BBC Verify has ten managers on its payroll costing a total of around £1 million a year. Safe from cuts…
Their salary bands put the total cost no less than £700,000 even if every one of them sat at the bottom of their band, rising to just over £1 million at the top.
Guido understands the highest paid Verify boss, the executive editor, is on up to £172,000. Coming in second is the head of statistics, on up to £165,000, who manages the Civil Service plants inside the BBC. Neither salary is published, because the BBC only discloses pay above £178,000…
That is on top of up to £480,000 spent on just four Verify correspondent roles. Guido’s moles say the unit has earned the nickname “Workshy Verify” among some staff internally. This comes as BBC News director Rachel Jupp announces a fresh wave of 100 more job losses to save £5.5 million. The top-heavy management layer at Verify looks set to escape the axe…
Guido revealed last week that Verify is actually hiring staff amid the job cuts. Unread, unwatched, and underworked…
The much maligned fact-checking service BBC Verify is expanding amid massive job cuts at the corporation. Ironclad…
The BBC is cutting up to 2,000 jobs, nearly one in ten of its staff, to save £500 million. At the same time BBC Verify has snuck out job ads for two new roles paying a combined £90,000: a senior data journalist and a “journalism researcher.” This follows previous expansion in salary costs for the large unit. Meanwhile all departments are being told they face cutbacks and need to tighten their belts…
Verify already has 95 staff. The brand was the pet project of former head of news Deborah Turness, who quit over the Panorama Trump edit scandal. Her brainchild is getting bigger…
The hiring raises some questions about new director of news Rachel Jupp, who has set out her stall on “being where our audiences are”. Media sources tell Guido that Verify stories are not well read, nor are its video productions well watched. At the BBC 550 jobs are going in the first round of cuts including around 200 in news. The often-wrong fact-checkers being protected is sure to dampen morale further at the corporation…
BBC Snoozify Verify’s live blog is winding down following the departure of former Head of News Deborah Turness, who launched the live service last June as a “an exciting step towards even greater transparency”. As soon as she was out the door, it was only a matter of time before the new leadership took a cleaver to it. Nobody reads it, and whenever it occasionally posts a story, it is a disaster. Don’t say Guido didn’t warn you…
The Times reports Lindsay McCoy, BBC Verify’s executive editor, gave staff the bad news in an internal memo:
“Unfortunately, the format hasn’t matched how people want to consume our work and it isn’t reaching the audience numbers we would like.
“As a result, we’ve taken the decision to focus our efforts where we can make the greatest impact. That means strengthening our presence on the main BBC News website and live page.”
At its peak, the overall BBC Verify team employed 60 people at a cost of £3.4 million. It remains to be seen what happens to the live blog staff…
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.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”
