Diferencias de conceptualización

Top of the four aims of the BBC World Service, according to its 2008 Annual Report, is to ‗be the world‘s best-known and most-respected voice in international news, thereby bringing benefit to the UK, the BBC and to audiences around the world‘. The main points of the remaining three aims—to provide the most trusted and relevant international news and analysis, facilitate global conversation and

‗enable people make sense of their increasingly complex world‘ (BBC, 2008)—are all supportive of the premier one. Striving to achieve them in a rapidly changing global environment presents a new challenge radically different from the ones previously faced by the corporation. But then, from its roles in the Empire days through to war years and Cold War era to the ones in the present post-September 11 world, the BBC‘s functions have never been static. Whether as a provider of

‗impartial‘ international news or as a ‗mediator of British diplomatic relations‘

(Sreberny et al., 2010b, p.279), the World Service has managed to maintain its relevance throughout those periods, delivering its services through diverse forms of distribution technologies.

Its relationship with its paymaster, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has also been dynamic all through those years. It ranges, in Sreberny‘s words, ‗from a tighter relationship of propagandistic direction, especially at times of war and

political conflict, to a much looser relationship of mutual understanding as to the BBC‘s role as ―public diplomat‖‘; and from a tighter control through censorship to a subtle control ‗by financial reward or punishment‘ (Sreberny et al., 2010b, p.279). One of the most notable changes seen in such relationship in recent years, as Sreberny et al. (2010b) rightly pointed out, was the government‘s decision during the 2004 Spending Review Settlement to place the World Service under Public Diplomacy category, openly acknowledging the public diplomacy role of the service. Lord Carter‘s UK Public Diplomacy Review Team made this clear:

The UK benefits from the existence of two World-Class institutions with strong brands, the British Council and the BBC World Service, and the Review Team recognised the valuable role they play, and the importance of appropriate editorial and managerial independence… Public diplomacy funded by tax payers must support Government goals and objectives, and public diplomacy partners must prove themselves able and willing to work collaboratively within an agreed strategic framework.

(FCO, 2005, p.4)

The World Service, the review noted, was the largest receiver of public diplomacy funding in the 2004/05 budget, getting £225 million out of the £617 million expended that year (FCO, 2005, p.6). Although the director of the World Service has only observer status on the Public Diplomacy Board and both the BBC and Foreign and Commonwealth Office have insisted that the corporation‘s editorial independence is guaranteed by the Royal Charter, its placement on that category has a telling effect on its standing (Sreberny et al., 2010b), as does, of course, the fact of its funding source and purpose.

Since the 2004 Spending Review Settlement came into effect, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had ensured a steady increase in the funding of the BBC World Service mainly to increase Britain‘s public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East—the introduction of the BBC Arabic and Persian television services in 2008 and 2009 respectively (BBC, 2008; Sreberny et al., 2010a) being the key projects (more on this later). The rise in the funding of the World Service was reflected in the annual budgetary allocation to it. For instance, the government‘s grant-in-aid to the World Service was increased from £225 million in 2004/05 noted earlier to

£239.5 million in 2006/07 and then to £255 million in 2007/08 (BBC, 2008). The amount jumped to its peak of £272 million in 2009/10 (Hiller, 2010b) before

Britain‘s debt and deficit crisis forced spending cuts that saw the allocation to it for the year 2010/11 first brought down to £261 million and then followed by an even more radical change introduced in the 2010 Spending Review Settlement (Robinson and Sweney, 2010; Thompson, 2011).

Perhaps the most significant change in government‘s relationship with the BBC in recent years, the 2010 Spending Review Settlement did not only cut spending for the World Service, it attempted to fundamentally alter its funding arrangement.

Under the settlement the government resolved to transfer the funding responsibility of the BBC World Service from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the BBC‘s licence fee with effect from 2014 (Robinson and Sweney, 2010; Foster, 2010; Thompson, 2011). The agreement, reached on 19 October 2010, stipulated that the BBC should from its licence fee bear an estimated annual cost of £340 million to fund the BBC World Service, the BBC monitoring department and the high-speed broadband roll out, and part-fund the Welsh language service channel S4C (Robinson and Sweney, 2010; Foster, 2010). The deal, endorsed by the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and BBC Director General Mark Thompson, was reached after what the culture secretary described as ‗the fastest negotiation in the corporation‘s 83-year history‘, as the corporation was also slammed with an unprecedented 16 per cent funding cut over a period of four years (Foster, 2010, p.6). The then chairman of the BBC Trust Sir Michael Lyons said although the settlement was ‗tough‘, it guaranteed what he called ‗certainty and stability‘ (Lyons, 2010).

However, subsequent happenings showed that Sir Michael‘s optimism was perhaps premature. First, the spending cuts compelled the World Service to consider reducing the number of its language services, cutting its staff strength and restructuring its offices and operations. On 26 January 2011 the BBC announced the closure of five language services (Albanian, Macedonian, Serbian, Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean), with an estimated 30 million fall in the global audience (BBC News, 2011). ‗Today will be a painful day for the BBC and for the millions of people around the globe who value the World Service,‘ Director General Mark Thompson (2011) said as he announced ‗a series of cuts that have been made necessary by last autumn‘s Comprehensive Spending Review‘. Apart

from the closure of the five foreign language services ‗in their entirety‘, the BBC also announced ‗the reduction of others to a web presence alone, as well as significant cuts to the English language radio service – both reductions in programmes and in distribution‘ (Thompson, 2011). It planned to also slash ‗650 jobs from a workforce of 2,400 over the next three years‘ to save £46m a year (BBC News, 2011).

The announcement generated adverse reactions and prompted the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee to launch an investigation, which found that the decisions to both cut and transfer the funding of the World Service would be harmful to UK‘s interests (FACOM, 2011; Burrell, 2011). In its 90-page report released on 13 April 2011, the committee chaired by Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Ottaway said:

We believe that the BBC World Service is of such value to the nation that its income should be ring-fenced against spending cuts. The recent dramatic events in North Africa and the Middle East have shown that the ―soft power‖ wielded through the World Service is likely to bring even more benefits to the UK in the future than it has in the past, and that to proceed with the planned cuts to the World Service would be a false economy.

(FACOM, 2011, p.3) The committee warned that the transfer of funding responsibility to the licence fee could allow BBC senior managers to ‗raid‘ the World Service funding, jeopardise foreign languages‘ news services and weaken the ‗Parliament‘s right to oversee its work‘ (FACOM, 2011, p.8). The report was welcomed by the new chairman of the BBC Trust Lord Patten who promised to raise the issue with Foreign Secretary William Hague. ‗I know he (foreign secretary) regards the World Service as an important part of this country‘s soft power and I‘m sure that with goodwill and without megaphones we‘ll be able to sort it out,‘ Lord Patten declared (Wynne-Jones, 2011). Whether they eventually ‗sort it out‘ or not, the issue has further highlighted the complexity of the BBC‘s relationship with the government, even when the two have no open confrontation over editorial matters—which usually tends to be the source of dispute. Since the release of the 2003/04 Hutton Inquiry which censured the BBC following the corporation‘s broadcast of accusations in May 2003 that Tony Blair‘s Government had exaggerated Iraqi military capability to justify its involvement in war in Iraq (Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009; Hill and Alshaer, 2010) and the subsequent reorganisation of the corporation triggered by

the inquiry‘s report, relations between the BBC and the government have been fairly cordial.

The concerns raised over the World Service‘s spending cuts were prompted by the fear that it might lose its influence at a time when global politics is also witnessing rapid changes. Even before the changes in North Africa and the Middle East began this year, the dynamics of the post-September 11 global geopolitics and the West‘s

‗war on terror‘ have generally transformed the focus of international broadcasting (Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009). And the public diplomacy initiatives among the Western nations tend to concentrate on the battle for the ‗hearts and minds‘ of the Muslims (Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009; Thussu, 2005, p.274). The BBC is being shaped by these changes as it too has been part of the process of shaping them. In an era of touch technology and multimedia explosion, it faces the challenge of having to deliver on both its roles of providing international news service and of mediating British ‗digital diplomacy initiatives‘ (Sreberny et al., 2010b, p.280).

Series of reports and happenings within the World Service showed the kind of strategies the corporation has been employing to face the challenge.

The first major strategy is the use of new technologies by its various services to deliver their products. ‗Broadband technology and mobile communications are transforming audience behaviour in many markets,‘ Lord Carter‘s review team observed in 2005. ‗The BBC claims to be leading the way among international broadcasters in introducing greater interactivity and video content in key languages‘, it noted, ‗and online forums in which people can express their views are now an established feature of BBC websites in many languages‘ (FCO, 2005, p.27). Within the subsequent three years the corporation moved fast to further integrate both the new and existing technologies for the delivery of its services. By the year 2008 BBC World Service was available in about 154 cities ‗on FM, as well as via satellite, cable, podcasts, mobiles and online – in addition to short and medium wave‘ (BBC, 2008). By harnessing various services to deliver multimedia products, the BBC has succeeded in getting an estimated 241 million people using its international services weekly through the World Service radio, World News television, online and mobile offerings, according to its 2010 audience surveys (Hiller, 2010a). This is three million higher than a year earlier, even though the

short-wave audience figure has declined by about 20 million from its peak of 188 million in 2009 (Hiller, 2010a, 2010b). BBC World Service Director Peter Horrocks admitted that the drop in the short-wave audiences was ‗dramatic‘, but maintained that the surveys also showed ‗the success of our multimedia strategy and investments for global audiences‘ (Hiller, 2010a, p.2). His predecessor, Nigel Chapman, had in 2008, following a report that showed the success of the World Service‘s multimedia approach, said ‗we demonstrated our ability to innovate while retaining the affection of audiences who have been loyal to us for a large part of our history‘ (BBC, 2008).

It was, as noted earlier, the year the World Service launched the Arabic television channel in March which Chapman said was the ‗culmination of a four-year journey to secure funding and deliver a high-quality television service in a vital region of the world‘ (BBC, 2008). This was not the first time the BBC launched an Arabic television channel. It had had one in the mid-1990s as a joint project with the Saudis, but it collapsed following a BBC Panorama programme that criticised Saudi government (Hill and Alshaer, 2010). The current channel is solely the World Service project funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A year after its launch, a Persian television channel was also launched, targeting the same region and pursuing similar objectives. The two new channels came at a huge cost for both the World Service and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. First, they had to sacrifice ‗no less than ten other language services to regions that were now deemed to be ―democratic‖ and so neither any longer in need of BBC content nor any longer of interest to British foreign policy interests‘ (Sreberny et al., 2010a, p.130). The 10 language services sacrificed were Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai which served Thailand that was later hit by political crisis ‗but lacked news feed from the BBC, an unfortunate consequence of the cuts‘ (p.130).

The BBC Persian television which targets Farsi speakers mainly in Iran, but also in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and in diaspora, has lesser financial allocation, with an annual budget of £15 million (Usher, 2009). It was launched in London on 4 January 2009 amid opposition from Iranian government officials who denounced it as an organ of ‗espionage and psychological warfare‘ (Ash, 2009). The Arabic

channel, however, costs the Foreign and Commonwealth Office an average of £25 million annually (Martin, 2008). Still, this was far lower than what was spent at the launch of its main rivals, Al-Jazeera in 1996 with $90 million and Al-Arabiyya in 2003 with $300 million, by the Qatari and Saudi royal families respectively (Hill and Alshaer, 2010). Chapman believed that the BBC Arabic channel was a worthwhile project as it complements the ‗revamped radio and online services, enabling us to compete effectively as a trimedia broadcaster‘ (BBC, 2008).

Significantly, the ‗new channel investigates the issues that dominate people‘s lives in the Middle East and wider Arab world, from regional politics to global economics, from conflict to climate change,‘ he said (BBC, 2008).

However, Hill and Alshaer (2010) viewed these moves as being part of British public diplomacy strategies. Analysing specifically the Arabic channel‘s interactive programme ‗Point of Debate‘, they noted how the programme ‗has sought to encourage the form of questioning and debate that accords with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office‘s public diplomacy objectives‘ (Hill and Alshaer, 2010, p.152). The issue they raised centres on the recurring debate about the contradictory context of the World Service‘s funding source and its claim of being an impartial provider of international news and analysis—a contradiction that both the corporation and its funding body consistently down play. They both insist that the BBC has a ‗complete editorial independence‘ (FCO, 2005. p.4). ‗We aim to be trusted for the accuracy, editorial independence and expertise of our journalism,‘ Chapman said. ‗We will cover hard-hitting stories without fear or favour to anyone‘ (Martin, 2008). But Hill and Alshaer (2010, p.153) maintained that the fact that it is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that funds the World Service ‗raised crucial questions about the degree to which it should be regarded as an instrument of foreign policy‘. Despite the claim of editorial independence, they argued, ‗the launch of the (Arabic) channel—and the freeing up of resources for it by the closure of other BBC services—suggests quite clear political concerns‘ (p.165). It is a feeling shared by many audiences in the Middle East who see the establishment of the Arabic channel as ‗a subcontracting of the public diplomacy side of the War on Terror to the more sophisticated Brits‘ following the failure of the American-sponsored Arabic language television Al-Hurra to make significant impact in the region (Jarrah cited in Hill and Alshaer, 2010, p.162). A

study earlier cited in the literature review here showed that Arab students had negative perceptions of the news credibility of both Al-Hurra and the other US-sponsored Arabic language international broadcaster, Radio Sawa (El-Nawawy, 2006).

Whether the BBC‘s perceived reputation of credibility and impartiality would enable it to do what direct propaganda has failed to do in the Middle East is open to interrogation, but it is hard to divorce the BBC‘s focus on the Middle East in particular and the Muslim world in general from the renewed Western interests in them after the bombings of the New York twin-towers and Pentagon in the US on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent US-led war on terror (Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009). The diversion of resources from other services to establish the Arabic and Persian television channels, the concentration of news coverage on happenings in the Muslim world and the remodelling of editorial perspective to accord prominence to stories that highlight Islam-West cultural divergence are clear testimonies to this.

The expansion of the BBC Hausa Service which targets the mainly Muslim Hausa speakers in West Africa appears to be in line with this shift. One former staff of the service, Bala Muhammad, argued that the establishment of the service in the first instance was for propaganda purpose. ‗The British did not set up the Hausa Service out of philanthropy or because they loved the Hausas. It is for a propaganda purpose, pure and simple, especially targeted towards those peoples who have refused, despite colonialism, to change their worldview to that of the West,‘ he wrote in his weekly column in Nigeria‘s Weekly Trust (Muhammad, 2010). The expansion saw the Hausa Service increasing the number of its transmissions from three to four per day in December 2006, the same period when it opened a big production centre in the Nigeria‘s capital, Abuja, where it now carries out its morning transmissions (BBC World Service, 2008). Although (unlike the Arabic and Persian services) the BBC Hausa Service does not have a television channel, it does, as noted earlier, employ new technologies of telephony and Internet to deliver its products to audiences. The short-wave radio transmission remains its main platform, but the online and mobile telephony services are expanding rapidly. The online audience figure reached 1.2 million in April 2010

and was projected to double in a year (Tangaza, 2010). The mobile phone approach, the head of Hausa Service noted, has a huge potential, given the fact that Nigeria was in 2009 described as the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, with over 70 million subscribers and an annual growth of 8.5 million subscribers (Tangaza, 2009; Okonji, 2009).

The Hausa Service has introduced an interactive programme that allows mobile phone users to send their stories and pictures to be used on the BBC Hausa web page, BBC Hausa.com, and on BBC Hausa Facebook, in addition to accessing BBC‘s content through their mobile phones. This has provided user-generated content for the station and increased its relationship with audiences, Tangaza stated. ‗It‘s a radical departure from how BBC Hausa has served its audience over many generations, but by tapping into how our audience wants to communicate we are making sure BBC Hausa remains a relevant and essential part of Nigerian life‘

(Tangaza, 2009). To further widen audience participation, the service in April 2010 introduced a weekly interactive programme called Ra‘ayi Riga (Have Your Say) in which listeners reach the Hausa Service through phone calls, Skype, text messages, Facebook, Twitter and emails to air their views (BBC, 2010a). It is similar to the other services‘ audience participatory programmes, such as Africa English‘s Africa Have Your Say and the main World Service‘s World Have Your Say—all of which are geared towards achieving the BBC‘s ‗global conversation‘

objective or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office‘s ‗digital diplomacy initiatives‘ (Sreberny et al., 2010b, p.280). ‗Ra‘ayi Riga brings informed debate to

objective or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office‘s ‗digital diplomacy initiatives‘ (Sreberny et al., 2010b, p.280). ‗Ra‘ayi Riga brings informed debate to