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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.
I don't know what budget funds this, but I'd be pleased if it were foreign aid rather than the BBC licence fee.
I suspect there are enough resourceful folks in Dark Korea that somebody will be listening. It doesn't take many. And the fact that it is hard to get makes it somehow more attractive and trustworthy. Word of mouth will take it from there. I'm not sure what good it will do though; the strangle hold on the population is pretty complete.
And of course the government will do everything it can to jam the signal. And of course the jamming will not be 100% effective; Things like frequency hopping and shortwave twilight immunity will ensure that some folks can get it some of the time.
Interestingly, South Korea jams North Korean propaganda radio pretty efficiently, but of course not effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I like the idea of dropping thousands of cheap solar powered shortwave receivers over Dark Korea, but perhaps it would be more effective to just drop a million or so coupons for a Free Quarter Pounder Meal at the McD's just across the boarder in Seoul.
No I'm one of the people who thinks having a DG who's also on the board of HSBC (a conservative party donor) is a conflict of interest but hey pick whichever bigoted approach you want.
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