The Spectacle of Protest and Punishment: Newspaper coverage of the Melksham Weavers' Riot of 1738

The goal of this article is to demonstrate and analyse how two public broadcasters with cultural and technical mandates to foster identity formation, the BBC in Britain and the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) in Canada, came to terms with the fact that the British and Canadian identities were different, and growing more so, in the 1930s. The focus is on how two BBC officials, Malcolm Frost and Felix Greene, assessed the public broadcasting experiment in Canada and gradually came to understand that the CRBC, while a Dominion broadcaster and potential distributor of the Empire Service, was also a North American broadcaster striving to gain legitimacy and credibility with Canadian listeners accustomed to the popular commercial programming of the large American networks. It concludes with a discussion of Greene's role in the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the appointment of Canadian-born BBC official Gladstone Murray as its first general manager.     

‘Plain,unvarnished news’?

Established during the Sudeten crisis in September 1938, the BBC German Service played an important role in Chamberlain's appeasement policy and warfare towards Nazi Germany. Yet the BBC's employment for official propaganda, especially in peacetime, raised delicate issues of its independence from government control and of the objectivity and credibility of its broadcasts. This paper discusses, first, the origins of the BBC German Service and its role within Chamberlain's policy. Second, it analyses the relationship between the BBC and Whitehall. Third, it traces the evolution and development of the British propaganda strategy towards Germany and investigates how the concepts of ‘truthfulness’ and ‘objectivity’ were internally understood and employed by the BBC and Whitehall in their propaganda campaign. Finally, the paper argues that Chamberlain's propaganda strategy towards Germany collapsed during the Allied campaign in Norway in April 1940 precisely because it no longer conformed to its self-proclaimed principles of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’. As a result, the credibility of the BBC German Service suffered a significant, if ultimately temporary, setback.     

The Great British Broadcasting Competition

The business reasons behind the decision to start the BBC television service in 1936 remain unclear despite the volume of literature on the subject. Additionally, controversy has persisted regarding foreign involvement in what has been considered a fully British system. What is apparent from the literature is an emphasis placed on the technical development, generally under-representing other aspects of television. A new multi-disciplinary approach is proposed and applied here to explore the circumstances around the emergence of the service, together with hitherto neglected industry aspects: the business and commercial issues relating to broadcaster and suppliers. This paper highlights the primacy of the BBC television service as providing the first instance of what became a common template for live television creation whilst illustrating, with new evidence, foreign influence on British engineering development for the BBC service.     

Repatriated Germans and ‘British Spirit’

Following the end of the Second World War, the ideals of public service broadcasting that had first been exemplified by the BBC came to lay the groundwork for a new type of broadcasting system in Northern Germany. This led to intensive discussions between British Military Officers and their German counterparts about the principles of public service broadcasting. Repatriated Germans came to play a crucial role. Having worked for the BBC German Service during their years of exile, some of them helped to nurture a new generation of democratic journalists. Focusing on these men, this article reveals the difficulties in transferring and adapting public service ideals. Making use of a wide range of sources, we highlight the multifaceted roles of the repatriated Germans, as both intermediaries and transmitters of public service broadcasting. We show how many of them came to play a pivotal role in resisting pressure from conservative forces in West German society.     

Our enemy's enemy

This article focuses on representations of Britain to occupied France by the BBC French Service via its flagship programme Les Français parlent aux Français [The French speak to the French]. It first examines the establishment of the service and the formulation of a British propaganda strategy on occupied France. It then explores the service's efforts to foster French belief in Britain as France's friend and ally, and to rationalise key issues and incidents which challenged that narrative. Simultaneously, it positions French Service endeavours alongside the propaganda delivered on French national radio, known as Radio Vichy, in order to explore the exchanges about Britain between French propagandists who spoke on behalf of different Frances. In so doing, the article provides a close reading of the original French Service broadcasts which covers a larger corpus of material than has hitherto been documented in published collections, and which extends existing knowledge on the topic.     

Pawns in a Chess Game

The Spanish Service was established in June 1939, two months after the end of the civil war in Spain and shortly before the start of the Second World War. Its implementation was strongly affected by these conflicts in the context of new international relations. Therefore, this study of the Spanish Service during 1939–1945 allows not only a better understanding of the communicational strategies developed by the BBC, but also of the complex Anglo-Spanish relations and the important role played by the Spanish-language broadcasts therein. The study is mainly based on archival documents from the National Archives in London and memoirs.     

Revisiting Transnational Broadcasting

This article introduces a collection of original papers and research project reports considering the history of the BBC foreign-language services prior to, and during, the Second World War. The communication between the British government and foreign publics by way of mass media constituted a fundamental, if often ignored, aspect of Britain's international relations. From the 1930s onwards, transnational broadcasting, that is, broadcasting across national borders, became a major element in the conduct of Britain's diplomacy, and the BBC was employed by the government to further its diplomatic, strategic and economic interests in times of rising international tension and conflict. A review of the literature on the BBC's foreign-language broadcasts sets the stage for the presentation of the articles that compose this special issue of Media History.     

BBC Experiments in Local Radio Broadcasting 1961–62

In the early 1960s, the BBC was given the opportunity to demonstrate that it had the skills and resources to create localized broadcasting, by organizing a series of experimental stations across the UK. Although the output was not heard publicly, the results were played to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, who were deliberating about the future direction of radio and television. Using archival research, featuring contemporary BBC documents, this paper argues that these experimental stations helped senior managers at the BBC to harness technological innovation with changing attitudes in society and culture, thus enabling them to formulate a strategy that put the BBC in the leading position to launch local radio a few years later in 1967.     

英国广播公司(BBC)动态语义出版模式研究

[目的/意义]动态语义出版是BBC提出的新兴出版模式,已成功应用到体育、新闻等多个领域。通过对动态语义出版模式进行研究,为动态数字出版的发展提供思路。[方法/过程]在论述动态语义出版内涵和架构的基础上,从基础架构、应用环境、出版模式、作用效果4个维度对比分析动态语义出版与一般数字出版。[结果/结论]BBC动态语义出版模式在系统架构具有一定的创新性,其动态性、语义性和互动性有利于进一步提升科研人员的知识发现与创新效率。     

THE BLOGGING BBC

Blogging has shifted from an activity largely taking place outside established media to a practice appropriated by professional journalists. This study explores how BBC News has incorporated blogging in its journalism, looking at the internal debates that led to the adoption of blogs and charting how they became a core part of the corporation's news output. Using a case study approach, it examines the impact of blogging on BBC editorial values and considers how journalists have sought to maintain their authority in a digital media environment by integrating a new form of journalism within existing norms and practices. The BBC offers a unique case study as its long-standing editorial values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness appear at odds with the notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated. The research reveals that blogs emerged initially as an activity peripheral to the main newsgathering functions of the organisation and were rapidly transformed into key mechanisms for communicating analysis and commentary to the public. It contends that, for now, blogging has had a greater impact on the style, rather than substance, of BBC journalism. While the systems whereby journalists deliver information have evolved, the attitudes and approaches have, so far, remained relatively static.     

Part of imperial communications

From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations—but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates. Through the three case studies—a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS' ‘Jerusalem Direct News Service’, and the NEBS' Islamic broadcasts—this article charts the evolving relationship between Great Britain and its Arab-world radio stations, examining these three stations in tandem tension between national and regional broadcasting mandates, as well as the challenge that managing each station raised for British officials in the UK and in-country. It moves away from a focus on the disembodied spheres of ideology and propaganda, and toward the messy administrative decisions that reflected British officials' on-the-ground efforts to navigate the administrative control and programming decisions in the perplexing world of semi-independent radio broadcasting stations in the Middle East. It closes by noting that while UK-based British officials saw these three stations as operating under the aegis of British governance and on the model of the BBC, the ESB and the PBS, in particular, reflected and projected not a British imperial identity but an Egyptian and a Palestinian nationalist one.     

BBC Portuguese Service during World War II

This article analyses the editorial line of the BBC Portuguese Service during World War II, presenting evidence of how the output of the broadcasts was influenced by the need of the Foreign Office to maintain a good relationship with the authoritarian regime led by Oliveira Salazar. Focusing on the internal guidelines that ruled the Service, this history demonstrates how Portuguese language broadcasts never threatened the survival of the regime that ruled in Portugal, despite the fact that towards the end of the war the station was used as a weapon to pressure Salazar to give in to British demands, namely to end exports of tungsten to Germany. A discussion is presented on the difficult task the Portuguese Service had to accomplish throughout the war: to praise a dictatorship while promoting British views on the war.     

“HAVE THEY GOT NEWS FOR US?”

The BBC elicits and uses a number of different types of audience material, but the corporation has most wholeheartedly embraced what we call Audience Content (eyewitness footage or photos, accounts of experiences, and story tip-offs). Indeed, when the term user-generated content (UGC) is used by BBC news journalists it usually denotes only this kind of material. Audience material is often described by commentators and practitioners as having revolutionised journalism by disrupting the traditional relationships between producers and consumers of the news. In the main journalists and editors see material from the audience as just another news source, a formulation which is perpetuated by the institutional frameworks set up to elicit and process audience material as well as the content of the corporation's UGC training. Our data suggest that, with the exception of some marginal collaborative projects, rather than changing the way most news journalists at the BBC work, audience material is firmly embedded within the long-standing routines of traditional journalism practice.     

谁在操纵BBC——公众?政府?——透视英国政府关于BBC公共广播改革的“绿皮书”

英国政府就BBC颁布的“绿皮书”(近12万字,全称为“BBC皇家管理宪章分析———一个独立于政府的强大的BBC”),由三大部分20个问题组成。它为BBC的运营做了详细的规划。本文透过BBC“绿皮书”,分析了BBC董事会分解的原因和背景,同时解答了广为人们关注的诸多问题:BBC托管真的能在未来代表付执照费者的利益吗?BBC能够履行其责任并有权利批准预算和计划吗?“绿皮书”公布之后各方的反应如何?BBC真的独立于政府吗?     

Clogging the Machinery: the BBC's experiment in science coordination, 1949–1953

In 1949, physicist Mark Oliphant criticised the BBC's handling of science in a letter to the Director General William Haley. It initiated a chain of events which led to the experimental appointment of a science adviser, Henry Dale, to improve the ‘coordination’ of science broadcasts. The experiment failed, but the episode revealed conflicting views of the BBC's responsibility towards science held by scientists and BBC staff. For the scientists, science had a special status, both as knowledge and as an activity, which in their view obligated the BBC to make special arrangements for it. BBC staff, however, had their own professional procedures which they were unwilling to abandon. The events unfolded within a few years of the end of the Second World War, when social attitudes to science had been coloured by the recent conflict, and when the BBC itself was under scrutiny from the William Beveridge's Committee. The BBC was also embarking on new initiatives, notably the revival of adult education. These contextual factors bear on the story, which is about the relationship between a public service broadcaster and the external constituencies it relies on, but must appear to remain independent from. The article therefore extends earlier studies showing how external bodies have attempted to manipulate the inner workings of the BBC to their own advantage (e.g. those by Doctor and Karpf) by looking at the little-researched area of science broadcasting. The article is largely based on unpublished archive documents.