Former News Producer: BBC Doubling Down on Fact Checking Operations Is ‘Chilling’

A general view of BBC Broadcasting House, in central London on July 10, 2023. Lucy North/PA Wire

The BBC director general’s plans to “double-down” on its large disinformation operation Verify and to deploy it globally is “chilling,” according to a former news producer.

Speaking at a Royal Television Society event in London on Tuesday, Tim Davie delivered a wide-ranging speech on BBC funding reform with a commitment to expand on its disinformation operations.

“We will double-down on multi-media brands like BBC Verify and deploy it globally,” said Mr. Davie.

However, an independent watchdog run by former newspaper and BBC journalist David Keighley which has been monitoring bias at the public broadcaster for two decades, said that the expansion of Verify is one of “the most sinister developments to date.”

‘Address Growing Threat’

BBC Verify was created to “address the growing threat of disinformation and build trust with audiences through transparency” and originally consisted of 60 journalists, including Ros Atkins, the corporation’s analysis editor, and disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring.

It also has reporters who specialise in “climate disinformation” and “health disinformation.”

Last November the team was expanded. However there has been major criticism levelled at some of Verify’s fake news fact-checking credentials.

For example, earlier this month, independent journalist and researcher on anti-semitism, David Collier, accused BBC Verify of “parroting Hamas propaganda” for its reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict after it used “unreliable witnesses” that worked for “outlets connected to Hamas and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard.”

In response, the BBC stated that it “stood by its journalism” and rejected the allegations made in the piece.

BBC Bias

Mr. Keighley, managing director of News-watch, which has been tracking BBC bias for 25 years, told The Epoch Times that the “really chilling thing about it is that they don’t realise the bubble that they’re in.”

Mr. Keighley was also the senior publicist of BBC news and current affairs programmes before joining the breakfast television company TV-am, where he was director of public affairs for almost a decade.

BBC's first specialist disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring, attends the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards on March 24, 2023. PA Media

“They see this [Verify] now as a central mission of BBC News. This is the chilling aspect of it. They don’t see what they’re doing. They are choosing the issues they think are important to investigate and putting all their weight on that,” he said.

“If you look now at the BBC’s climate change section, it is propaganda, not journalism. It hasn’t been journalism, I would say now for the best part of ten—15 years,” he said.

“News operations should concentrate on getting the truth, getting facts, getting the balance. What the BBC is doing, and they won’t accept that they’re not doing this, but in certain areas, they have got their own prejudices, and they’re following a prejudiced agenda with Verify and leading the charge against those it says, is spreading disinformation,” he said.

“Most journalists working for the BBC, I am not saying they’re all political activists, but they are convinced that the left view of the world is the right view of the world,” he added.

News-watch monitors the BBC output in regular reports. One report examined “strong pro-Remain” bias at the BBC Radio 1’s flagship youth news programme “Newsbeat” in 2016.

Another analysis of the government’s Nationality and Borders Bill found that BBC news “skewed heavily toward that the new bill would deter genuine asylum seekers entering the UK.”

Mr. Keighley pointed to a shift within the BBC when it created The Trusted News Initiative in 2019 in what InfluenceWatch called “a coalition of left-of-centre media, social media, and technology companies with the “specific aims of flagging disinformation during elections,” and to ”also censor what the initiative deems is misinformation.”

Complaints

Clive Thorne, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property, told The Epoch Times that the “BBC needs to get its own house in order in terms of complying with its impartiality obligations” set out in its charter.

Mr. Thorne has published articles at the market-oriented, non-party political British think tank Politeia website on issues surrounding freedom of speech and the BBC.

“The way in which the BBC handles complaints isn’t really good enough,” he added.

“If you have a serious complaint, you have to go to something called the Executive Complaints Unit, under what is known as stage two of the Complaints Framework. And hardly ever does the BBC find against itself,” he said.

The Epoch Times contacted The BBC for comment.