election inaccuracies – or any other information I would have thought relevant.
In short, the “fact-check” boiled down to this: We are CNN, we and only we are in possession of the facts and you, the dumb viewer, will believe whatever we say, because we are the ones saying it.
Of course, they could run a proper interview with Elon Musk to debate the point in detail. But since the BBC tried that with Musk last year and their reporter was shown up to be a complete imbecile who’d done zero research and Musk tore him to shreds, I guess they don’t have the guts to do that.
I always thought that fact-checking your news output before it is published is part and parcel of good journalism.
Fundamentally, having a high-budget operation to “fact-check” your own news output after publication simply highlights that the regular news output is not fact-checked and hence not credible. I can’t think of a better way to damage your own brand.
I find both Ros Atkins and Marianna Spring (when I against my better judgement click on a piece) biased, close-minded narrative-pushers and between tedious and infuriating. They are meant to be the icons for BBC Verify?
The only way we are going to teach this corrupt organisation a lesson which will really hurt them is for all of us to stop paying the licence fee. Provided you follow the rules this is easy to do. Once they are starved of funds from tax payers they will find out what it is like to exist in the real world – they won’t survive.
BBC Verify is silly, unserious journalism. Give yourself grand titles and make sweeping, self-congratulatory pronouncements – we are the newsiest of the news. Methinks they have watched too many episodes of CSI. Just do your frickin job.
Great report by the way. Maybe one day, if the authors say their daily prayers, they too can be knighted into the halls of greatness that is BBC Verify.
Orwell had “Verify” in mind when he wrote his exploration of how media is used to deceive people, and especially how the institutionalization of deception is actually a pretty good job if one’s soul has been first excised.
The emerging oligarchy will explicitly rely on institutional deception as provided by Verify.
Good article, thanks. A lot of news outlets have set up units similar to BBC Verify. E.g. AFP, France24 and Reuters. Most of them function as attack dogs, only “checking” a story if it goes against the grain of the editorial narrative of the parent news outlet.
It is fashionable nowadays to bash the BBC. Journalists make mistakes – some more often than others – and other journalists can recognise the mistakes when they see them. The world is awash with rubbish masquerading as news, and at least the BBC can be held to account by other news hounds. Although I credit this piece, let the author show where I should be looking for unbiased news – where does he get his news from?
Facts are immutable – or should be. However, which facts are presented, which are withheld, comes down to editorial policy. As has been pointed out, it’s not just about factual accuracy but which particular facts are deemed to be ‘allowed’. This is the very definition of bias, and the BBC stands accused of blatant bias: not because it’s “fashionable” to do so but because its bias in this regard is demonstrable.
This makes its “Verify” feature all the more egregious.
Might be nice if the BBC “held itself to account” for once.
In June I put up a new curtain pole, watched in every movement by ‘her indoors’. She never took her eyes off what I was doing and finally gave a grudging admission that it was a good job.
Last week it started to fall down and a lot of anger was aimed in my direction. “But,” I said, “you were watching everything I did and you thought it was a good job.” The obvious answer came back, “How do you think I should know anything about putting up curtain poles?”
And she was right.
I cam remember the BBC from 40 years ago before BBC Verfiy was ever dreamed of. It was leagues better than it is today. It reported all relevant news and not just the stories it chose to push. Without any discrimination or favouring particular “in groups”. When politicians were asked questions, they were given time to actually answer and explain. There were no “presenters” or celebs. Just newsreaders and people who actually knew what they were talking about.
The fact that BBC Verify exists at all is just another proof point that the BBC is lost beyond hope of recovery. When you think you need a backup army of checkers, it just shows that you have no confidence in the departments doing the frontline jobs to do their work reliably and accurately.
The BBC’s entire goal for the past 20 or so years has been to try to persuade us that it’s still relevant and vital. So reality is an existential threat for them.
I agree…to an extent.
However that we now know the “news” currently is mainly propaganda makes me query whether it always has been. On balance I tend to think it was. For example, I never did understand why “the West” was involved in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. The Soviets weren’t going to invade India and supplying sophisticated weapons to the mujahideen seemed madness with every likelihood they wouldn’t just be used against the Soviets. The inevitable blowback duly occurred on 911. And yet the Western news media described the mujahideen as “freedom fighters”…transmuted into the evil Al Qaeda after 911.
Both stances were just propaganda, simplistic presentations of the complex reality.
Excellent point. It’s quite possible that bias of one form or another has always been present in BBC reporting. Until the age of 24-hour news channels and social media, the BBC was unquestioningly accepted as the voice of authority and truth in news broadcasting. There were very few alternatives.
While the quality of BBC reporting and reporters was vastly superior to what passes for journalism today, we had no way of verifying the accuracy, reliability and potential bias of what was being reported.
I think the same. “Information” had always been a scarce commodity before the internet. Now it’s freely available to all and thus the price has dropped precipitously. So a new model needed to be developed. And here we are.
There was a time when the BBC was respected all around the world.
The best propaganda always is.
Are you saying the BBC always was?
Someone like Paxman, or even better Robin Day, is sorely needed but would never get anywhere now.
BBC verify’s naked bias when it comes to Israel has had the exact opposite effect for me and many others in that we now trust the BBC far less than we did before Verify – what a waste of money. At least the bias before was not posited as the absolute truth or verification of facts – once you start claiming you are verifying facts the bar is suddenly raised to the highest level. The ‘missile’ strike on the hospital was the best example of this complete failure. How the managers at BBC have not seen this and acted only makes the BBC look even more biased.
As soon as the strike was reported I looked at Al Jazeera to see their version and they had it accurately reported as a dud missile.
The lack of accuracy of the BBC reporting is a major problem. The examples given here are but a drop in the bucket. The Asserson report identified 1500 instances of lack of compliance with the BBC’s own standards of impartiality when reporting on the Israel-Hamas war (https://campaignformediastandards.org.uk/asserson-report.pdf). But beyond accuracy in reporting, the main contribution of the MSM to the shaping of public opinion lies in what the editors choose to report, or not to report. Matti’s Friedman description of his time at AP’s Israel bureau, although 10 years old, is still highly pertinent (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/) and goes a long way to explaining what is shaping the BBC reporting.
I don’t know whether the following report is accurate, but it somehow feels true. Journalist Tom Gross recalled being interviewed in the nineties for a BBC internship. His interviewers asked what he would change about the previous night’s broadcast, and he replied that more attention should have been paid to Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iraqi Kurds:
“I pointed out that this horrific act was the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian target since World War II. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Kurdish children and adults had been gassed to death. Yet the BBC had only mentioned it in passing about twenty minutes into its news bulletin, after a light-hearted item about Prince Charles.
There was silence in the room. The members of the BBC interviewing panel glanced at one another with expressions of bemusement. The chair then turned and asked me, with a slight scowl, “Are you a Zionist?”
And then, before I could answer, my interview came to an end. . . . At no point in my BBC interview or application process had I mentioned Israelis, Palestinians, or Jews. In what was the pre-Google era, my family background is not something that the BBC could easily have discovered. . . . It was the BBC that brought up the subject of Zionism. Needless to say, I wasn’t granted a place on the BBC trainee course.”
BBC’s bias is nothing new. New biases have appeared, others have disappeared, but there is at least one that seems to be quite constant.
There’s a step-by-step demolition of the BBC fact-checkers at https://vookes.substack.com/p/love-in-the-time-of-covid-10 (which contains all the citations and references to back up the rest of this comment by me). The complete fiction of 215 dead babies purportedly discovered in Kamloops has been repeated by the BBC in sensational headlines, and they have never apologised or retracted : “Canada mourns as remains of 215 children found at indigenous school” . The first sentence in that BBC article – printed in bold type – states emphatically that “Unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 children have been found” … and the article proceeds – without evidence – to make various claims that have been proved to be completely baseless. The link above also references articles scientifically debunking the claim, and a book about the whole fiction and the damage it caused.
I suppose they went with ‘BBC Verify’ because ‘BBC Truth” would have been too obviously indebted to the values, methodology and name of the official newspaper of the CPSU, Pravda. No-one is fooled.
On 2 June 2020 in an article on George Floyd the BBC’s ‘anti-disinformation team’ swallowed hook line and sinker the Russian collusion myth, among other jaw-dropping errors. The team included ‘Marianna Spring, BBC Specialist Disinformation and Social Media reporter’. The descriptor ‘Specialist’ has been dropped from her title since 2020, and the descriptor ‘reporter’ has been replaced by ‘Correspondent’. Which reminds me of a Graham Greene quote from The Quiet American: ‘He’s a superior sort of journalist—they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea.’
Very good journalism. Unlike BBC Verify, it seems like this was proper journalism.
It should be a rule, in the BBC charter especially but for all major news outlets too, that any corrections it provides should be made with the same publicity and prominence and on the same page / position / slot as the original, and incorrect, story.
Just the BBC doing what the BBC does. Good article.
All of this pales in comparison to the BBC’s coverage of ‘climate change.’ For decades the Beeb has been shoveling misinformation at the public with the condescension we’ve come to expect from that lot. They take as proven fact the ‘consensus’ of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and so-called experts who have been shown to be lying by their own private communications. We have 2 generations of young people who have no idea that global warming is a failed hypothesis that has repeatedly predicted absurd consequences (no polar ice caps, no polar bears, no snow in the UK, etc).
Likewise their reporting on Russia/Ukraine. Their Moscow ‘correspondent’ Steve Rosenberg is so hysterically anti-Putin that one wonders if the only reason he’s still allowed to work in Russia is that Putin thinks he’s a useful idiot i.e. that no-one could possibly believe such obvious anti-Russian propaganda.
An anti-Putin bias is definately not a problem here on the Unheard forum, where there is no shortage of bootlicking Putinistas.
The BBC is a thoroughly left-liberal biased organisation, including Verify and most of the “journalists” who work in it, and this has been clear for ages. Now Labour is the BBC’s new ultimate paymaster it is even less likely to change.
Easy to ignore: the BBC is now quite ridiculous in promoting itself as a crusader for liberal democratic justice. They set up this unit to appeal to younger Internet-oriented viewers, and now they have Clive Mylie the newsreader, and funky black TV journalist always first on the scene when the Middle East blows up, in a hilarious BBC promotional piece pledging to protect the public from fascistic ‘fake news’.
The legacy media have a long track record of presenting information in a way that suits their agenda.
I remember reading that before the 1924 General Election, a news story came out that cut the legs from under the Labour Party, who were on course to win. After the election, the story was retracted as it was untrue.
What has changed is that we, the recipients, now have alternatives to the official narrative, thanks to the internet. When I am interested in a story in one outlet, I’ll check it on several others, in order to get a more rounded picture.
Departments like BBC Verify can only be an attempt to legitimise one version of the narrative. When their version of a story is found to be seriously inaccurate, they run the risk of looking stupid or incompetent.
All the great ‘news’ and ‘current affairs’ legacy-media corporations are biased. Even when the bias is not intentional, ‘how could they not be given the inevitable editorial selectivity involved in condensing an almost infinite amount of events-unfolding into a finite ‘news’ programme. Editorial selectivity means that some murders warrant weeks of agonising and outrage while others never get a mention – some war stories ‘trend’ and others fail to ‘capture the public imagination’ etc etc.’ https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining. Given its sheer size and state-backed imprimatur as the Great British bastion of media ‘impartiality’, the BBC has probably spread more tendentious ‘information’ around the globe these past 50 years than any other. It hasn’t exactly intended this but how could it do otherwise given its workforce of 25000 Leftys and 250 conservatives.
You lost me at BBC
How could the BBC possibly operate a neutral fact checking service when ideological bias is so entrenched with the organisation itself?
Every single BBC outlet or platform is constitutionally focused on advancing a progressive agenda. It’s not just news, it’s sport, drama, comedy, documentaries and everything else. A significant majority of BBC news items or broadcasts will include references to climate change, feminism, LGBTQ issues or racism, and 99.9% of the time with the endorsement of a Guardianesque perspective.
The other 0.01% only exists so it can be smugly brandished to ‘demonstrate’ the corporation’s neutrality when some pleb dares to question it.
It is biased, so is only too happy to come to the conclusion it is seeking. The car insurance story is a classic example: why even begin looking into it if the presumption of ‘racism’ was not already in the journalists’ minds? Actuaries are very good ‘fact checkers’ since getting things wrong through ideological bias of any kind could result in serious financial costs to their companies. The BBC however operates under no such restraint. This kind of manufactured misinformation is rife throughout the legacy media and is the root cause of public scepticism and outright distrust.
please can bbc verify verify whether men can be women?
I’m very proud to be able to say that, having cancelled my TV license in 2008, I haven’t been paying for any of this.
Somebody urgently needs to make a porn parody called “Who fks the Czech fkers?”
I’m obviously naive, but i thought BBC Verify was there to fact check other parts of the BBCs output or a rival news agency’s claims ie they exist as backup for sceptics. Reading this, it seems that they exist as rivals to, and replacements for, other sections of the BBC News. With their large budget, and cuts elsewhere I imagine they must be popular amongst their colleagues.
It’s curious that, in virtually all of the cases you mention, articles have been openly corrected as new information became available. That’s a lot better than the many uncorrected statements made by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Your penultimate paragraph gives the game away. You are upset because BBC Verify does not follow the party line of Reform UK. Thank heavens for that.
Skipping the current “President” in the US, his VP, and the current PM if the UK is a bit telling…
Why do you put “president” in inverted commas?
Probably because an incumbent nearing the end of his second term and suffering from dementia is inevitably a lame duck.
Lame duck? Obviously, by definition. So the answer to that is to elect a candidate who’s almost as old, and who suffers from severe cognitive impairment?
My favorite fact check of Trump was when he vowed to have a vaccine ready by the end of the year , and this was pronounced wrong, dishonest and inaccurate by the youthful Nostradamuses of the legacy press. Then there was the NYT checking the Libertarian candidate in 2016, and explaining to the world that the capital of Syria was Aleppo. ( Clue, it isn’t). And there was Snopes, explaining to us that eugenics was invented in America in the 1960s s by ( a very bad man whose name I forget). Clue, it was 1880 by Thomas Huxley, and seized on the far left Labour Party as a very worthy enterprise.
It was actually Francis Galton, not TH Huxley, who is recognised as the populariser of eugenics. Before WW2 it was embraced by people of all political persuasions. After WW2, the only people who still thought it was a good idea were the extreme right. That was largely a result of Hitler’s ‘experiment’, but also because advances in the science of genetics showed that it wouldn’t work.
Please try to get the history right.
You seem to be confusing politicians with state broadcasters. The two do different jobs, or hadn’t you noticed?
BBC Verify and other “fact-checking” operations are just a part of the legacy media’s campaign against news that end-runs its politicized and biased “gatekeeping” role. They want the Internet discredited or, better yet, silenced. Yes, there is misinformation on the Internet, but most people have so much experience filtering the legacy media’s own faulty and blazingly unfair news reporting they can easily winnow the wheat from the chaff.
Summary stunningly absent from this piece:
Almost all the errors are one ideological direction.
Very useful article, but it doesn’t really emphasise the true story – the BBC is implicitly and explcitly staing that before this ‘verify’ outfit BBC News reporting wasn’t as accurate as it should have been, and outside of this merry band of whizzkids still isn’t. “BBC Verify was born in an age of disinformation, in which “fake news” spread by platforms such as TikTok has eroded trust in “legacy media”” Surely the first job of every BBC newsroom is to get things right or explain what the problems of verification are. Setting up stories and badging them as properly verified implies that all the other BBC stories are not necessarily reliable or unbiased.
Having said that, it’d be interesting to see UnHerd’s take on bias in the rest of the news world; at least the BBC is giving it a go, even if rather poorly. GB News anyone?
I also wonder how accurate and unbiased our news was in the past compared to today; that false ‘racist attack’ story wouldn’t even have been a story at all in the days before the public were armed with video cameras in their phones.
It is so easy to lie with a camera. That’s the problem with video cameras. When one starts filming and when filming is ended makes a tremendous difference in the video recorded. That’s why integrity in journalism is so important. One must trust that film is not used to deliberately mislead. Unfortunately trust and journalism have become oxymorons.
The answer is defund the BBC
Meanwhile more than 100 members of BBC staff accuse the broadcaster of bias in favour of Israel in Gaza coverage in writing.
I recognized some time ago that the BBC had become left wing and biased. As such, the BBC has joined the rest of the mainstream media and I try to avoid them. It takes work and some money to find good sources that report the other side of an item. I have stopped watching BBC America because it has totally succumbed to DEI. As pointed out in this article it reports disproportionately on the Israeli-Hamas situation. The bias is towards Hamas. It may take up to 10 minutes of a 25 minute broadcast. People will be interviewed by a reporter who asks the same questions over and over again, receiving the same canned answers, and never asking the tough followup questions. Boring! I have written to the BBC, but of course, nothing happens. I also expect that the BBC executives are paid very high salaries, because they “have to attract the best people”. Hahahaha….
The BBC? So worried about misinformation but still happy to say that a rapist with a c**k and balls is a woman! Bless!
BBC is very selective in it’s targets. BBC has joined USA in a cold war mentality. The propaganda against China is obvious. A glaring example is BBC’s Beijing correspondent John Sudworth, for his many biased stories distorting China’s Xinjiang policies and COVID-19 responses. Sudworth has left the Chinese mainland and is now in Taiwan island after Xinjiang individuals said they plan to sue BBC for fake news.
From stigmatizing China as being the origin of the novel coronavirus to claiming Xinjiang’s cotton was “tainted,” Sudworth has participated in many of BBC’s notorious reports attacking China in recent years.
BBC adheres to ideological bias and continues to churn out false news to attack and smear China. And this if their right. But don’t believe BBC and verify are seekers of truth.
I have had the privilege of living on this planet for almost 70 years.
In that time I’ve been involved in, or intimately familiar with the details of, approximately twenty stories produced by either print or TV media.
In every single one of those stories when they were either printed, or aired, I saw at least one glaring error in the facts reported.
From the time they interviewed my father at a bus stop about commuter issues, and the chryon underneath his picture as they talked said he lived in the wrong community to an IRS expose that got the entire fundamental tax issue in question utterly wrong, I’ve never–ever–seen a reporter’s story, wherein I knew the facts personally, to be fundamentally accurate.
I would say to Unherd’s investigative reporters who found 5% of BBC Verify stories with material facts in error: Guys, you’ve not even scratched the surface.
One thing I think is rather astonishing of an organisation claiming to provide objective news is that it does not provide links to sources. That would enable us to ”verify” whether the BBC’s own reporting is accurate and impartial.
Is anyone really surprised? These are all propaganda sites, some less egregious than others, but their purpose is to sell something and they will make it up if they have too. And try to cover with six with this nonsense word salad they used to defend themselves. Also, the Chief Executive seems to have a rather checked past and has been called incompetent. But of course, these folks like Ms. Turness, always find an organization like the BBC, that is the nature of corporations at the moment. Even if you are totally incompetent, you will find a six plus figure job.
The main purveyors of disinformation are the media. I have long ago discounted any “fact-finding” claim by any media. After the 60 minutes debacles, it is apparent that the media make shit up to promote their agenda. I can imagine the pressure that is put on “news organizations and so called journalist” in today’s world.
They are nothing but spin factories and these “hard hitting investigative journalists” are nothing but bought shills typing out pap on their word processors especially if their asses don’t leave the comfort of their sanctuary. Pathetic and tragic.
My future vote will go to whichever political party commits to ceasing, on assumption to power, the massive government subsidy of the BBC via the licence ‘fee’ and placing it on a subscription footing forthwith. It is an evil organisation that has evolved into an unapologetic propaganda machine that is as unaccountable as it is egregious.
The very existence of Verify is testament to the apparent lack of trust that the BBC has in its own journalism. Couldn’t make it up.
All the ‘fact check’ journalism I’ve seen, especially but not only from the BBC, has been riven with confirmation bias. The funniest ones are when they report on paranoid conspiracy theories and procede to exactly replicate them
It’s also slightly idiotic to say ‘now I’m being more truthful than I normally am”
George Orwell’s 1984 novel had the Ministry of Truth. The BBC has BBC Verify. They’re one and the same. Orwell worked at the BBC. Connect the dots!
See Asserson.co.uk for the report on BBC bias.
So all those thousands of people dying in Gaza and Lebanon. Theyre doing it to themselves. It’s their OWN STUPID FAULT. Well,that’s a relief to know then. All that talk about Netanyahu and the IDF is “fake news”.
Just a silly thought. That car attacked by “right wing Nazi thugs”,it was a worrying serious crime when the occupiers of the car were thought to be so Asian Muslim ethnic origin but once it was established they were Eastern European it was “who cares”!
And quite right too. The East Europeans are way more creepy and sinister than our earlier waves of migrants. They look sulky and resentful,they look like axe murderers all of them,most of them their great granddads were highly likely to have been Nazis or joined em. They hang about in groups muttering incomprehensibly with nothing to do. Why are they here. They are horrible
All whilst shutting down HARDTALK !!
Is anyone in the least surprised? Journalists who regard the truth as sacred and who will never compromise about it could not possibly get a job at the BBC. The interview of new staff is mostly about being ‘right-on’ and anyone who isn’t simply isn’t employed. A move to ‘verification’ from ‘reporting’ at the Beeb doesn’t mean a sudden change from ‘woke’ to ‘crusader for truth’.
There’s no question that BBC Verify should be investigated by Ofcom. The only question is, why isn’t it? If any other news outlet had got so many, important stories wrong (those that could have, and probably did in some cases, get many people killed or injured) they’d taken off air immediately and issued a hefty fine. Let’s face it, BBC Verify is nothing more than a corporate-Leftist smokescreen that seeks to do the opposite of what it claims, spreading disinformation for political affect. The very second I heard that the BBC were launching ‘verify’, I turned to my wife with a wry look on my face and said, ‘well, finally we’ll get the truth then, won’t we’. Like me, a lot of people were more than a tad sceptical from the off. Just one more nail in the BBC’s coffin, I’m afraid. I’m personally only millimetres away from refusing to paying my TV license.
Ofcom is the same. Corporate-leftist
I lost faith in the BBC Verify early on when Marianna Spring launched her series ‘Marianna in Conspiracy Land’. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00238nv?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile).
According to this, the implicit message is that only the right believe in conspiracies as only right leaning cases are looked into.
I would love to have the BBC look into the following conspiracy theories;
* that the UK is systemically racist.
* that all right of center political views are “far right”.
* that anyone worried about the level of immigration is a xenophobe.
* the “patriarchy”.
* the gender pay gap.
* that only women are victims of domestic abuse and only men are the perpetrators.
* that men can become women.
* that no human life (aka babies) are harmed during an abortion.
* That praying within 200m of an abortion clinic is not a criminal offence.
* that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
* that UNRWA is a benign non-sectarian relief agency.
* that there is “nothing to see here” in the Biden lap top story.
* that there was Russian collusion with Trump in 2016.
* … more.. COVID? Take your pick!
Very well put! You’re list points up how very, very biased BBC Verify actually is. These two you mention would be great:
* that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
* that UNRWA is a benign non-sectarian relief agency.
To them I would add:
* Hamas Ministry of Health daily death toll figues
* The UN is a force for good in the world
But you really would have to drag Turness, Donnison, Spring and Co., kicking and screaming to investigate these. I’m sure they’d sooner resign!
here is a link to an article published on the BBC website on 9th January re Midwives by Verify staff without using the logo:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67732916
“BBC Verify analysis shows that the number of full-time equivalent midwife posts in England has gone up by 7% in the last decade.
In comparison, the overall NHS workforce has increased by 34%.
The country has a shortage of about 2,500 midwives, and maternity units are struggling with safety concerns.”
However the article does not mention that the number of births have fallen by 15% over the same period, so the ratio of midwives to births has improved. Still births have fallen.
BBC Verify is just a government agency tasked with censorship. There is no need to honestly search for solutions to the dilemma resulting from the limitation of every single one of us in time and space. No matter how knowledgable one is, what you don’t know is infinitely greater than what you do. The problem with knowledge is it fools you into thinking you know things you don’t. That’s why agencies of censorship are so pernicious. They are ignorant but lack wisdom to realize it.
That response seems to deny that any distinction exists between things that are true and things that are not. That is a viewpoint that’s common among Trump supporters. But it’s a view that’s incompatible with science. It’s ironical that the main way that such views are propagated is through that enormous scientific achievement, the world wide web.
BBC Verify was set up because of an unprecedented situation. Of course politicians and salespeople have always used selective statistics to further their aims. But never before have politicians systematically attempted to confuse truth and falsehood as a policy. This isn’t speculation -it’s been said quite explicitly -Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with s**t”. Putin is doing something similar.
This has given rise to deliberate lies on an a hitherto unimaginable scale. It takes specialist skills to detect videos and audio that has been generated by AI. That is why a verification unit is now essential for any responsible news organisation. They won’t be perfect but what matters is that they openly publish corrections when they get things wrong. Correcting mistakes is something that Mr Trump has never done.
Try looking for anything on sex and gender. You won’t find anything. Nothing to verify there
It’s not sensible to believe anything the BBC writes or says
It might be hard to justify but easy to explain. The decline of the BBC mirrors the decline of Britain.