By David Rose. American Conservative. (Image: Unsplash)
e Daily Telegraph on October 18 reported that since 2018, dozens of British civil servants had been seconded to the BBC for periods of three to six months, during which they wrote news stories and advised on “high-impact, sensitive topics” such as Channel migrant crossings in small boats from France and the Covid pandemic. Their work appeared in stories published on the BBC News website, sometimes under the auspices of BBC Verify, supposedly an exemplar of rigorous standards whose stated mission is to “counter disinformation” and fact-check untruths. Their salaries were paid by the government whose record they were charged with checking. Nobody told the audience.
Within two days of the story breaking, the BBC suspended the scheme, insisting that all editorial decisions are made by its own journalists. It remains the case that for eight years, the department responsible for immigration policy had staff inside the national broadcaster’s newsroom, “verifying” its coverage of immigration.
Another recent report from the Telegraph: One fine day last July, two police officers knocked at a house in the northeast of England. The woman who answered, Holly Passmore, is 44, the mother of two children, and a graduate student of Holocaust history at the University of Haifa. She had recently returned from a press trip to Israel, and it was this that the officers wished to discuss. They did not mention her health, although the document that had sent them to her door described her as having mental health problems and being “vulnerable to negative influence.” They asked why she was interested in “Jewish issues,” given that her neighborhood “is not a Jewish area,” and whether she had ever been to Auschwitz. They told her she might be “at risk of manipulation.”
Passmore had been referred to Prevent, the counterterrorism program under which the British state identifies people supposedly at risk of being drawn into extremist activity.