BBC's "VAX Disinformation" Reporter Lied On CV

Star reporter Marianna Spring should have fact-checked her resume.

With COVID-19’s arrival in Great Britain, the young native Londoner, Marianna Spring, became a shooting star reporter for the BBC. In March 2020, she was anointed the network’s first “Disinformation Specialist” and social media correspondent. Since 2021 she has been a BBC television and radio producer. One of her first episodes was titled "Vaccines: The Disinformation War." This fall, her debut book Among the Trolls: Notes From the Disinformation Wars is due for publication by Atlantic Books. For the last three years has she’s had a fine career accusing people—including people with considerably more education and training—of “spreading disinformation.”

Ms. Spring is typical of the bright young things who have risen in legacy media outlets like the BBC for their zeal to propagate corporate establishment narratives and to punish anyone who doesn’t adhere to them. I doubt her professed belief in the orthodoxies of the day is based on a serious examination or understanding of the subject matter. Her chief mental state is a feeling of ambition. I’ve encountered her type in hotel bars all over Europe and the UK, and they always annoy me with their special brand of superficiality and superciliousness.

As was revealed this week in the The New European, Ms. Spring should have spent less time fact-checking others, and more on her CV.

We all make mistakes when we are young, and sometimes they grow in irony as time passes. Case in point: Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent who, I can reveal today, was once caught red-handed lying in her CV to win a job.

Only this week, Spring was the focus of a laudatory profile piece by the Guardian‘s Zoe Williams for her role on the front line when it comes to exposing fabrications across social media.

Yet the high standard of integrity and honesty Spring today demands of others has not always been entirely consistent with her own behaviour.

Five years ago, in 2018, Spring was looking for work as a Moscow stringer for US-based news site Coda Story. In her application to editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava, she included a CV in which claimed to have worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on the corporation’s coverage of the football World Cup held in Russia.

The entry in her CV read: “June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.”

This claim was, unfortunately, pure disinformation. In reality, she had merely met Rainsford in a couple of social situations. The claim was a lie. A simple check by Antelava with Rainsford resulted in the latter admonishing Spring for the embellishment in her CV. A grovelling email apology from Spring to Antelava followed, citing, in her own words, her “awful misjudgement”.

I’m sure many readers of this Substack will share my sentiment that I’ve had enough of the BBC and its “Trusted News Media” quango of mendacious twits. I wish they would, like Monty Python’s Ron Obvious, all jump into the English Channel.