If you were told that North Korea has civil servants working and writing for the country’s largest and ‘independent’ fact-checking agency, you would probably nod in agreement. Well, this is the case in the UK.
The BBC now admits this itself:
… the government contractor who described how they had drafted text for the news website …
In other words: a seconded civil servant himself described how he had drafted text for the BBC’s news website.
It was the British newspaper The Telegraph that exposed the scheme on 17 October. Journalist Samuel Montgomery documented that civil servants had been seconded to the BBC’s editorial department – including BBC Verify, the media giant’s own fact-checking service. There, they were involved in fact-checking, writing news stories and working on politically sensitive issues.
The very next day, the BBC put the scheme on hold.
Two days after the initial revelation, Montgomery was able to reveal that the BBC was not alone. Civil servants had also been working within the editorial teams at ITV and Channel 4 – including during British election campaigns.
The Telegraph reports:
A senior researcher from the ONS (Office for National Statistics, the UK’s equivalent of Statistics Norway), who was seconded to Channel 4 News during the 2017 general election, also stated that she was responsible for fact-checking.
This makes it impossible to describe the arrangement solely as passive advice. A civil servant had been given responsibility for fact-checking within a media organisation that is itself supposed to carry out such checks.
A civil servant himself describes how he assessed the credibility of political election pledges whilst working within a news organisation during the election campaign:
I spent much of my time each day investigating election pledges and assessing their credibility and rationale using data.
Apply this to the Norwegian context: imagine a Labour Party (Ap) bureaucrat working within one of the country’s largest newsrooms during the election campaign, assessing the credibility of Jonas Gahr Støre’s election pledges.
Would we still call this an unproblematic separation between the state and the press?
ONS states that the purpose was:
… to advise and assist journalists and producers with the collection, presentation and interpretation of statistics and data, and for no other purpose.
This admission highlights the contradiction The Telegraph is attempting to document. The official description is rather narrow, whilst the civil servants’ own descriptions include fact-checking, assessing election pledges, conducting interviews and working on specific reports.
All this has been happening behind the scenes whilst the very same media organisations and fact-checkers have wrongly conveyed to the public that they were ‘independent’.
This is not just any media scandal. The revelation undermines the very notion of a free and independent press and fact-checking: civil servants have been working within some of the UK’s most important newsrooms and participating in fact-checking and journalistic work.
Sensitive topics
Among the topics on which what might be called the ‘Ministry of Truth’ had a leading hand were, amongst others, Covid-19, Keir Starmer’s election pledges on student loans, crime statistics relating to crime and ethnicity, and small-boat migration.
The UK and France have extensive shared interests in the field of migration, and the authorities in both countries have for years been admitting far more immigrants than they are able to integrate, whilst the media gloss over the crime this entails. Now we may know why – at least in the UK.
Whilst the scandal surrounding the government-employed fact-checkers was exploding back home in the UK, BBC Verify itself was actively involved in covering the violent riots in France.
The reality is that the violence, looting and burning barricades are being driven by radical left-wing groups and poorly integrated immigrants from MENA countries in the suburbs – the latter incited by the far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI), according to Emmanuel Macron in his speech on Sunday, in which the President described it as an attempt to ‘overthrow the Republic’.
So how did the BBC fact-check these politically explosive events in France?
In the free press and on social media, the BBC is accused of downplaying the violent unrest, and of describing it as largely peaceful demonstrations and student protests centred on the underfunding of schools.
This makes sense now that we know that fact-checkers and the mainstream media are, in fact, not ‘independent’, but part of a regime one might think belonged in North Korea.
It does not help matters that the UK has seen a massive increase in recorded arrests for free speech offences in recent years. This peaked in 2023 with 12,183 arrests, which equates to around 33 arrests per day.
The combination of state infiltration of the media and a witch-hunt against those who often merely ‘have the misfortune’ to speak the truth can be terrifying in broad daylight.
Is there cause for concern in Norway?
This is clinically similar to the kind of reporting we see here in Norway. Could it be that we have a similar level of state control here?
Rainer Prang, who has worked for NRK for 20 years, pointed out on Facebook a few days ago that the French school system is not, in fact, underfunded, as it ranks above the OECD average. He points out that the problems in schools are due to teachers burning out because they are unable to bring young people from MENA countries into line.
He believes the press is lying about France, and concludes with this:
The disinformation we are witnessing regarding domestic and international affairs is harmful to Norwegians.
That is precisely why press subsidies should be scrapped and NRK wound up.
Another former NRK employee, Anders Magnus, questions whether we can trust the press, and reports from the inside. He recounts how he himself was censored by the state broadcaster. He, too, highlights events that in many ways resemble the riots in France, but which he believes were not covered accurately whilst he was NRK’s correspondent in the US – namely the BLM protests. He writes in *Aftenposten*:
Nor was there much enthusiasm for reports on how rowdy and violent the left-wing Black Lives Matter demonstrators were behaving in many parts of the US. The focus was supposed to be on police violence against Black people.
Cries are coming from within – when will those on the outside react?
How can those who censor claim they merely want to save democracy, when we cannot even speak the truth before retirement age? Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy. This irony weighs heavily on us.
NRK and Faktisk.no
Faktisk.no appears to be based on the same idea as BBC Verify. In both cases, a public service broadcaster has been involved in setting up a fact-checking body which critics accuse of ‘patting each other on the back’.
The difference is that the situation in Norway is potentially even more problematic, as Verdens Gang AS, Dagbladet AS (Aller Media), TV 2 AS, Amedia AS and Polaris Media ASA have also joined the team.
The reason I believe it is worse is that if the media are to call themselves independent, they cannot at the same time be so closely intertwined when it comes to ‘what is actually true’.
Another reason why this is a serious matter is that Faktisk.no relies on BBC Verify for its fact-checks – which we now know is by no means independent.
Faktisk’s education division is called Tenk. It has developed a teaching programme for lower secondary and upper secondary schools.
To teach pupils ‘who they should listen to’, to use their own words, in relation to information about the protests in France, and to avoid starting to believe in ‘conspiracy theories’, the advice is: ‘Use several independent sources before forming an opinion’.
And who do you think is listed amongst the few “people they should listen to”? The answer is BBC Verify.
Firstly, it is not true that they use ‘multiple sources’, when Faktisk.no provides them with several sources that are, in reality, linked together and rely on one another for fact-checking. Consequently, they quite rightly end up with several names for the sources they’ve used, and whilst this looks good, it’s actually a single entity.
It’s also completely wrong when they call them ‘independent’; we know that now.
This is the next generation being downright tricked into becoming particularly poor at source criticism – by Faktisk.no.
And if one ventures outside this single entity – which is the state-sanctioned ‘truth’ – across several states, which mistakenly teach us that they are a diverse whole, we see that one is met with relentless smear campaigns in which all the major media outlets ‘are mindful of their responsibility’.
Nor do we shy away from imprisoning people for their speech:
In June, Document reported that, for the first time in Norway, we have begun to remand people in custody as a preventive measure for statements they might make in the future.
This is new. Another new development is this:
In this video, 22-year-old Tonje Omdahl explains on Wednesday that she recently served 30 days in prison for what she has written about child welfare services and the police, after she, as a 13, was placed in foster care against her will following false allegations of violence against her father.
She loved her father and told child welfare services that he never hit her. She wanted to live at home with him, as he loved her. But the child welfare services had other plans. Now, at the age of 22, prison is the response when she speaks publicly about what she has been subjected to – because she mentioned a few names (one cannot hold a ‘system’ accountable, only those responsible, and that is what she did).
The state-sanctioned truth is that the child welfare services are exemplary, even though foreign countries are making documentaries about the Norwegian child welfare system – and we hold the record for convictions in Strasbourg, per capita. Say anything else, and you’ll go to prison.
We have not yet exposed direct state infiltration of the Norwegian media or of Faktisk.no, but it is no secret that when Faktisk.noeditor Kristoffer Egeberg stepped down from his post in 2023, he went straight into a role at the PST’s open-sources section, where he was to work on research and intelligence based on publicly available information on the internet.
This revolving-door practice holds the whole sordid system together. And the fact that we’re talking about the intelligence services this time is by no means any better than if it were the state itself, as is the case in England.
So I don’t think the situation is any better in Norway than in England.
Perhaps this explains why the Norwegian mainstream press is as silent as the grave regarding the British revelations.
Or perhaps here in Norway, too, we have state infiltrators in the media who, in this case, are saying: ‘Let this lie; we know it’s in the public interest, but this could undermine trust’.
Originally published on the author’s Substack on 23 October 2026.
