One decision for the BBC’s next Director-General and Head of News to decide is whether to continue the Verify project. Over 60 staff at a salary cost to the licence-fee payer of £3.4 million…
Verify was the brainchild of now-outgoing Head of News Deborah Turness, who launched it in 2023 as a “new brand to address the growing threat of disinformation and build trust with audiences by transparently showing how BBC journalists know the information they are reporting.” This was Turness’ first major intervention and one she backed for the three years after in the face of some internal opposition. One BBC source said at the launch:
“She’s clearly bet the farm on this Verify stuff, which a lot of us are a bit sniffy about… Classic BBC, reinventing the wheel so we can say we’ve done it rather than because it’s new or good.”
Nick Robinson said the project wsa all about Turness’ belief that ‘building trust’ “matters above all else…And the way to establish trust with the audience is to show more of your workings.” Think we know how that’s gone…
BBC Verify has fired up its live blog this morning, which Turness launched this year in a sign of her dedication to the brand. A refresh at the broadcaster could prove the right time to take the failed project out back…
The fact-checking ‘specialists’ at BBC Verify were forced to delete a “thoroughly wrong” article accusing car insurance companies of racism, according to a whistleblowing report published in the Telegraph. The report reveals how the self-appointed arbiters of truth (a 60-strong team which costs over £3 million a year) wrote about a so-called “ethnic penalty” within the insurance firms, with the story appearing on BBC Breakfast, the One and Six O’ Clock News, Radio 1, Radio 5 Live and on TikTok. The article remained online for a whopping six months before it was finally deleted…
Michael Prescott, former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, wrote in his internal memo:
“BBC audiences were being encouraged to believe Britain’s major insurers were, intentionally or unintentionally, racist, and charging high prices to customers based on their ethnicity… For me, it was hard to imagine UK FTSE boards or executive teams conceiving of or sanctioning a policy to charge ethnic minority customers higher prices.”
Prescott found the story “so unlikely” he demanded an internal review, which exposed “multiple serious editorial problems“. When the BBC top brass were informed of all this, only the direct references to a phantom “ethnic penalty” were cut. Eventually, it was determined the whole article was so bogus it was quietly removed. No one was disciplined. This is the handy work of a team which, when not ‘fact checking’ the existence of dancers in bikinis, is busy congratulating itself on social media for exposing fake news and preaching about how “the truth matters”…
It’s shoulder to the wheel time for BBC Verify’s more than 60 staff on another busy Monday: their first effort to ‘debunk’ disinformation today confirms a picture of a scantily-clad dancer at Donald Trump’s Halloween party is indeed real. The fact-checking ‘specialists’ over at Broadcasting House have, using their advanced verification techniques, “debunked” claims the photo was taken two years ago at Dua Lipa’s bash. Thanks for that…
“The Halloween bash was attended by the US president and several top administration officials, receiving extensive media coverage. We’ve managed to identify where in Mar-A-Lago the image was taken and verified a different video of the dancer at the party.
The BBC is now refusing to reveal how many staff make up its Verify team and how much they are paid. Something to hide?
The corporation is now refusing freedom of information requests on the team numbers and salary because figures “with an increased headcount and combined salary will potentially identify the salary of a small number of new recruits. Therefore, if the BBC disclosed this information it would contravene data protection principles.” Bogus…
The salary costs for BBC Verify are at least £3.4 million and have been rising over the past two years. The value of that team to the taxpayer is not hard to verify…
BBC Verify’s live service is busy “debunking” obviously fake AI images. They’re at it again…
The little-read live service today informed viewers that a “widely circulated” image of “European leaders” sitting in a White House corridor meekly is fake:
“First, take a look at the legs – artificial intelligence often struggles with limbs.
In this case, there seems to an extra pair of legs next to French President Emmanuel Macron.
If we zoom in, we can also see the knees of the woman in red seem to blend into each other and there appears to be an extra high-heeled shoe further down.
The pattern on the floor is also inconsistent – another typical issue with AI-generated images.
There’s an odd blue panel at the front of the image and then the pattern seems to become irregular the further away they are from the viewer.
The women in the picture also bear no resemblance to either Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni or European Commission head Ursula Von Der Leyen.
Their clothes are entirely different from what the real leaders were wearing at the White House.”
Verify staff have form on this – talk about overkill. Other “fact checks” were already done by American news websites 18 hours ago…
The image hasn’t been widely circulated and it is obviously AI-generated – no one character apart from Macron has a passing resemblance to any European leader. BBC Verify staff costs: £3.4 million…
Guido’s coverage of BBC Verify and the launch of his very own Verify Unit have clearly caused shockwaves over in Broadcasting House – it has started a live feed. The Verify unit is now trying to prove to licence fee payers that its staff are doing work…
At 09:49 the Verify “Live editor” (who makes no mention of such on her public profiles) announced that the team had “just finished our morning meeting.” Early start…
The editor added that on the agenda was fact-checking Trump and “geolocating and chronolocating videos to track the scale of the Los Angeles protests.” What that means is checking where and when a video the team saw on X may have happened…
To that end the BBC has “verified footage of protesters smashing windows at the LAPD headquarters – one of them can be seen using a skateboard. This is most likely to have been filmed on Sunday evening as it’s nighttime footage which first appeared online on Monday morning.” Fascinating…
The live feed, in which each different Verify hack has a go, features fascinating behind-the-scenes details. In the section titled “How does BBC Verify authenticate videos and photos?” it is explained to readers that if a “clip has not previously appeared in search results that it a good indication that it is new.” Total Verify staff: 61…
In a short piece about Trump, apparently top of the agenda for Verify today, the BBC manages to misspell Colombia as “Columbia.” Total Verify staff costs: £3.4 million…
As this story goes to pixel BBC Verify’s new live feed has 3,000 live viewers, while the BBC’s video updates on Greta Thunberg being given sandwiches by the IDF has 20,000. Uphill battle…
Starmer insisted his chances of leading the country are not diminishing. He told reporters during his visit to McLaren:
“No, no, no. I’m very happy to be out and about this morning, not talking about the internal politics of the Labour party, but talking about young people.”
