Abstract
What will it take to save the World Service?
On 12 July 2012, the World Service made its final broadcast from Bush House on Aldwych in London and the remaining staff left the building for their new home in Portland Place. After more than 70 years, the World Service and domestic BBC are under one roof. World Service news programmes now sit alongside domestic radio flagships such as Today and The World Tonight. They don’t yet mix with each other (although domestic producers have been caught stealing the World Service news team’s sandwiches) and perhaps they never will: it’s quite usual for BBC staff on different programmes to work in the same room without speaking to one another, a characteristic of the broadcaster’s culture that always perplexed me when I worked there.
There are fears that the World Service’s distinct editorial approach and authority are already suffering
The move to the BBC’s spanking new Broadcasting House, which cost £1bn (US$1.6bn) to build, is the latest stage in the biggest upheaval in the World Service’s history. Although the broadcaster has always been part of the BBC, its physical separation was matched by the independence of its editorial values, and it was also funded by the Foreign Office rather than the licence fee, which is levied from British television viewers. World Service staff have always taken pride in a global approach to news that transcends the limits of the domestic agenda. Bush House, with its art-deco design and famously polyglot canteen, was part of that identity – a home for writers and journalists from all over the world, like a cultural version of the UN. Its new home is a glasshouse, where a journalist can gaze through transparent walls at colleagues several floors below – a place that distinctly lacks privacy and could not be a greater contrast with Bush’s corridors and enclosed spaces, which was a much friendlier environment for any dissident or producer in need of a discreet gossip.
For World Service staff, their new home certainly gives them a higher profile within the BBC family. As one World Service veteran puts it: ‘It’s good that we’re out of the cupboard where we’ve been for so many years.’ But the broadcaster is in a vulnerable position. More than two years ago, the Foreign Office cut the World Service’s budget by 16 per cent, with a devastating impact on staff and broadcasting: five language services have closed, another seven can now only be heard online and 460 jobs are being cut. Short wave broadcasts to the Middle East have almost entirely ceased and medium wave broadcasts to Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt are being slashed at a time when impartial news to the region remains critical. A key short wave transmitter in Cyprus is also being closed down.
The English language service, one of the World Service’s great success stories with a staggering audience of 44 million, is being similarly savaged by the cuts: the medium wave frequency to Europe was switched off in 2011, which means that listeners now struggle to hear broadcasts; English news has lost 20 per cent of its budget and its daily broadcasts have been cut by four hours. World Briefing is being replaced by a new programme, The Newsroom. With a focus on social media, some argue that the programme dumbs down the news and marks a disturbing departure from the World Service’s trademark dispatches, the backbone of the broadcaster. Arts coverage has also taken a hammering with the demise of the regular feature The Strand. One media expert told me: ‘You can begin to hear the cuts on air: more opinion and less fact.’
Staff are also worried that programme support (including studio operations and press) is now being shared with the wider BBC and that domestic demands are already taking precedence over the World Service. There are fears, too, that the World Service’s distinct editorial approach and authority are suffering. One seasoned observer tells me that the BBC’s vast newsroom is in danger of becoming an ‘industrial machine for unitary news values’, which is harmful for the BBC as a whole and potentially devastating for the World Service.
The decision to axe seasoned World Service stringers, one of the broadcaster’s key news sources around the world, and introduce bi-lingual language service correspondents is a particular cause of concern. Insiders fear that the correspondents, who are used to working for the language services rather than English programmes, may lack the necessary broadcasting experience and English language skills, and that this will lead to a decline in standards and coverage. ‘It’s the end of World Service news as an authoritative broadcasting outlet,’ according to an experienced BBC journalist. BBC News has committed to integrate newsgathering and language services reporting into one newsroom, but some suspect that domestic news will still use its own UK reporters on the big foreign stories rather than bi-lingual World Service broadcasters.
Although Peter Horrocks, director of Global News, has said that the reduction in short wave and medium wave broadcasts reflects listening trends and that audiences are moving towards television, mobiles and online, it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. World Service still attracts the biggest audience of Global News (145 million for radio, compared with 97 million for television and 30 million for online), but the figures are shrinking as a result of the cuts and closures. The worry is that the inevitable decline in audience figures will be used as evidence of a fall in listeners to justify further cuts. Short wave is one of the broadcaster’s biggest costs and some experts believe that it is being ditched prematurely, sacrificing a core audience. Critics also point out that while dictators can, and do, block access online, short wave continues to be independent of arbitrary control.
In answer to a question in the House of Lords last November from Baroness Falkner, seeking reassurance that broadcasting impartial news to the Middle East and China would remain a priority, the government’s spokesperson Baroness Warsi said ‘more and more people are looking to BBC world news and television and looking online to obtain this information’. It’s a worrying response that echoes BBC Global News thinking and betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the role played by the broadcaster and the nature of its audience, as well as the unique and continually popular medium of radio.
There are concerns that this direction is driven by ideology as much as by financial necessity. One senior insider told me: ‘They’re making major changes and cutting off audiences before they need to. It’s not really a radio broadcaster any more – it wants to be on television and online and that fundamentally changes what the World Service is. We don’t know enough about the impact of what we’re doing and are making decisions it’s impossible to come back from – chasing markets and not looking at listeners any more.’
The Foreign Office cuts are just the curtain opener to the revolution that the World Service is facing. In 2010, in an unexpected move, the BBC’s then director-general Mark Thompson did a deal with the government that ended its Foreign Office funding: from next year, the World Service will be funded by the licence fee. It was a development that shocked many supporters and observers of the international broadcaster: how could the government sacrifice its most celebrated form of soft power? And at a time when international broadcasting was expanding in China, Russia and Iran? It was, after all, Kofi Annan who once described the World Service as ‘Britain’s greatest gift to the world in the 20th century.’
Bush House, which was home to the World Service for more than 70 years
Yet this act of cultural vandalism against one of our finest institutions, coupled with the cuts, passed with remarkably little outcry, despite a robust investigation by the foreign affairs select committee. It was, perhaps, just one more story of a great institution felled at a time of devastating cuts across the UK. Some critics also believe that the World Service was sacrificed to save the skin of the greater BBC: the government had initially asked the corporation to take on the cost of the licence fee payments of the over-75s, an astronomical bill that would keep on growing. The funding of the World Service, along with the Welsh language channel S4C and BBC Monitoring, was the bargain that Thompson managed to strike in exchange for a six-year freeze on the licence fee.
The implications for the World Service are still being played out. Once the broadcaster is funded by British licence fee payers, there are fears that it will become very hard to justify and safeguard broadcasts in, say, Hausa or Turkish, and that the language services may continue to shrink. There are also concerns that when it comes to making future cuts across the corporation, the World Service will be particularly vulnerable. Peter Horrocks does not have a seat on the BBC’s executive board, the top level of management, so his ability to exert influence and protect the World Service may be limited. BBC historian Jean Seaton is encouraged, however, by the Trust’s efforts so far to look after it. ‘The upside is the BBC’s constitution, which has evolved to take the World Service in. It now has its own governor and some of the Trust’s duties and obligations have been redrawn. It has been handled elegantly so it’s in a much safer place than it was. The World Service is certainly not lost, although there is still a problem as to whether the licence fee payer is the right guardian.’
BBC chairman Chris Patten has publicly supported the World Service, while its new director-general Tony Hall, who was appointed in November, is also thought to be a champion. But Patten’s announcement last October of further funding for BBC World television news, which is commercially funded, has not been taken as a sign of encouragement by World Service staff. While BBC World television would certainly benefit from investment, it’s galling for World Service journalists who produce a superior product and continue to be starved. The BBC has also started television broadcasting in Russian, Hindi and Urdu.
What will it take to persuade BBC management and politicians to stop the World Service from shrinking before it is too late? For the moment, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, there are other concerns occupying their attention. The revelations that one of the BBC’s biggest stars engaged in paedophilia, and on its premises, along with the failure of editorial judgement on Newsnight in its coverage, are an unprecedented scandal for the corporation. The BBC may be too busy fighting for its own survival to worry about the World Service. But at a time of crisis for the future of the media – from press regulation to newspaper sales – the failure to cherish a national treasure that boasts more listeners and dedicated fans than any other media outlet in the world is one of the most perverse ironies of our time and a dangerously short-sighted policy.