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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.
too bad north koreans can not afford a shortwave radio, maybe broadcast on the medium wave band and airdrop a bunch of crystal radio kits
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I don't know what budget funds this, but I'd be pleased if it were foreign aid rather than the BBC licence fee.
Interesting to see the UK interest in Ethiopia and Eritrea again. Time to rebuild old relationships back into African cold war history?
The "infrastructural environment" was great for the US and UK decades ago.
Warming up Kagnew again? A site that gave the NSA and GCHQ great coverage of Africa and the Middle East (high-speed Morse 1950's), later submarine communications?
That site gave great intercept coverage before Diego Garcia was upgraded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Of course the disadvantage of the influence of the BBC is that all the refugees want to come here as a result...
The North Koreans will listen to the BBC and think, "hey, I don't mind a bit of propaganda but this is too much!"
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>
Interesting to see the UK interest in Ethiopia and Eritrea again. Time to rebuild old relationships back into African cold war history?
I doubt it. More likely this is so they can tell the Eritreans not to bother illegally emigrating to the UK. They seem to think it is a mythical land of milk and honey, when really it is just a reasonably dysfunctional western european country with terrible weather.
Fuck me... it should be!
Measured from outside the UK, sure, the BBC puts across a very British point of view; how could it not.
Inside the UK, this is an organisation that is accused of egregious negative bias by all sides: the very definition of a successfully neutral organisation.
> BBC World Service To Provide Radio For North Korea
No, they won't. They will be emitting, but the DPRK will promptly jam them with a few hundred kilowatts' worth of white noise, made by big, old soviet-made vacuum tube systems. Therefore, no service will be rendered.
Honestly said, I side with the DPRK here. Experience shows, anybody who makes concessions to the imperialists is promptly killed. Remember how Gaddhafi was ritually sacrificed on live TV just a few years after making peace with the NATO. Remember how Saddam hanged and how his sons were hunted with missiles. Look at how Assad is besieged as a result of the very reforms he had introduced in Syria. DPRK still stands because of their simple nukes + uncompromising stalinism. It is also absurd to expect regime change until US military (and with nukes) is stationed in South Korea. That is also an existential threat to the mainland China.
Restore Gaddhafi's only surviving son to lead Libya, stop trying to topple Assad and pay reparations to Syria. Restore Saddam's only surviving nephew to lead Iraq, pay reparations for the nation's stolen oil and then there can be talk about DPRK reforming to a degree.
When you live in Eritrea, "a reasonably dysfunction wester european country" is a land of milk and honey.
The North Koreans will listen to the BBC and think, "hey, I don't mind a bit of propaganda but this is too much!"
I'd be interested to hear your idea of a more balanced and neutral service than the BBC.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Ah yes. Just like providing aid to India in the hope that it just goes all Raj
The BBC would not be at the top of my list of examples of "media independence".
The BBC isn't perfect but it's less imperfect than almost anything else of its size.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
yeah - here in Scotland it is all kicking off about the BBC - but you would never know that because it is not reported... on the BBC ... !! Scotland has had a strange move towards online away from BBC and newspaper media.
I do agree with what Anon says below about most things. Not so sure about the oil price because it was never part of the annual spend calculations for an independent Scotland. They were going to create an oil wealth fund with any revenue so the effects would not have been seen for a decade or more (ref: Scotlands Future). Scotland's GDP per capita is higher than anywhere in the UK & NI except London - but the overall wealth figures are lower largely due to Scotland subsidising other parts of the UK (which is OK by the way).
Good idea, BBC. Let's topple whatever dictatorship currently running Eritrea so that it becomes an extension of Somalia. After all, one of the factors in Eritrea's secession from Ethiopia was that while inland Ethiopia is largely Eastern Orthodox Christian, Eritrea is majority Muslim. And now, w/ democracy being encouraged, it's not long before they go the way of Libya or Tunisia
The BBC is an instrument of the confluence between government and corporations. It's mission is to maintain the status quo. The run-up to the Iraq War and fallout from the 2008 financial crisis are two recent examples of their inability to be "independent". They are a tool of control. And North Koreans don't need more control. They already have plenty.
You are welcome on my lawn.