Full Fact to recruit a new chief executive
After more than a decade I will be stepping down as Full Fact’s chief executive later this year.
I’ll be handing over to an excellent team, and following recruitment, a new CEO.
Our cross-party board of trustees will be running the recruitment and they are looking for someone who will uphold and strengthen Full Fact’s reputation for high standards and impartiality.
I am sorry to be leaving Full Fact, but I’m excited to be joining another organisation committed to evidence-based public debate. The Campbell Collaboration is an international social science research network of staff and volunteers, and I will be joining as CEO later this year. By reviewing and bringing together all the available evidence, Campbell Collaboration systematic reviews and evidence and gap maps help make it possible to tackle the biggest societal challenges we face today.
It has been a privilege to work with and lead Full Fact’s team for the last 12 years.
When we started, experts told us that major newspapers like the Mail would never print a correction. Not only have the Mail, The Sun, and many other newspapers started corrections columns, last year our work led to more than 60 corrections. Every week we are making change happen.
When we started, Ministers routinely leaked unpublished official statistics to push their political agendas. We got the UK Statistics Authority to step in and stop that.
When we started, MPs routinely failed to correct inaccurate statements they made. Too many of them still do. Of the 19 MPs we’ve asked to correct themselves this year, only 4 have done it. Now more than 40,000 of us have signed a petition and together we got the House of Commons to set up an inquiry on how to improve its corrections system.
We don’t treat bad information as one big insoluble problem. Fact checking specific claims every day shows it for what it really is: many different problems, many of which we can solve or improve.
Full Fact is a team effort and I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has contributed to where we are today: a sustainable, long term force to inform and improve public debate.
Healthy organisations like this one need change at the top. We are advertising for my replacement publicly and we want to attract a diverse range of applicants. It’s a brilliant job—endlessly interesting, important, and with a great team—so please do share the role with anyone you think might be interested in applying.