Slashdot Mirror
BBC World Service To Provide Radio For North Korea and Eritrea (bbc.com)
Ewan Palmer writes: The BBC World service has announced it will expand to serve the worst countries for press freedom as part of a plan to reach a global audience of 500 million. The British government announced its "single biggest increase in the World Service budget ever committed" and promised to invest more than $128 million by 2017/18 to the service. Along with improvements in countries such as Thailand, Russia and Somalia, they will launch radio services in North Korea and Eritrea who, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2015 World Press Freedom index, are the two worst performing countries in the world when ranked on a number of criteria including media independence, respect for the safety and freedom of journalists, and infrastructural environment in which the media operate.
North Koreans typically have radios, they're just hardwired to receive on official party channels only.
Shortwave listening was a staple of my childhood. In the 70s and early 80s roughly a third all portable radios were shortwave-capable and a great many people listened to programmes from other countries on a regular basis. Of course you were listening to the raw output of world governments, but you knew this and they made no bones about it. Shortwave is expensive and power-intensive, and yet the airwaves were crowded. People were listening. James Careless has also written this informative shortwave lament which gives much needed backstory for the younger generations.
When I surf US news sources today I can spot the bias from a mile away, and even when they strive for balance of viewpoint the result often comes off clumsily, buried in hedge-words and apologetic disclaimers as if the commentator is, well, feeling a bit insecure. I miss the clarity of sifting world news as portrayed by world governments, assembled and delivered for an English speaking audience in five minutes.
For example, one of my daily listens was Vladimir Posner on Radio Moscow World Service with his daily talk. At a time when US News networks portrayed Russia as a cold-hearted military threat intent on world conquest and our own President Reagan seemed incapable of anything beyond an infantile level of Cowboys 'n Indians... Posner's commentaries were thoughtful and reflective viewpoints on our cultural differences and similarities. You could even 'read' between the lines and glimpse the areas in which Russian society would later reform.
I was lucky to grow up in a time of sunspot activity. Then you could bop over to the BBC for world news (they still cover it best) and then tune at random. You'd hear pan pipes, Romanian lover's laments and even classical music --- tortured as it was by AM bandwidth and fade --- had a certain magic to it, especially at 3 O'clock in the morning.
Tie a long thin wire to a rock and toss the end over a tree or your neighbor's roof, pull it tight and connect it. You're listening to Tokyo, broadcasting from Tokyo. No infrastructure in between except for the ionosphere.
Of course the Internet --- that incredibly, almost laughably fragile construct that relies on stable grid power between you and your 'station', with its hidden single points of failure like DNS and relies on an awesome amount of cooperation and due diligence of faceless corporations and governments to ensure that every little packet will arrive safely and unfiltered... is better, for everything, right?
Sure it is. Until the very day and moment it is not better any more.
Any number of things could happen. It could all be over in minutes.
It would be wise to acquire at least one good shortwave radio.
If something goes wrong with the world, you might be the only one who knows what's going on.
While you're at it, go ahead and toss that rock and give a listen.
We're past the heyday of shortwave broadcasting but there are still voices out there.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>