Here we go again.
BBC News CEO Deborah Turness writes:
The exponential growth of manipulated and distorted video means that seeing is no longer believing. 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 information and video content before it appears on our platforms. And as AI weaponises and turbocharges the impact and consequences of disinformation, this work has never been more important.
The first two sentences are the only parts I can agree with. Soon enough, we will only be able to trust our own firsthand lived experience seen with our own eyes, as truth. Even that may be manipulated and distorted over time, with augmented reality and technology that has yet to come into being.
BBC Verify will be home to specific 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.
Note how the BBC is working the trust angle. The word ‘truth’ is only mentioned once:
They'll be fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and - crucially - explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.
This verify venture will be torn to shreds as their love of fact-checking is turned against them to obliterate whatever slithers of credibility the BBC still has amongst die-hard believers.
Half of writing history is about hiding the truth. The same goes in real-time for the legacy media.
I eagerly await normies to tell me that “this has been verified by the BBC.” To which I will respond “who verifies the verifiers?” They’ll mutter something about trusted verified sources, and the dance continues.
Orwell’s instruction manual novel continues to ‘inspire’ totalitarianism and keep us safe…
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down.
He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past — for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive? - 1984, page 42, Chapter 2.
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BBC Verifiably Trustworthy?