Local Radio—A Different Sort of Animal

There was extensive mutual influence between BBC Local Radio and Independent Local Radio (ILR), particularly during the set-up periods for both systems. Although they competed for locations and frequencies, often fiercely, they developed through a single governmental mechanism and came to feel at times a close affinity. Had the proposals of the Annan Committee been agreed, that these 2 systems of local radio should be brought together under a single regulator, both could have benefited and the long-term prospects for local radio in the UK might have been enhanced.     

BBC Radio Ulster: Public Service Radio in Northern Ireland’s Divided Society

BBC radio has been broadcast in Northern Ireland since shortly after the establishment of the country in the early 1920s. Throughout this period it has been faced by the challenge of how to deliver public service radio in a divided society, one that has for many years experienced violent conflict. Today as BBC Radio Ulster, the station has the highest audience reach of any BBC network radio service or those nations services in Scotland and Wales. This article outlines how BBC policy serves to deliver this performance, by examining a BBC Trust Service Review in relation to culture and diversity.     

The Greater London Council’s Initiatives: A Precursor of British Asian Radio Broadcasting

By the mid-1970s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Independent Local Radio (ILR) sector started catering to the local Asian migrant listener community in England, by producing Asian radio programming output in English and in Asian languages such as Hindi and Urdu. In the 1980s, the Greater London Council (GLC) came up with its own initiatives to cater to London’s Asian migrant community. This article describes GLC’s initiatives through its Community Radio Unit, which encouraged independent British Asian radio broadcasting in England.     

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.     

Shortwave news: An exploratory study

This study focuses on the news content of four major international news broadcasters: VOA, BBC, Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. The period of study was from February 1 through 5, 1979.     

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.     

Independent Local Radio in the West Midlands

This essay presents the comparative analysis of two Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations in the West Midlands during the 1970s. ILR was a public, community-based, radio service funded by the sale of spot advertising, and the success or the failure of an ILR station depended on the outlook and experience of its management team. BRMB represented the appropriate balance of experience and expertise. It was headed by a managing director with a commercial background and a programme controller experienced in regulated public service broadcasting. Beacon was a station with a management from a commercial broadcasting background, and their approach brought the station into conflict with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), ILR's regulator. The profit motive took precedence over the fulfilment of its public service obligations, and it was this which caused the IBA to remove the Beacon licence. This essay will, therefore, address two principal questions: why were the experiences of the two West Midlands ILR stations in the 1970s so different and why were they treated so differently by the regulator?     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Early Canadian radio broadcasting policy privileged private, commercial broadcasting enterprises above alternative broadcasting formats, including amateur and community radio. One station, 10AB, operated by the Moose Jaw Radio Association (MJRA) and owned by community members took exception to this policy and engaged in a decade-long dispute with radio authorities, first the Radio Branch of the Department of Marine and Fisheries and later the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC). The MJRA ignored regulations with which it disagreed and challenged the radio authorities whilst requesting a private commercial broadcasting license. Absorbed by perceived discrimination, the MJRA failed to understand the complex situation the CRBC faced. I argue that considering transnational radio history can deepen our understanding of the dispute between the local station and national regulators in Canada.     

Remarks on Radio Localism

Radio stations regularly conduct music research to determine what music they should play. Programming belief is that if they play music that people like better, more people will listen and listen longer, and the station's ratings will improve. This project utilizes Radio &; Records' Callout America® callout research of the top 30 songs on its Contemporary Hit Radio/Pop chart and their published CHR/Pop radio station playlists to compile an average favorability score for the music the station played. These scores were then compared to Arbitron ratings. Analysis found a statistically significant direct correlation between music research scores and Arbitron ratings.     

Airtime for Newcomers

This article explores the British and West German public service radio’s abilities to reflect on and to address the specific needs and expectations of migrant groups in their programmes between the 1960s and 1980s. Mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion alike can be investigated here. Empirically, it is based on comparisons of radio broadcasts on and for different immigrant communities, produced by BBC Radio Leicester on/for the post-war Asian migrants in England and by West German public service broadcasting on/for ‘Gastarbeiter’ (foreign workers) as well as for ‘Spätaussiedler’ (German repatriates from East Europe). Radio is studied as an agent of identity management and citizenship education. Not only did radio talk about migrants and migration to introduce these topics and the newcomers to the local population. It also offered airtime to selected migrant communities to cater for their needs and interests as well as to facilitate their difficulties of adjusting to an unfamiliar environment.     

Who are We?

This article scrutinises the usage of the words “we”, “us” and “our” by BBC radio journalists when reporting and discussing news and current affairs. By analysing reports and discussions on the “flagship” Radio 4 Today, a daily news programme whose centrality to political and public debate is widely recognised, the article raises substantive questions about clarity, accuracy and impartiality in senior broadcast journalists’ choice of language. In exploring the assumptions which may underlie the invocation, via such language choices, of an implied community, and against the backdrop of the BBC's commitment to impartiality in its Editorial Guidelines, the article identifies numerous recent examples where the choice of words and identifiers can be seen as undermining the BBC's impartiality and which show several of its senior journalists adopting the first-person plural “we” when reporting on matters of public policy. The findings therefore indicate a general need to codify norms which are seen to integrate the need for accuracy as well as impartiality, and for these norms to take into account issues which might at first glance seem to be inconsequential, micro-level features of the journalists’ language. The evidence suggests that more fine-grained guidelines on permissible circumstances for BBC journalists’ usage of “we” and “our” need revising and disseminating in the light of these findings.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Radio as a Successful Local Storyteller in Los Angeles: A Case Study of KKBT and KPCC

This case study examines the local storytelling practices of two radio stations in Los Angeles: one a commercial hip-hop station, the other a public radio station managed by Minnesota Public Radio with a news-talk format. Interviews with station staff and direct observation of station practices provide data that reveal specific practices showing how stations can apply communication infrastructure theory in attempts to forge the connections between the media, community residents, and the local organizations that bind neighborhoods. Obstacles to sustaining these practices are noted, including commercial pressures and journalistic principles that may hinder advocacy.