BBC Verify is in retreat. Last June the Beeb launched the ‘Verify Live blog’ as part of its push for ‘greater transparency’. But already the blog has gone quiet. This morning the Times reported that Verify’s executive editor has emailed staff to announce that the blog had been ‘put on pause for the last few weeks’ and would not be restarted. Verify lives on in a neutered form within the wider BBC News website.
Mourning its loss, the Reality Check team took a look at Verify’s greatest hits…
Race claims
Perhaps their most inflammatory mistake was to state, wrongly, that during the disturbances around the country in the wake of the Southport stabbings, a group of ‘angry white men’ in Hull had ‘surrounded and attacked a car with men of Asian heritage inside’. The video they cited as evidence for this claim showed the men inside the car – but Verify had to wait for Humberside police to point out to them that they were in fact Eastern European before correcting the article.
Given the scale of destruction and violence which followed the Southport atrocity, it is a small miracle that nobody was murdered in the disturbances. Rapidly disseminating false narratives of interethnic violence are exactly what BBC Verify should have been stopping, not spreading.
Ethnic insurance premiums
Another racially inflammatory claim made by BBC Verify was that insurers were charging an ‘ethnicity penalty’ in racially diverse areas, a claim they would later withdraw as the article did not ‘explain clearly and fully enough that we had not established why premiums were higher (causation rather than correlation)’.
The allegation that Britain is ‘structurally racist’ is spread so often now that it is easy to forget just how incendiary it is. To intimate that there is some sort of conspiracy among British insurers to discriminate against non-white people – and that they do this despite it being against their commercial interests, because they are so passionately prejudiced – is an extraordinary claim. It justifies a brand of racial politics which casts all non-white people as oppressed and white people as their oppressors. It is a real example of spreading misinformation which could foment racial division.
Gaza
The BBC’s problem with accurate coverage of the Gaza conflict is well documented (only 4 per cent of British Jews polled in 2023 agreed with the statement ‘Overall I am satisfied with the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict’).
BBC Verify was no exception to the broader inability to provide balanced reporting on the issue. As an example, one article verifying events around aid convoy deaths quoted Mahmoud Awadeyah saying ‘Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived… Israelis purposefully fired at the men’. They forgot to mention that Awadeyah worked for an Iranian news agency, Tasnim, which is owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Deadly drugs
Are Chinese scammers using a drug called ‘devil’s breath’ to put elderly victims into a state of pliability and take their valuables? Verify were happy to repeat that claim, despite admitting there was no firm evidence. The former head of the drugs intelligence unit at the Forensic Science Service, Dr Les King, believes the idea that devil’s breath is being used this way is little more than an urban myth.
This theory can be debunked with simple common sense: if there really was a drug that allowed strangers to momentarily incapacitate you in the street, it would be an extremely powerful tool for criminals and be used frequently to get people to drain their bank accounts.
Farm tax
When the BBC verified Rachel Reeves’s claims on her family farm tax, they confused hectares for acres and forgot to say that an ‘independent expert’ they cited, Dan Neidle, had been a Labour activist. Neidle claimed that as few as 500 farms would be impacted by the changes to inheritance tax.
The trouble really started for Verify when Starmer cited this figure at the G20 summit in Rio De Janeiro. BBC Verify deleted the sentence saying it would be as few as 500 without highlighting that the article had been amended. The BBC says the figure ‘was taken out for brevity as it was repetitive’.
Marianna Spring’s CV
The purest expression of BBC Verify’s hypocrisy came when we found out that its most prominent public face, Marianna Spring, had lied on her CV. The New European dug up a CV she had used while applying for a job in 2018, where she claimed that she had worked on the BBC’s foreign coverage of Russia during the 2018 world cup alongside Sarah Rainsford. Spring was then subjected to a fact checking of her own, by the editor making the hiring decision, who found out that Spring had only met Rainsford a few times in social situations. Spring apologised for this incident, but has continued in her position as the BBC’s ‘social media investigations senior correspondent’ (assuming you can trust the accuracy of her LinkedIn profile).
In 2024, investigative journalist David Rose’s analysis of Verify’s errors found that of the 200 stories it published between its launch in May 2023 and October 2024, 12 had been corrected, clarified or withdrawn.
That’s a pity because, in spite of all these errors, and the apparent ideological bias of BBC Verify, the underlying logic of having a service that exposes faulty logic and false narratives as they happen is still sound. ‘Disinformation’ does exist and is a problem on social media, and indeed in traditional media.
Perhaps, though, the BBC has realised that verification is a basic – and key – part of all journalism rather than its own specialism. A return to the basic reporting of facts without ideology can only be a good thing for Aunty.
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