Marianna Spring

At an RTS event last month, BBC correspondent Marianna Spring discussed being on the receiving end of abuse from trolls supporting Elon Musk – and how she deals with it.

Investigating social media, she explained, “triggers a wave of trolls and conspiracy theorists in a way that I didn’t used to experience. But I think, for me, the most positive way of dealing with that is [to think] I wouldn’t be doing my job right if... I wasn’t getting that kind of response.”

“Disinformation Correspondent” is surely a top contender in the Orwellian job title stakes. The BBC’s Marianna Spring has “and Social Media” tagged on, but that’s not her focus. Social media, as she explains in this disturbing book, is just the vehicle for spreading unfounded scare stories, half-baked pseudoscience, racist bigotry and unadulterated hate.

Spring, winner of the RTS Television Journalism Awards 2023 Innovation prize, has delved deep in the cesspool of disinformation and unearthed some of the mad, bad and sad characters who inhabit the cyber underground.

She wasn’t exaggerating. The same profile noted that, of the 14,488 messages marked for review by the BBC’s online abuse monitoring system (between 1 January and late June in 2023), 11,771 were directed at the broadcaster’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent.

It’s a tragic irony of the job that, by investigating cases of online hate you inevitably become the victim of one. And yet Spring refuses to back down from this new virtual front line, ie, her inbox.

Podcasts are not all about comedy, true crime and self-help – increasingly, news and current affairs are fuelling the boom in the audio format.  

At the beginning of this month, the BBC’s Global News Podcast, The Economist Podcasts and The Rest Is Politics, which is hosted by New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and ex-Tory minister Rory Stewart, all featured in the top 10 most popular UK podcasts.  

The RTS Student Programme Master­classes drew a crowd of more than 300 in early November to hear four of the industry’s top talents talk about their careers and offer first-hand advice on how to make a start in television. 

Kenton Allen, one of the biggest names in British comedy, offered the masterclass in scripted entertainment. The CEO of Big Talk is the producer of countless award-winning shows, including The Royle Family and Friday Night Dinner.  

At just 25, she has reported on conspiracy theories and online abuse for the BBC’s news programmes, Newsnight and Panorama. 

“I was one of those slightly weird kids that, aged eight, [watched] BBC World News on holiday because it was the only channel in English,” Spring recalled. At school, university (Oxford, studying French and Russian) and during a year of study abroad, she wrote for local and student papers, and, post-university, worked shifts at the Guardian.

The infiltration of fake news in today’s society isn’t just a scourge for those in the newsrooms – it affects the authority of whole media brands on one side and the public’s well-­being on the other. Since the term “fake news” was made Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2017, it has only become a bigger issue. 

To prove how convincing fake news can be, attendees at this session were put to the test. Chair Naga Munchetty showed a series of viral images, with the audience deciding if they were real or fake using the poll function on the RTS Cambridge app.