From The Daily Sceptic
By SHIRAZ AKRAM
In 2017 the BBC announced its intention to assemble a dedicated team “to fact check and debunk deliberately misleading and false stories masquerading as real news”. News chief James Harding proclaimed that the Reality Check team would be “weighing in on the battle over lies, distortions and exaggerations”. Harding continued: “The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either.” Harding goes further to say the corporation had been inundated by news in 2016 because the world was “living in an age of instability”.
It appears that the BBC has not coped particularly well with this excess of news and the methods employed by the Reality Check team have not generated the desired outcome. According to data compiled by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the BBC has experienced a decline in public trust from 75% to just 55%, with other mainstream TV broadcasters and print news suffering a similar decline over the same period, from 2018-2022. Further to this, the most recent global annual report published by the Edelman Trust Barometer placed the U.K. in 26th position, ahead of only South Korea and Japan in terms of public faith in media. The survey clearly tells us that the U.K. remains one of the countries with the lowest faith in media.
So what is driving this decline in trust? Is fake news to blame? Or, paradoxically, could the efforts of the BBC to counter such stories be exposing its own limitations? A typical example of how BBC Reality Check chooses to ‘weigh in’ is illustrated in this 2022 report, ‘Does video show Russian prisoners being shot?‘ The report is unable to provide sufficient evidence to ‘debunk’ the authenticity of the footage, which, the BBC states, “has been claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoners of war”. Instead, it offers the reader a discourse, the content of which is clearly riddled with omission, selection and presentation bias. The report reads like a crude attempt to defend a narrative, rather than an objective attempt to elucidate a news story.
Consider this shocking statistic: only two of every 10 people in the U.K. feel that the news media is “independent from undue political or Government influence most of the time”. This ranks us 16th among the 24 nations surveyed, on a par with Romania.
I do not mention this to slight other nations, but to illustrate the point that our much vaunted media landscape is not the envy of the world as we are often led to believe.
Against this background, with such a prolonged and substantial decline in trust, what action is our national broadcaster taking to rebuild it? One might expect the BBC to reflect on its output, a period of introspection perhaps, an honest assessment of mistakes that have been made, a promise to learn from them and do better in the future. But no – the BBC has concluded that the problem is you: your inability to separate fact from fiction and your inability to appreciate the hard work that goes into getting the truth to your television.
So in order to help us, the BBC has a launched a new initiative, BBC Verify, “a new brand within our brand” aiming to “pull back the curtain on our journalists’ investigative work and introduce radical transparency”.
Deborah Turness, the Chief Executive of BBC News and Current Affairs, writes:
The exponential growth of manipulated and distorted video means that seeing is no longer believing. Consumers tell us they can no longer trust that the video in their news feeds is real. Which is why we at the BBC must urgently begin to show and share the work we do behind the scenes to check and verify information and video content before it appears on our platforms. All day, every day, the BBC’s news teams are using ever more sophisticated tools, techniques and technology to check and verify videos like the Kremlin drone footage, as well as images and information… but, until now, that work has largely gone on in the background, unseen by audiences.
The implication being presented here is that the BBC’s output is not at fault, but it is our perception of its output that is defective and BBC Verify is designed to correct our misconceptions. It is with circular, or perhaps spurious, reasoning that the BBC chooses not to report on its own decline in trust and then circumvents any discussion of this fact by creating a unit to verify the trustworthiness of content available on other platforms.
Turness kindly provides us with a link to “give people a taste of what Verify will be doing, day in, day out”. The video, presented by BBC Verify editor Ros Atkins, analyses footage of the apparent attack on the Kremlin and one can assume that this is the best current example of the BBC’s forensic capabilities. I would urge readers to view this report and, like the roof of the Kremlin, prepare not to be blown away!
We are informed that BBC Verify will foster the investigative skills and open source intelligence capabilities of around 60 journalists and experts including the specialist ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring.
Marianna helps us in the fight for identifying the perpetrators of misinformation online by listing the “seven types of people who start and spread falsehoods”.
Interestingly, Marianna lists politicians, jokers, scammers, conspiracy theorists, insiders, celebrities and even your relatives as people to be wary of, but fails to acknowledge the role of journalists in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. This is despite contemporary research informing us that British people have among the lowest level of trust in journalists, with only 37% of those surveyed saying that they trusted them, versus a global average of 47%. The report states: “That might indicate that developed countries either have people who are more prone to trusting conspiracy theories or they are experienced enough to know when journalists might be lying.”
The BBC offers no evidence that the former theory rather than the latter is more probable, but it is nonetheless working hard to push the former. A demonstration of this push is apparent in the publicity material for Marianna Spring’s podcast series Marianna in Conspiracyland.
The press release for episode six (airs June 19th Radio 4) states: “Marianna is uniquely equipped to navigate Conspiracyland, having found herself on the frontlines of the battle of online disinformation and hate since those early days of the pandemic. She herself has become a frequent target of this movement.”
Does the movement in question include the eminent doctors and scientists whose voices have been censored and ignored by the mainstream?
Will Marianna act impartially, exercise objectivity and engage with these experts? Will she discuss the substantial body of research that counters the mainstream pandemic and vaccine narrative? Will she detail how our Government delayed the release of statistics revealing that “for healthy 40-49 year-olds almost one million booster shots were required to prevent one ‘severe’ hospital admission”? Or the freedom of information releases from Japan and Australia revealing that vaccine trial data indicated widespread multi-organ bio-distribution of vaccine lipid nano-particles? This was known to authorities but not revealed and it runs counter to assurances given to the public at the time.
Surely, this knowledge is essential to obtain informed consent, especially from those at less risk from infection.
Legitimate concerns of deficiencies within the vaccine trials, regulatory failures and widespread data misrepresentation have been either censored or forced to the periphery of debate. It seems improbable that Marianna will take part in any substantive discussion on these issues, as she has already announced her intention, namely to construct a tenable narrative that links the “growing U.K. conspiracy movement and alternative media” to foreign, far-Right groups and ‘hate’.
To appreciate the ultimate purpose of this podcast and the underlying intention of BBC Verify, we must refer back to James Harding’s comment in 2016 when he intimated that the BBC was unable to fulfil its desire to “edit the internet”. Since then, much has changed; mechanisms that curtail the exchange of information between law-abiding citizens are now well established via the Trusted News initiative (TNI).
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a partnership founded by the BBC in 2019. According to the press release:
TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.
The public interest argument presented is that the TNI is essential “to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy”.
A very basic question regarding this initiative by the BBC remains undetermined, namely: by what authority does the BBC exercise the power to create the TNI? The BBC Charter clearly states: “The BBC must be independent in all matters concerning the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes, particularly as regards to editorial and creative decisions… and in the management of its affairs.”
The charter makes no exception to this rule. One cannot be “independent in all matters” whilst also engaging in discussions about media content with a vast network of international news providers and social media platforms. Currently the partners are listed as: AP, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, the Hindu, Microsoft, Reuters and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and the Washington Post.
When our national broadcaster creates an international media partnership whose collective perspective is formed through the lens of official guidance then it becomes less able to fulfil its democratic function: to hold officialdom to account. This partnership makes a mockery of the notion of media plurality and the damage to our democratic values is confounded by its inconspicuous nature.
The editorial independence of the BBC also comes into question when it defines health disinformation as any view that runs counter to official guidance. By taking this stance it becomes unable or unwilling to act as an arbiter of truth in its own right. If the BBC only defines truth via the diktats of Government agencies then its role becomes that of an intermediary, like an arm of Government, acting in a similar fashion to a state broadcaster.
For a damning example of how the TNI creates bias within our media, listen to the story of Mr. John Watt outlined in this video.
His experience of severe vaccine injury is purged from the internet by multiple platforms. Consequently, his voice and access to communications via the internet are restricted. Of equal importance, a challenge to the unscientific mantra of ‘safe and effective’ is removed from the discourse. John’s story is not disinformation and this type of censorship acts in opposition to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 is clear: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
The question of whether media platforms have the right to censor speech and ban people from communicating will become highly irrelevant once the Online Safety Bill and the EU Digital Services Act become law. Once this happens, Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights looks set to be of limited help.
The BBC should not be coordinating a publicity campaign that falsely implies the only speech these laws will affect are those of far-Right groups, purveyors of ‘hate’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’.
The public deserve a more thorough analysis of how the proposed limits to their communication will remove an essential balance within our society. When diverse voices are supressed, truth and transparency are often the first victims. It is this suppression of ‘unapproved’ viewpoints that has fuelled the rise in alternative media. If the BBC is to regain trust, it should set a path to a return to impartiality.
Shiraz Akram is a member of the Thinking Coalition, a pro-liberty group, highlighting and questioning Government overreach.
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