Questions Are Being Asked About the BBC’s ‘Disinformation Reporter’

Fred Skulthorp has written an excellent piece in the Critic about Marianna Spring, the BBC’s ‘Disinformation Reporter’, pointing out that at least one colleague of hers has reservations about her reporting. Here’s how it begins:

Last Wednesday morning, the German police announced to the world they had foiled a far-right plot to take over the country. The apparent leader of the coup, a minor Aristocrat called Heinrich XIII, was arrested alongside 25 others including a celebrity chef.

That night Marianna Spring, the BBC’s ‘Disinformation Reporter’, took to News at Ten to tell the nation:

Whilst this group predates the pandemic, its audacious plot and its commitment to it perhaps goes hand in hand with the rise of disinformation about Covid-19 and the violent rhetoric that has accompanied that … The legacy [of the pandemic] and the conspiracy legacy that it leaves remains, and it can embolden these fringe groups in a way that just didn’t happen before and that’s really quite frightening.

The COVID-19 disinformation angle was a curious one in a story that has since emerged to be far more complex. Indeed, in deploying Marianna as the lead correspondent on the story, the BBC appeared to be the only ones especially keen to push it.

The group, unsurprisingly, believed some barmy things about not just the pandemic but pretty much everything else currently on the news agenda. Membership of the Reichsbürger, the dissident movement from which the coup emerged, had also risen by 4,500 to 21,000 since 2017.

The rest of her take was just bizarre — not least her implication that prior to the pandemic, mad people have never believed mad things and acted them out. At best, it was the sort of half-baked journalism hardly befitting the News at Ten. At worst, it was a tabloidy attempt to invoke a wider sense of paranoia about further violence in the wake of the “conspiracy legacy of the pandemic”.

I wasn’t surprised by the whole affair. I’ve followed Marianna Spring’s career at the BBC with acute frustration. I don’t doubt she has some talent as a reporter, but I have increasing concern about the way she has been managed at the corporation over the pandemic — and I am not alone.

The ‘Disinformation Unit’ she pioneered now has a deserved reputation both inside and outside the organisation for being a de-facto mouthpiece for the Government during those years. Watching Spring assert on the evening news that the events in Germany were more or less a consequence of “pandemic disinformation” made for uncomfortable viewing. Not least because Marianna and her team’s definition of “disinformation” has in the past appeared to implicate everyone from Peter Hitchens to an NHS doctor. What did she mean by it this time?