Catriona Nunn Tom Edgington (Politics and Sociology, 2005), never imagined he would one day be scrutinising the claims of prime ministers and presidents for the BBC. He has built a career at BBC Verify dedicated to questioning, evidence and clarity. Today, his work in political fact checking helps audiences navigate an increasingly noisy and fast‑moving information landscape.
“I never set out with a clear plan to become a journalist. In fact, when I left York in 2005 with a degree in Politics and Sociology, I mostly knew what I didn’t want to do: I’d been to the graduate fairs, I’d listened dutifully to the pitches for big corporate schemes, but nothing lit that spark. What I did know was that I cared deeply about politics, public policy and the way ideas shape people’s lives, and that I loved stories – whether in books, on stage or on the news. Looking back now, as a political fact checker for BBC Verify, it feels almost inevitable that I would end up doing a job that sits exactly at that intersection: interrogating political claims, testing them against evidence and then turning that process into clear, accessible storytelling for the public.
I arrived at York from Winchester not knowing anyone, and my world very quickly became Fairfax House and Vanbrugh College. Fairfax was on the edge of campus, close enough that you never felt cut off, but near enough to town that you could wander in without it feeling like a trek, the best of both worlds.
“There was a feeling of being part of something bigger than your course.”
It was also, crucially, pre‑Wi‑Fi. We didn’t have the internet when I was there – I think it arrived not long after I left, which meant we were, in the best possible way, forced to talk to each other! There was a TV room that became the heart of our lives: pre‑drinks, post‑night‑out debriefs, long late‑night conversations where you’d argue passionately about politics one minute and then end up playing GoldenEye on the N64 the next. They were simple evenings, but they’re some of my strongest memories, because that is how I made the friends who are still in my life now.
York gave me a real sense of community. Through college life, inter‑college sport, seminars and all the assorted social events, there was a feeling of being part of something bigger than your course. I’ve always really liked sport and been really bad at it – a terrible combination – but York’s inclusivity meant I still found myself turning out for the college hockey team, making a couple of appearances for the cricket team and even, once, standing in for the squash team. I am almost certain I didn’t score a single point, but it didn’t matter; the point was that there was a place for everyone, even the chronically uncoordinated!
Academically, York did something really important for me: it taught me how to think. I remember sitting in first‑year politics seminars arguing over J. S. Mill’s “On Liberty” and being struck by how different that was from the more top‑down education I’d had at school. Learning through debate, testing arguments in real time, challenging assumptions, picking apart ideas with your peers – was exciting, and it planted the seeds of the critical thinking that underpins what I do every day now.
From policy nerd to BBC newsroom
When I graduated, I knew I wanted to stay close to politics and policy, even if I didn’t yet have a job title in mind. I deferred the decision slightly by doing a master’s in International Policy Analysis at Bath, which turned out to be a perfect bridge: York had given me the theoretical foundations; ideology, philosophy, political theory, and Bath pushed me into the messy world of real‑life policy problems and how you might actually solve them.
Then came that summer of endless speculative emails and cover letters that so many graduates will recognise. Some of my York friends had already moved to London, so I did a bit of sofa‑surfing while I interned for an MP, then at a think tank, then at a public affairs firm. Off the back of that final placement, I landed my first proper job at a political communications company called Dods, producing policy conferences for people working in local government. It wasn’t journalism, but it kept me close to Westminster and deepened my understanding of how politics actually functions day to day.
Around this time I had an experience that, in hindsight, shows how powerful the York network can be. I was working on the registration desk for a think tank event when I spotted the name of a delegate whose boss was a York alumnus I’d known from politics – he was in third‑year when I was in first year. This was pre‑WhatsApp, so we’d lost touch. I mentioned his name to her, she passed on my details, and a week later I had an email from him suggesting we meet for coffee. That conversation led to another short internship and ultimately fed into the experience that helped me get my first BBC job. It’s a very concrete example of why keeping in touch with people from York – formally through platforms like York for Life or informally through your own networks – can make a real difference.
My route into the BBC wasn’t especially strategic. One Sunday evening, I was absent‑mindedly clicking around the BBC News website and wandered onto the careers section. I wasn’t actively job‑hunting, but I saw an advert for a political analyst in the BBC’s political research unit and thought, “Wow, that looks incredible.” The only problem was that the deadline was that night! If nothing else, journalism has taught me that a tight deadline focuses the mind. I spent the next few hours laser‑focused on writing the best application I could and submitted it just before midnight. Not long after that, I found myself walking up the stairs at Millbank for my interview, imposter syndrome in overdrive as I passed political reporters I’d grown up watching and even Andrew Neil coming the other way. I joined the BBC in January 2008, not as a journalist but as a political researcher – that was my way in.
The scale of the BBC means you can move around a lot once you’re inside. Over the years I’ve done various roles across different programmes and networks – and working for Radio 5 Live is very different from working for Radio 4, which again is different from doing Newsnight or working on digital output. But the common thread has always been politics, evidence and trying to make sense of complex things for audiences who are busy and often overwhelmed.
What political fact checking really looks like
These days my role focuses on political fact checking for BBC Verify, particularly UK politics but increasingly US politics too. On any given day that might mean interrogating a claim made in Prime Minister’s Questions, something said in a broadcast interview, a line dropped into a press conference or a graphic that has gone viral on social media. Our team examine claims from politicians across the political spectrum
Once a claim has been identified as worth examining, the job is essentially to take it apart and ask: what is this actually based on? That often involves pulling together official statistics, policy documents, academic research and sometimes speaking to independent experts, and then working with editors, producers and data specialists to decide what we can say and how we should say it. A recent example from my time in the US involved looking back at the bold promises Donald Trump made during the election campaign about what would happen to the cost of living – grocery prices, gasoline, electricity – and then testing those claims against the official data. Some things, like gasoline prices, had fallen, but not down to the level he’d pledged; overall grocery prices had risen, even if certain items, like eggs, had dropped.
“That kind of selective framing – where the numbers aren’t invented but are used in ways that obscure as much as they reveal – could become more common.”
There are two big challenges that always loom large. The first is speed: political claims, memes and misleading graphics travel far faster than careful evidence can be gathered, checked, signed off and turned into journalism. There’s a constant pressure to be quick, but you can only hit publish when you’re absolutely confident that you’ve done a fair, thorough job, which is why there’s such a robust internal sign‑off process. The second is perception. People often say, “Who fact checks the fact checkers?” and that’s a fair question. The answer, at least in our case, is that anyone can: our pieces walk you step by step through the sources and methods we’ve used, we link to the data, and if we don’t know something, we say so. We never just slap on a verdict without showing our working.
The nature of misinformation is also changing. Yes, there are outright falsehoods and old‑fashioned lies, but what we’ve seen increasingly, particularly during the 2024 UK general election, are technically true claims framed in ways that risk being highly misleading. The Conservatives repeatedly said Labour would put £2,000 on the tax bill of every working family, while Labour repeatedly said homeowners would pay £4,800 more on their mortgages under the Conservatives. When we and other fact checkers looked at these, we found that both relied on extremely generous assumptions and particular ways of presenting the numbers, so we said they risked being misleading, but we couldn’t label them simply “wrong”. That kind of selective framing – where the numbers aren’t invented but are used in ways that obscure as much as they reveal – could become more common.
At the same time, the media landscape around politics has transformed. Politicians can now bypass traditional broadcasters completely and go straight to voters via TikTok, live streams or Instagram Reels, which puts pressure on fact checkers to be present in those same spaces. At BBC Verify we produce a lot of social‑first content – short one‑minute debunks that can be easily shared on platforms where false claims spread fastest. A recent video I did on a fact check relating to Greenland, for example, was viewed nearly four and a half million times on TikTok alone, which tells you where audiences are.
Trust in institutions – not just in journalism, but in politics, government and beyond – is under real strain, and that is one of the reasons BBC Verify was created. Verification has always happened behind the scenes at the BBC; pictures and footage have long been checked before appearing on the Ten O’Clock News. The difference now is that the act of verifying has become part of the story itself. The aim is not just to say what we know, but to show how we know it.
You’ll often see us taking audiences behind the scenes of that process. Colleagues might, for instance, take a video that claims to show an event in a war zone at a particular time and place and then analyse the shadows, weather patterns and other environmental details, cross‑checking them with historical weather data to work out whether the footage is authentic. That level of forensic detail is painstaking, but it is exactly what is required to build confidence that a piece of content is really showing what it purports to show..
In an era of deepfakes, AI‑generated images and increasingly sophisticated visual misinformation, explaining those methods openly matters as much as the final conclusion. If audiences can see the steps, they can decide for themselves whether they trust the result. It’s the same principle that underpins our political fact checks: we don’t expect you simply to take our word for it; we invite you to look at the evidence with us.
“The difference now is that the act of verifying has become part of the story itself. The aim is not just to say what we know, but to show how we know it.”
Five weeks in Washington
Most of my work is focused on UK politics, but recently I spent five weeks based in the BBC’s Washington bureau, which gave me a crash course in the differences between the British and American political and media cultures. In the UK, as the national broadcaster, the BBC is a place politicians expect to deal with; they may not always be thrilled with what we report, but there’s a baseline expectation that they will engage, answer questions and respond to fact‑check queries. In the US, by contrast, you have multiple big networks and a much more polarised broadcast environment, and politicians are far more selective about which outlets they appear on.
What also struck me was the scale and intensity of political division. People I met in America seemed, in general, more comfortable adopting very strong ideological positions openly, whereas British political disagreement is often more coded, more implied, a little more understated. It was fascinating, and sobering, to see that up close during such a heated political moment.
Outside the bureau, the trip became a vivid lesson in just how vast the US is. I went from Boston, where it was -15 degrees, to Los Angeles, where I was on the beach in 20‑plus degree sunshine, and it really brought home the sheer variety of the place.
Back home, I live in a small town called Thame in Oxfordshire, about twenty minutes east of Oxford, which gives me another kind of best‑of‑both‑worlds setup. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone, but I can still hop on a fast train to Marylebone and walk to Broadcasting House from there. Having briefly lived in Washington, I’ve come to appreciate being able to enjoy a busy newsroom in the day and then come back to somewhere smaller and quieter in the evenings.
Some advice for York alumni
For recent York grads thinking about careers in journalism, research or politics, the first thing to say is that there is no single “correct” path. My route – via policy, think‑tank internships and a political research role – is just one version, and almost every journalist has a different story to tell. What does endure are qualities like curiosity and good judgement.
“York taught me to question, to test assumptions and to engage properly with evidence and that’s essentially what I do now, just with a slightly bigger audience.”
The toolkit of journalism, though, is changing fast. Some of the most impactful work now is forensic journalism: taking claims apart, testing evidence rigorously and showing your working in a transparent way. Open‑source intelligence, or OSINT, is one part of that – using publicly available data, documents, images, videos, satellite pictures and social media posts and analysing them to establish what’s true. You don’t have to be a coder or a data scientist; you do have to be willing to apply the critical thinking skills you’ve already learned at university to new kinds of evidence
If there’s one lesson from my own journey, it’s that university doesn’t just give you a degree; it gives you a mindset and a network. York taught me to question, to test assumptions and to engage properly with evidence and that’s essentially what I do now, just with a slightly bigger audience. And those casual conversations in the Fairfax TV room, those seminars on Mill’s “On Liberty”, that slightly awkward email chain to an old college acquaintance that led to a coffee and then a job – all of those things, in ways I couldn’t possibly have predicted at the time, helped me get to where I am today.”
Keeping in touch through platforms like York for Life is an invaluable way to maintain your network and can make a real difference in your professional career.
