Why I don’t trust the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative

You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing narrative on topics like lockdowns, Covid vaccines, electoral fraud, the Ukraine war and climate change. It was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cecil, a senior BBC executive who, in 2021, was part of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of ‘experts’ convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.

The TNI is currently embroiled in an anti-trust lawsuit in the US brought by various independent news publishers who have accused the BBC, Reuters, which Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, of conspiring with their TNI partners – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft – to suppress heretical content using techniques such as shadow-banning, de–platforming and manipulating search results. The plaintiffs argue that these high-profile, legacy media companies are abusing their dominance of the market-place to stop consumers deserting their ‘trusted’ brands for online upstarts. The defendants maintain that their only motives are safeguarding public health, protecting democratic elections, defending the West from its enemies and saving the planet.

I won’t comment on the merits of the lawsuit, but in the ongoing, titanic struggle between the mainstream media and alt-media, the former has taken quite a beating in the past week or so. I’m thinking of the reputational damage suffered by the BBC and its TNI partners due to their reporting of the explosion at the al-Ahli hospital. Within minutes, they faithfully regurgitated the propaganda of Gaza’s ministry of health that the hospital had been razed by an Israeli airstrike, killing several hundred civilians.