Annabelle Sreberny

Mediated Culture in the Middle East: Diffusion, Democracy, Difficulties

This overview attempts to place the region in wider historical and cultural contexts. The recent and rapid developments in media are discussed, while particular attention is paid to the dynamics of democratization, gender participation and Internet access in the Middle East.

The Iranian Press and the Continuing Struggle Over Civil Society 1998-2000

This article maps the manner in which the press has become a key site in the ongoing struggle between conservatives and reformers inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. A more moderate president has encouraged renewed debate about civil society, often evident in new titles and newspaper content, while the forces of conservatism continue to fear and censor such debate. A new struggle around an old medium is very live in Iran.

Transcultural journalism and the politics of translation: Interrogating the BBC World Service

When George Orwell worked for the BBC Eastern Services during the Second World War, he regarded it as ‘an organ of colonial discourse propagating the word and world view of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people’ (Kerr, 2002: 473–90). Orwell’s misgivings about his own journalistic practice and the BBC Eastern Service’s suspected ideological functions may pose an enduring dilemma for some journalists, but many are delighted to endure the processes of recruitment, induction, training and enculturation into the BBC’s hegemonic, globally diffused brand of impartial journalism. This is called, with some self-irony, ‘being BBCed’ by journalists working in, or for, Bush House. The BBC’s overseas services (now the World Service) have long relied on an army of diasporic translators and ‘the right kind of voice’ to disseminate news across the globe. The long-standing reputation of the BBC World Service (BBCWS) among the world’s pre-eminent broadcasters and its credibility have depended on the largely undocumented and unexplored everyday transcultural encounters and translation practices that have taken place in the diasporic and cosmopolitan contact zones of Bush House. This special issue draws on a collaborative empirical research project on the BBC World Service to examine wider issues of the politics, ethics and practices of transcultural journalism and the politics of translation.

WSIS: Articulating Information at the Summit:

This brief article examines WSIS as a staging of transnational political communication. Playing with the acronym, it explores a number of moments of articulation and contradiction within the WSIS process, including gender imbalance, the politics of the inside and the outside, the space between rhetoric and action, and the lack of media coverage of a media-focused event. It suggests that WSIS is as relevant for western publics as for southern publics, and that the articulation of civil society within WSIS can be seen as the globalizing of radical democracy.

Contradictions of the globalizing moment

London, August 2004: sufficient for context. The logics of the analysis of globalization seem now to privilege space over time, geography over history. Yet history is not ending but running fast, with dramatic changes in focus and debate, so that one’s standpoint needs to be addressed not only in terms of categories of social life and political orientation but also of the time and place from/in which one writes. Far from obliterating the traces of the moment, they need to be better written into our work, as indications of where we are when thinking the things we think. British television: for the moment. BBC channels are dominated by the Olympics, throughout the day, pushing other programmes off the schedule, helped by the relative synchronicity with Athens. European timing. Mediated sport is one obvious example of globalization processes. The modern Olympics are an example of the emergence of global competitions, which Robertson (1992: 59) suggests are central to the take-off phase of globalization. No mention, though, of the role of broadcasting whereby media are carriers of this other, earlier, element of globalization and make it public. Sport has been seen as part of the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias, 1978), whereby more and more people come to abide by universal rule-governed behaviour that includes making up the ‘rules of the game’ and the mechanisms for keeping them. Thus, articulation of International Olympic Committee (IOC) corruption (explored in a documentary in August 2004 on Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme) and doping scandals (high drama when two leading Greek athletes provided the headline story on the eve of the games’ opening) were said to only strengthen the rule-bound and transparent nature of sport. Indeed, as the Olympic games ‘come home to Athens’, the ‘home of democracy’, at the same time that international conflict was being waged and extended ‘to bring democracy’ to Others, the essence of democracy is worth spelling out (pace Keane, 1991). This centres on the ability by the people to re-write the rules of the game and even to determine who has the right to write the rules. All the attempts by the Islamic Republic to write about ‘religious democracy’ and the attempts by US ground forces to impose democracy don’t fly if the rules themselves cannot be re-written and if the rulers cannot be removed by the ruled when necessary. Global sport is obviously big business, as is media coverage, and both function to extend the global reach of capital. Eleven key sponsors

Editorial The BBC World Service and the Middle East: comparisons, contrasts, conflicts

The author reflects on the development of the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBCs) international broadcasting services in which the Middle East has played a vital role. He discusses that BBC adopted Arabic as its first foreign language service in January 1938 because of the threat of World War II. BBC decided to expand its radio service in Turkey and Persia.

Epilogue: The BBC World Service and the Middle East: past, present, and future dilemmas

The article offers information on the company BBC World Service (BBCWS) and its development and struggle in the Middle East. It also explains the relationship between BBCWS and British Foreign and Commonwealth office (FCO). Public diplomacy is stated to have altered the perceived and potential role of the BBC in the region.

Becoming Intellectual: The Blogestan and Public Political Space in the Islamic Republic

This chapter seeks to interrogate the possibility that the blogosphere is a significant space for a range of intellectual voices inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. The paper critiques naïve arguments that the blogosphere is totally oppositional by examining some of the religious discourses of ‘embedded intellectuals’. But it also critiques the idea that Iranian intellectual life must be examined solely through the prism of Islam. We explore how more critical voices have gravitated to the web in the absence of other sites for engagement with the regime. Using Gramscis notion of oppositional intellectuals, coupled with Mouffes argument about political space, we explore the emergent voices of women as well as the range of mundane economic issues being articulated through blogs and websites. Hence we suggest that Iranian virtual politics is quite robust, for the moment, even while under the censors gaze. All men (sic) are intellectuals but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals (A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1971)

The BBC Persian Service and the Islamic Revolution of 1979

This paper is the second part of a work in progress that examines the impact of seventy years of BBC Persian broadcasts to Iran. The Persian Service, established in December 1940, was originally set up by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as one of thirty-eight language services broadcasting to strategically important areas of the world during World War Two. The first piece of research looked at three historic moments when the influence of BBC Persian broadcasts was hotly debated: the toppling of the pro-German Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, in 1941; the late 1940s, when Irans nationalist leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, championed oil nationalization and challenged the rights hitherto enjoyed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and the US-led coup of 1953 that returned the young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne. The present research focuses on a period that many Iranians consider the most influential in terms of all BBC broadcasts to Iran. The BBC Persian Service (BBCPS) became a household name during 1978, the year leading up to the revolution of 11 February 1979. Many Iranians at home and abroad tuned in to hear the latest news and developments, even as the Shah of Iran accused the BBC of fomenting revolution, an argument echoed thirty years later in the responses of the Islamic Republic to the launch of the new Persian television channel in January 2009. The research shows clearly how difficult it had become for the FCO to uphold the independence of the BBC and support their closest friend in the region when he believed that the British government must be in charge. There was indeed heated debate and discussion inside the Foreign Office as to whether Britain was sacrificing its long-term interests by allowing the BBC to continue its broadcasts when even the British ambassador in Tehran was suggesting the service should be closed down.

The bbc persian service 1941–1979

The BBC World Service (BBCWS) functions with a deep and intriguing tension at the heart of its activities. Funded directly by the FCO, the BBCWS is subject to the changing priorities and concerns of British foreign policy. However, by 2008, the services themselves have come to operate under the sign of impartiality and distance from direct government influence. The BBCWS practice of distance from government has emerged over time and not without a struggle to claim and preserve control over the content of its broadcasts. Here we examine a particularly rich vein of BBCWS history, the establishment and development of the Persian language service. This was developed in the epoch of the Empire Service, a time of overt utilization of external radio services as tools of propaganda, and has played a major role in relations between the UK and the Persian-speaking world in crucial political conjunctures. Iranians have both listened to the BBC with scepticism but also regarded the Persian Service as one of their most trusted sources of news and information. The recent 2007 FCO allocation of funds to the development of Arabic television and Persian television reveals how central the Middle East region—and Iran in particular—remains to British political and economic interests. The paper describes how the BBC Persian Service became involved in three key moments in British–Persian relations and the attempts at political pressure from its own government with which it had to cope. These moments are the removal of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1941, the UK–Iran oil negotiations during 1948–1953 and the period leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The analysis of the latter period will be embellished as and when government documents are released under the 30 Year rule. The paper also shows how the relationship between the BBCWS and