Marie Gillespie

Transnational Television Audiences after September 11

This article introduces and sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of a collaborative research project into news-viewing in multilingual families and households in the UK on and after 11 September 2001 upon which the articles in this special issue are based. Viewing the attacks of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath on television triggered deep emotional responses in viewers. Many people experienced a sense of trauma; these events forced viewers to think about the unthinkable—violent and painful death at the hands of terrorists—and the consequences of enduring political conflict over issues of security and terrorism. In thinking through the causes, meanings and consequences of these events, viewers offered accounts of other ‘ground zeros’. They compared and contrasted coverage on a range of channels such as BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN, and actively sought alternative news sources because of perceived bias in Western reporting. The research examines the extent to which different patterns of news consumption reinforce or relativise understandings of terrorism and political violence.

News media, threats and insecurities: an ethnographic approach

This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and security in Britain following the 2003 Iraq War. We develop the case for a more integrated and nuanced approach to studying the relationship between policymakers, media practitioners and media publics given the increasing importance of these relationships to international relations (IR) matters of concern. Our analysis demonstrates the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that explain why certain individuals and groups arrive at certain understandings or perceptions of threats. Responding to recent calls in IR for the use of diverse and interdisciplinary methods, our methodology enables us to demonstrate how disparities emerge between official and public understandings of threats. These understandings result from peoples engagement with political and media discourses, and the experience of this engagement can be characterized by connectivity, (un)certainty and contradiction.

BBC Arabic, Social Media and Citizen Production: An Experiment in Digital Democracy before the Arab Spring:

This article examines an innovative experiment in democratizing international broadcasting through embracing a participatory model of production. In spring 2010, a political debate television series was co-created by BBC Arabic and citizen producers, using social media tools. Based around interviews with prominent political and controversial public figures, the programme (G710) was broadcast weekly on satellite TV across the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking world. Combining collaborative ethnography with corporate ‘big data’ analysis, the research team followed the experiment from conception to premature closure. The article argues that the kinds of digital tools deployed in producing the programme, and used by BBC audience research to monitor user practices in real time, have become essential to corporate processes of BBC World Service governance and management procedures, business strategy, accountability measures, marketing practices and editorial decision-making. They act as change agents, presenting methodological problems and opportunities for the BBC’s audience researchers and academic researchers, as well as symbolizing the contradictory logic of empowerment and surveillance.

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.

The Mumbai attacks and diasporic nationalism: BBC World Service online forums as conflict, contact and comfort zones

The violent attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 occasioned intense political debates in the online forums of the BBC World Service (BBCWS). This article examines the ‘Have Your Say’ forums of BBC Urdu and BBC Hindi. Such public forums can be understood as ‘contact zones’ of debate between digitally empowered, potential ‘world citizens’, located both inside and outside their countries of identification (in this case Pakistan and India). BBCWS envisages such forums as facilitating a ‘global conversation’, which is its declared policy aim, but these particular forums are, in relation to the Mumbai attacks, sites of transnational affective bonding in terms of shared national identities, rather than sites of encounter and intellectual engagement with ‘others’. Although diverse opinions are expressed, users appear to value the forums as offering them ‘bonding’ rather than ‘bridging’ forms of transnational social capital. The BBCs editorial framing and pre‐moderation of debates contributes to this characteristic of the forums, in particular in the Hindi case. The process of selection, translation (hence editing), and the delay in publishing limits the potential for dialogue between users, but enhances the forums function as a message board or ‘public screen’ onto which diasporic nationalist imaginings are projected.

Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy

Intersecting shifts in the nature of security challenges, the media environment, and of multicultural society have, in the past decade, in European polities such as the UK, offered conditions for the generation of overt ruptures in the interests and interpretations held by different sections of society. These differing interests and interpretations centre on perceptions of threats to security—the perceptions held by elected representatives, military policy-makers, journalists and news audiences-cum-citizens (and each of these categories is intensely heterogeneous). Disagreement exists on a number of axes, for instance, the type of security question afforded priority (is nuclear terrorism a greater threat than state restriction of liberties?), and the policy responses warranted by security risks and threats. Consequently, disagreement about the nature of security, generally, and what might be posited as a range of plural, particular security/insecurity dynamics, in itself, can contribute to fostering senses of insecurity. Community cohesion has become one of the principal security challenges of the early twenty-first century for policy-makers (Gow, 2007a) in multicultural societies such as the UK (Parekh, 1998, 2005, 2008). Yet challenges to community cohesion sometimes appear to result from security policy. Moreover, among those we studied, more concern was expressed about the precarious nature of citizenship and the erosion of rights and liberties than about community cohesion (Gillespie & OLoughlin, 2009). From whichever perspective one views the problem of security, disjuncture begets disjuncture (Appadurai, 2006). How, then, have multicultural society, the legitimacy of government and security policy, and, as we shall argue, news media, come into such apparently conflictual relations? This Ethnopolitics, Vol. 9, No. 2, 239–253, June 2010

Broadcasting britishness, strategic challenges and the ecology of overseas broadcasting by the BBC

In December 2007, the BBC World Service celebrated 75 years of broadcasting overseas: from the first transmission on the original Empire Service to the explosion in foreign language services induced by the Second World War and the subsequent establishment and continuous re-development of a post-war pattern of broadcasting around the world that still bears an imprint on output today. Yet despite global public familiarity with the World Service as an institution, symbolised by its home at Bush House in London and the unmistakable Britishness of the ‘voice’ that emanates from it, the history of overseas broadcasting by the Corporation is little known and perhaps even less understood. It is more than a little surprising that the BBC World Service, or the External Services as they were known prior to a name change in 1988, have still to receive anything like the kind of critical and detailed examination warranted by their role in the political, diplomatic and cultural lives of those countries and diasporas to which they broadcast. Notwithstanding Asa Briggs’ colossal and extensive official history of the BBC up to the mid-1970s, Bush House remains an icon, though a relatively unexplained one. There has been a general failure in the academic community, as Philip Taylor has pointed out, to sufficiently mesh the media and other forms of cultural exchange into mainstream political and administrative histories and this remains the case today.

Diasporas and diplomacy: cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service, 1932-2012

Diasporas and Diplomacy analyzes the exercise of British ‘soft power’ through the BBC’s foreign language services, and the diplomatic role played by their diasporic broadcasters. The book offers the first historical and comparative analysis of the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ that has characterized the work of the BBC’s international services since the inception of its Empire Service in 1932 – from radio to the Internet. A series of empirically-grounded case studies, within a shared analytical framework, interrogate transformations in international broadcasting relating to: - colonialism and corporate cosmopolitanism - diasporic and national identities -public diplomacy and international relations -broadcasters and audiences The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and anthropology, media and cultural studies, journalism, history, politics, international relations, as well as of research methods that cross the boundaries between the Social Sciences and Humanities. It will also appeal to broadcast journalists and practitioners of strategic communication.

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.