Why Should We Trust the BBC's Trusted News Initiative?

Most Daily Sceptic readers will have heard of BBC Verify. This is a group of BBC journalists who check stories to ensure they are factually correct because, as we all know, the BBC is ‘impartial’. From its start, BBC Verify had a slight whiff of something unpleasant when it was reported that a key employee, Marianna Spring, had once lied on her CV to get a job. However, that minor indiscretion doesn’t seem to the BBC to disqualify her as a ‘fact-checker’. I wonder whether BBC Verify was involved when a BBC foreign affairs correspondent almost gleefully reported that the evil Israelis had bombed a hospital in Gaza killing around 500 innocents? Of course, the story turned out to be complete nonsense – propaganda pushed out by Hamas on the gullible, Israel-hating BBC. In fact, a Hamas rocket aimed at Israel had misfired and a piece had landed in a hospital car park, causing unverified injury and loss of life. But we’ll never know the truth – especially if the rather dubious BBC Verify is involved.

But readers may not be aware of our national broadcaster’s involvement in what is called the Trusted News Initiative. Here’s the Trusted News Initiative’s explanation of what it does:

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a partnership, founded by the BBC, that includes organisations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, the Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, the Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.

TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation. By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.

As you’ll see, the Trusted News Initiative includes much of the mainstream media around the world, the largest media agencies as well as the main tech megacorporations. Let’s imagine just some of the supposed ‘disinformation’ the Trusted News Initiative has bravely tackled to bring us the mainstream media’s and tech mega-giants’ supposedly unbiased reporting:

The origins of COVID-19 – From early on, numerous online voices have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic which killed over seven million innocents originated from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They also argued that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, along with other labs around the world, was carrying out ‘gain of function’ research paid for by U.S. taxpayers as certain well-known figures in the U.S. healthcare establishment used foreign labs in order to circumvent a ban on ‘gain of function’ research in the U.S. This disinformation narrative was repeatedly attacked by members of the Trusted News Initiative who insisted that the COVID-19 virus evolved naturally and was mysteriously carried by a bat which travelled or was carried over 1,000 miles from its cave, without infecting anyone along the way, before it decided to land just around the corner from the Wuhan Institute of Virology which coincidentally was carrying out research, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, into bat viruses.
The safe and effective vaccines – Most of the members of the Trusted News Initiative have continually pushed the story that the inadequately-tested mRNA vaccines were ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ both in preventing COVID-19 infections and in preventing hospitalisation from serious adverse effects. We now know, in spite of the members of the Trusted News Initiative trying to pretend otherwise, that the safety data on the mRNA vaccines were highly contestable and that the vaccines were never even tested to see if they prevented asymptomatic COVID-19 infections. Moreover, increasing studies from around the world – Israel, Thailand, Germany – have suggested that for many age groups having the vaccines may have been more dangerous to people’s health than a COVID-19 infection as repeated mRNA vaccination may wreck the body’s natural immune system and the mRNA vaccines have been linked to a rise in heart problems – myocarditis and pericarditis – and possibly an acceleration in the growth of many life-threatening cancers.
Trashing Ivermectin – At the start of the pandemic many doctors were recommending an antiviral, ivermectin, produced by Merck. Ivermectin is out of patent and only costs around $1 to $2 for a course of treatment. However, Merck quickly developed an antiviral, Molnupiravir. Molnupiravir is supposedly a new drug and is therefore protected by patent and costs about $700 for a course of treatment. In June 2021 Merck signed a deal with the U.S. Government for $1.2bn for 1,700,000 courses of Molnupiravir. So Merck had quite a lot of cash riding on Molnupiravir’s success. Members of the Trusted News Initiative mostly ridiculed anyone proposing ivermectin by repeatedly referring to it as a ‘horse dewormer’. Yet prior to the pandemic over 3.7 billion doses of Ivermectin have been safely administered to humans over the last 40 or so years, something members of the Trusted News Initiative seem to have forgotten to mention while trying to discredit the cheap, out-of-patent ivermectin.

Perhaps the worst and most destructive misinformation spewed out at us by members of the Trusted News Initiative is its members relentless propagandising anthropogenic global warming (or climate change or global boiling or climate crisis or whatever it’s called this month) nonsense. There are several reliable individuals who have repeatedly exposed the utter tripe fuelling the global boiling cult. These include Tony Heller’s RealClimateScience, Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, Anthony Watts’s Watts Up With That?, the Daily Sceptic‘s Chris Morrison and my own modest contribution – the book There is No Climate Crisis.

So instead of me repeating here all the reasons why global boiling is Brobdingnagian-sized baloney, I’ll quote the Trusted News Initiative’s warning on why people like Tony Heller, Paul Homewood, Anthony Watts, Chris Morrison and myself are a danger to the future of the human race:

Whether it’s politicians, companies, or states, many actors have an interest in hindering the fight against climate change. And their power cannot be underestimated: some are going to great lengths to muddy the waters of public debate.

Maybe it’s a fossil fuel company pretending to be much greener than it actually is. Or perhaps it’s a petrostate, whose state media promote climate scepticism to their viewers.

Climate mis- and dis-information can take many shapes and forms – but what brings them all together is a fundamental distortion of facts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those of us who cover climate change for the BBC often find ourselves being accused of failing to abide by the very same principles our employer stands for: impartiality, neutrality, objectivity.

Why not hear from the other side, they ask, from those who don’t believe in climate change?

The answer is simple. Because the overwhelming majority of scientists (99.9% of them, according to this paper) are in agreement about the key facts of climate change: that it is real, that it is already happening, and that it is being driven by mankind.

What the world does to tackle climate change is a political choice, a debate for our audiences to engage in. Our role is to provide them with the facts they need to have informed conversations about the biggest challenge of our time.

This can involve reporting on or debunking falsehoods that emerge on any given day, but also producing content that audiences may find useful at any given time – like practical guides to convince climate deniers, or fact-checks of common climate myths.