BBG Watch Media
Due to high interest, BBG Watch is providing a longer excerpt from the “Future of News” report by the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, James Harding. Many of his observations about the future of BBC world news and BBC World Service are actually already true today, as some of us have observed.
“The World Service faces a choice between decline and growth,” the report states. “Competition in global news is growing, both from big state-sponsored news organisations such as Al Jazeera, China Central Television and Russia Today [RT] and from digital platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.
“If the UK wants the BBC to remain valued and respected, an ambassador of Britain’s values and an agent of soft power in the world, then the BBC is going to have to commit to growing the World Service and the government will also have to recognize this,” the report points out. “It will mean reversing the trend of closing language services and, with an eye to audiences of need, opening new ones.”
“Communities of interest” may include religious, economic or social groups. They also include groups demanding and fighting for respect for human rights, BBG Watch experts observed.
Five World Service language operations were closed in 2011. The BBC took over the cost of the World Service from the Foreign Office last April.
May of Voice of America (VOA) and other U.S. government-funded media programs and journalistic jobs have also been eliminated in recent years while the federal bureaucracy of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has grown by leaps and bounds.
Many of BBC’s James Harding’s findings are highly applicable for the Voice of America and the rest of U.S. taxpayer-funded international media outreach run by the federal Broadcasting Board of Governors, which now has Andy Lack and its director and CEO.
BBC World Service (from Future of News by James Harding)
“The World Service faces a choice between decline and growth. Competition in global news is growing, both from big state-sponsored news organisations such as Al Jazeera, China Central Television and Russia Today and from digital platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. If the UK wants the BBC to remain valued and respected, an ambassador of Britain’s values and an agent of soft power in the world, then the BBC is going to have to commit to growing the World Service and the government will also have to recognise this. It will mean reversing the trend of closing language services and, with an eye to audiences of need, opening new ones. It will mean taking greater advantage of our strength in English as a global language. In many parts of the world, there is not more free expression but less. Some democracies are proving to be pseudo-democracies. The need for the BBC World Service – in English and in the languages of audiences around the world – to provide independent, reliable information to people who sorely need it is growing. It will mean moving beyond covering the world by country, and into communities of interest – whether religious, economic or social. And it will mean ensuring a global perspective by moving more of BBC News out of London, out of the UK.”
READ MORE: Future of News, James Harding, BBC
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