The TV News Scheduling Game: When the Face of the Newscaster Matters

From the late 1920s, all radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom was undertaken by a public sector broadcaster—the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Television was also the exclusive preserve of the BBC until the mid-1950s, when advertiser-supported commercial stations came into existence. This form of competition for audiences, but not for finance, between two broadcasting sectors—called by some a 'comfortable duopoly'—persisted until the late 1980s when the government permitted competitive entry by cable and satellite operators, introduced competition for advertising revenue between terrestrial stations, and placed commercial television broadcasting on a more competitive footing by introducing tendering for franchises. As these changes have occurred, the BBC has maintained its traditional system of regulation and has continued to operate under a Royal Charter. Although the expiry of the current Charter at the end of 1996 has provoked a debate about the role of the BBC, the government has stated its intention to renew the Charter for another 10 years. It seems likely that, until the year 2002 at least, the current system of regulating and financing public Service broadcasting in the United Kingdom will remain intact. However, the proliferation of channels represents a threat to the BBC's audience base. There may also be difficulties in combining within the same organization a public service mission and highly commercial activities, undertaken in a very competitive world market.     

Book Review—Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith,Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in American Radio

For most of the 20th century, international broadcasting was characterized by state-run broadcasts carried over shortwave radio. Such broadcasting was at the core of the Cold War and World War II, as well as the decade leading up to World War II. After the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the geopolitical context that had structured international broadcasting for so long dissolved, allowing for the possibility of significant changes in international broadcasting. One of these changes since the end of the Cold War is the development of Web radio. The year 1995 marks the point when broadcasting over the Web began in earnest. Included in this movement were a number of the primary broadcasters who had been, and still were, active in international shortwave broadcasting. Then, in 2001, after gradually reducing shortwave output to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, the BBC World Service terminated official shortwave broadcasts to these areas. In place of shortwave, listeners were directed to receive BBC World Service programming primarily through Web broadcasts and secondarily through local AM/FM rebroadcasts. The announcement of the termination of these shortwave broadcasts provoked a large and vocal opposition to the cuts from shortwave listeners, professionals in international broadcasting, and even the British Parliament. This article documents the BBC World Service's announcement as well as the reaction it generated.     

PIETY AND PROFESSIONALISM

This research focuses on two decades in the BBC's relationship with religion as an area of programming. The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of massive social change in Britain in which traditional religious institutions were challenged relentlessly and a more religiously diverse society emerged. This makes it a significant time to examine the BBC's response and the impact these changes had on the culture of production within the Corporation. This research asks how did the BBC frame the making of religious programmes within the changing socio-political context and how did their changing religious mission sit within the Corporation's wider strategic aims? Religious broadcasting also offers a unique microcosm within which to view the changing professional culture of the BBC itself. To address these interests this research uses documents from the BBC's written archive and accounts from staff involved with the genre at the time.     

‘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.     

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.     

The Symbolic Agenda of a British Satellite Broadcaster's 1997 General Election Coverage

This study of Sky News, run by Britain's main satellite station, suggests that its decision to provide intensive coverage of the 1997general election was determined less by hopes of commercial payoff than a desire for self-respect and the admiration of politicians and fellow broadcasters. This symbolic agenda boosted the self-image of Sky staff as major media players and ensured a continued adherence to conventional notions of public service broadcasting.     

Policy,Pop, and the Public: The Discourse of Regulation in British Commercial Radio

This paper examines the language and practices of regulation that have constructed the idea of British commercial radio. It concludes that the regulator's definitions of its purpose and practice are characterized by variability because of the attempt to draw simultaneously from repertoires of definition established in Britain's public service, commercial, and community traditions. In turn, it is noted that this discourse of regulation does not seem to be shared by those who run commercial radio stations. The paper explores the way that the dominance of a particular public service ideal is negotiated with the increasing influence of commercial orders of discourse, and the marginalization of concepts of community broadcasting.     

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.     

Educating Students About Global Media Regulation

As Mexico's government undertook neoliberal reforms to join the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, a number of scholars questioned the cultural consequences of closer media ties to the United States and Canada. Government officials countered that Mexico's strong identity needed no protection. This study situates the disagreement within cultural policy traditions, and examines how Mexican television broadcasting changed under globalization forces—including domestic competition, international market expansion, and new technology development—during the 1990s and early 2000s.Thestudy concludes that insufficient attention was given NAFTA's impact on Mexico's own television industry, which strongly influences culture.     

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.     

Visualizing Critique: Montage as a practice of alternative media

Postwar religious broadcasting in Britain sought to accommodate diverging aims, with public radio as the established arena for Christian evangelism and yet also an emerging forum for dissenting viewpoints in an increasingly faith-averse age. A transitional figure within literary modernism, E. M. Forster embraced broadcast radio in the effort to disseminate ‘culture,’ even as he sought to make the ethical turn away from culture as religious. Since the 1930s, Forster had consistently supported the airing of such ‘minority’ viewpoints; after the war, his arguments for ethical alternatives to Christian broadcasting were bolstered by the rise of postwar ecumenism and the Beveridge reforms. Forster's defense of humanist broadcasts given by Margaret Knight in January 1955 effectively highlights the formated nature of on-air debates at the expense of unpopular viewpoints, even as BBC policy-makers were actively considering abandoning existing practices in favor of stand-alone ethical rebuttals to accepted Christian viewpoints.     

Loose lips on the air: The BBC's wartime radio blunder

In wartime, governments must develop methods of controlling information. During World War II, for the first time, the British government had to invent policies about speech that could be broadcast on radio. Problems inevitably surfaced. One occurred in 1943 during a transatlantic hookup, when a BBC presenter quoted General Montgomery whom she had seen at a London nightclub and whose whereabouts were classified. The mistake provides insight into three wartime phenomena: British censorship, the government's public relations efforts, and the emerging power of the BBC.     

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.     

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.     

A statement on the “fairness doctrine”

Although it is only a dozen years old, Britain's commercial television service is a powerful example of the way in which a system, different from that familiar to broadcasters in the United States, can evolve. Actually, the IT A was designed to avoid the very difficulties that the U.S. system acquired through 40 years of trial‐and‐error. Some of the research for this comparative study of two different kinds of commercial television broadcasting was conducted while the author was studying in Great Britain on a research grant. Robert P. Crawford received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah, and is Director of the College Center for Radio‐Television at Queens College, New York.     

BBC Radio Leicester in 1976: Kick Starting British Asian Radio

This article examines how, in 1976, BBC Radio Leicester revolutionized broadcasting to Asian communities in England by launching a 5-nights a week Asian program. Aimed at helping to diffuse the toxic racial atmosphere in the city and improve community relations, the program proved to be a huge success and a direct forerunner of the BBC Asian Network.     

浅析美欧公共电视发展的法律环境

本文讨论的是美国民营公共电视机构所处的法律环境,以及欧盟各国对公共电视发展的法律支持,旨在提供对国外公营广电的基本了解。     

BBC's Wednesday Magazine and Arts Television for Women

Wednesday Magazine (1958–1963) was an innovative BBC television afternoon arts and culture strand produced by the specialist BBC women's programme unit, which had been built up and nurtured by the first dedicated head of women's programmes Doreen Stephens, who was appointed in 1953. Stephens was responsible for the development of a diverse and extensive range of women's programming; highly ambitious in the offering that it presented to its female viewers. This article will examine the series Wednesday Magazine exploring the wealth of arts and culture items broadcast, whilst considering the programme's significance in critical histories of both women's programming and arts television. The article will also make an intervention into historical debates around what constituted women's television in Britain.