Given that the BBC places great store in having a ‘Verify’ unit to root out fake news emanating from other outlets, one might expect the corporation to be merciless on itself when it comes to sticking to the facts. Yet the roughly two million viewers who tuned into BBC1’s flagship lunchtime news yesterday were at risk of being deceived by misinformation every bit as disturbing as any of the stuff that Marianna Spring and colleagues unearth on far-right websites.

Hey @BBCNews guess what’s missing in this report?
H/t @oflynnsocial pic.twitter.com/RwGm1UT0eQ

— Rupert Myers (@RupertMyers) February 26, 2024

The item involved the story of what experienced BBC news anchor Ben Brown introduced as a ‘woman who livestreamed herself’ killing and dissecting a cat ‘before fatally attacking a man and leaving him to drown’.

She was called Scarlet Blake, he informed us. Brown then handed over to the equally experienced Duncan Kennedy outside Oxford Crown Court, where Blake was due to be sentenced. Kennedy regaled viewers with more details of the terrible things that ‘she’ had done. He reported that the prosecution had outlined how ‘she was obsessed with murder and sexual gratification’. Kennedy added that ‘she thought she’d got away with it’ but that a former partner had dobbed her in to police two years later. And that was that. A not insubstantial report lasting a minute and thirty-eight seconds came to an end.

On initial hearing, I thought I remembered the case as having involved a transwoman, i.e. a biological male, but figured this could not be the case because even the BBC would have clearly included that fact at some point in their broadcast report. They couldn’t possibly have left viewers believing that an adult human female had committed foul crimes when in fact a biological male had done so.

Yet a few seconds of online searching was sufficient to reveal that is exactly what the BBC had done. And remember, this was not on a fringe offshoot or late-night regional outlet staffed by young novices who might be at heightened vulnerability to falling into the grip of extreme ID politics. This was prime BBC1 lunchtime news staffed by some of the best editors, producers and reporters on the corporation’s books.

For the record, Scarlet Blake was born a male in China

For the record, Scarlet Blake was born a male in China, and went by the name Fangze Wang earlier in life. Perhaps given the depravity of the crimes committed it would have been reasonable to withdraw any presumption of good faith when reporting this person’s pronouns post-conviction and simply use male ones.

In any event, it beggars belief that at no point did either Brown or Kennedy flag up to their viewers the basic biological facts relating to Blake. A woman did this, they told us. But a woman did not murder Jorge Carreno or livestream the dissection of a cat. A biological male in the grip of typically male forms of violent criminal deviancy did all that.

For a broadcaster which seems more and more to be locked into an unwarranted messiah complex these days the lesson should simply be: BBC Verify, go and verify yourselves.