When Tim Davie, the former BBC director-general, announced the expansion of BBC Verify, the organisation’s external fact-checking branch, last May, he claimed it would ‘nurture trust’ among readers, watchers and listeners of ‘the world’s most trusted news provider’. How did Verify get on?
Well, after making misleading claims about racially motivated attacks in the wake of the 2024 Southport stabbings, wrongly claiming that car insurers were charging an ‘ethnicity penalty’ for drivers, and citing a journalist employed by an Iranian news agency owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps for commentary on the conflict in Gaza, the credibility of Verify, as well as its importance, was truly diminished.
Less than a year after Davie’s plan to expand the operation, BBC Verify’s live blog was shut down and its role in the organisation minimised. How could BBC readers’ trust in Verify get any lower?
On Sunday evening, an investigation from the Telegraph revealed that civil servants had been seconded to and worked on BBC News and BBC Verify stories about small boats, net migration and election debates.
The scheme, which took civil servants from the Government Statistical Service, had been running since 2018 and sought applicants to ‘advise on the interpretation and presentation of statistical claims’; ‘help journalists find the right data source and come to conclusions supported by the evidence’; and ‘promote good statistics and statistical thinking to journalists.’
The BBC said that the secondees were not allowed to write copy, but their contributions could be used to ‘scrutinise the current government, as well as all political parties’. Given the notion of political impartiality written into the Civil Service Code, the idea that civil servants contributed to BBC journalism which scrutinised parties is eyebrow-raising, to say the least.
In the time since Davie’s pronouncement that BBC Verify would go global, The Spectator’s Reality Check has debunked myths about the Chancellor, our energy system, net zero, dodgy academics and migration numbers to name a few. All without government minders.
Only after the Telegraph revealed this did the BBC suspend the scheme. Will BBC Verify continue to limp on after yet another miscalculation?
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