Government Double-takes On World Service

Michael Hedges September 9, 2010 Follow on Twitter

International broadcasting reaches into dark places. Metrics are obscure. Missions blur. And it’s hard to graft an answer to the head of a pin. The fight for funding requires tenacity.

The new Conservative UK government was forced to stand up for the BBC World Service during a week when it was stunned by creeping – and creepy – allegations of illegal wiretapping by a tabloid newspaper covered up by officials. The BBC World Service will see budget cuts in 2011 after a government review of public services, said Foreign Secretary William Hague (September 8). Specifics, he said, were yet to be determined.

Earlier in the week (September 7), the Guardian quoted an unnamed “diplomatic source” saying the Burmese service is expensive and has few listeners. “The human rights argument doesn’t hold much sway with the new Foreign Office.”

To be sure, government funded international broadcasters operate on a budget and the allocation of funds reflects, typically, foreign policy interests. While ring-fenced from direct political influence, the BBC World Service is no different. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union it was a policy decision to withdraw the World Service from Eastern Europe and place more emphasis on the Middle East, generally, and major capitals of influence, specifically.

The new Conservative government in the UK has embarked on a plan of significant cuts to public sector budgets in the name of fiscal responsibility. The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is expected to take its slashing with the schools, hospitals, libraries and trash removal. Most economists with an inkling find these austerity plans ill advised, but that’s a separate story.

The military junta controlling Burma bows scant attention to foreign influence, not even to neighboring China. Press freedom watchers Reporters sans Frontieres and Freedom House rank Burma as one of the worlds most repressive. That begs the reasoning for discontinuing a major reporting source.

“Scrapping the World Service in Burma would be a gift to the military junta, and an insult to political prisoners locked in Burma’s jail for no crime,” said shadow foreign secretary David Miliband to the Guardian (September 8). A spokesperson for Burmese rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi told the Independent (UK) (September 8) she is “very concerned about the situation as the people in Burma are relying on the BBC … for news and information.”

Foreign Secretary Hague took great pains to align himself with “the importance of communicating into” Burma. “The chances that I'm then going to sit in my office and say, 'let's close the World Service into Burma' are correspondingly small.”

Also “vulnerable” would be the BBC’s Russian service, said unnamed BBC “insiders” to the Guardian. The BBC Russian service just added (September 8) its BBC Students’ Club for journalists and English language students to Russia’s biggest social networking platform LiveJournal.com. (See BBC World Service presser here)

Speaking to the Parliamentary committee for media, culture and sport (September 8), BBC Trust Chairman Michael Lyons defended the World Service as “amongst the most valued parts of the BBC's output both in terms of its standing in this country but certainly across the world.” He called the £272 million (about €325 million) authorization for the World Service a “very modest expenditure for the BBC and Britain to have its voice heard by that larger audience.”

“The BBC is inhibited from using license fee payers' money for the World Service so any cut that is imposed here actually will be a cut in service,” he explained. “There is no way to avoid that.”

In a coincidence of timing, further revelations about government officials and tabloid newspapers notwithstanding (see that story here), less than a week ago (September 2) was the 70th anniversary of the BBC’s first broadcast in the Burmese language to Burma. It was celebrated in Thailand because of continuing censorship. Back in the day, it was none other than George Orwell who voiced BBC news bulletins on what was then known as the Empire Service.

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