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A little over a week ago, the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, wrote an article on the launch of “BBC Verify.”  We have followed the UK government’s advice as noted by FullFact.com’s ‘SHAREChecklist’ and noticed Turness had made a few errors and omissions. So, we have reproduced her article with some corrections.

Below is Turness’ corrected article (E&OE).  You can read her article on the BBC News website HERE.  We have left Turness’ original text in place and then crossed out errors and added omitted/corrected text as appropriate.  We have used a red font colour to note our supplementary text.

If our readers feel we have missed or incorrectly stated anything, please do let us know by noting it in the comments section under our article. Unfortunately, the BBC article does not facilitate comments from the public under its article but we can, at least, record any corrections you may have in ours.

For further information on the launch of BBC Verify read our article, ‘BBC wants to be the sole source of truth and it’s getting roasted for it’.

Explaining the ‘how’ – the launch of De-BBC Verify

By Deborah Turness, Central Entelligence Office, BBC Not the News published by British Brainwashing Corporation on 22 May 2023

In the early hours of Wednesday 3 May, video footage emerged showing what appeared to be two drones crashing into a dome of the Kremlin complex in Moscow. But was the video real or fake? Did this “attack” actually happen? And how could we tell? One rule of thumb is to not trust anything you see or read from the BBC without verifying it somewhere else.

The exponential growth of manipulated and distorted video means that seeing is no longer believing. Our news programmes are a testament to this.  And so, consumers tell us they can no longer trust that the video in their news feeds is real. Which is why we at the BBC must urgently begin to show and share the work we do behind the scenes, to check and verify select information and video content before it appears on our platforms, to a large degree using AI. And as AI weaponises and turbocharges the impact and consequences of disinformation, this work has never been more important.

All day, every day, the BBC’s news teams are using ever more sophisticated tools, techniques and technology to check and verify find videos like the Kremlin drone footage, as well as images and information, that do not align with our narrative. They do this to ensure our journalism reports meets the rigorous follow editorial standards the BBC is proud to uphold now well known for.

But, until now, that work has largely gone on in the background, unseen by audiences.

These same audiences are constantly bombarded with mis- and disinformation, and with fake images, including those generated by AI, from organisations associated with the Trusted News Initiative network. And they are telling us that amid this noise and sensationalism, they need to see our workings, so we can maintain, from our perspective, claw back the trust people have put had in the BBC for the last 100 years many years ago. People want to know not just what we know (and don’t know), but how we know it. In particular, people want to know what we know but are not reporting.  Unfortunately, we cannot report on these events.

And this is how our new brand, BBC De-Verify, has come into being.

We’ve brought together forensic corporate-funded journalists and expert talent other approved personnel from across the BBC, including our analysis reconstruction editor Ros Atkins and disinformation correspondent counter-narrative hunter Marianna Spring and their teams. We will take the utmost care to ensure only those who align with our narrative will be approved to join the team and make contributions. In all, BBC De-Verify comprises about 60 journalists who will form a highly specialised corporate operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips.

They’ll be fact-checking suppressing, verifying disapproving video, countering facts with disinformation, analysing reconstructing data and – crucially – explaining complex telling stories in the pursuit of manipulating the truth.

This is a different way of the same way we have been doing our journalism in the past. But now, we’ve built a physical space in the London newsroom, with a studio that, with the help of AI-generated content, BBC De-Verify correspondents and experts approved others will report from, transparently sharing their evidence-gathering version of events with our audiences. They will contribute to News Online, radio and TV, including the News Channel and our live and breaking streaming operation, both in the UK and internationally.

BBC De-Verify will be home to specific selected corporate-funded expertise and technology. But I want the principle of transparently explaining the “how” behind our journalism to be shared by every journalist in the BBC – and thank you to those who are experimenting with new ways to do that.

“If you know how it’s made, you can trust what it says” – that’s what our audiences have told us. Trust is earned and transparency will help us earn it.  Unfortunately, we aren’t able to provide transparency so our audiences will just have to trust us.

Featured image: FullFact.com SHAREChecklist (far left), created image, without using AI, using FullFact claim summary format (left) and BBC De-Verify logo (right)