10 Mar 2011 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
A BBC news team trying to reach the town of Zawiya were detained, beaten and subjected to mock executions by pro-Gaddafi forces. The team of three were detained on Monday at an army roadblock and taken to a military barracks in Tripoli where they were held for 21 hours. After release they left the country.
The Guardian reports today that its correspondent, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, and his travelling companion Andrei Netto, from the Brazilian newspaper Estado, are missing in Libya. Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi national, was last in touch with the paper through a third party on Sunday.
4 Mar 2011 | Index Index, minipost
BBC Radio and Radio France International (RFI) are now off air in Ivory Coast. The government of Laurent Gbagbo denies taking action against the radio stations, but in the past the government has blocked both these stations. Pro- and anti-government media have complained of threats, harassment and attacks.
23 Feb 2011 | Uncategorized
BBC director general Mark Thompson was a bit wimpish during the Newsnight debate [watch here] about the future of newspapers, when it was put to him that BBC online news was “distorting the market”. The corporation is unnecessarily defensive on this issue.
The BBC is distorting the market only if you buy into the idea that news must always be a “market” whose terms of trade are defined by commercial organisations like the FT, News Internatonal, the Guardian and Associated Newspapers. Whenever such organisations get the chance, of course they will complain that free BBC content is cramping their ability to make profits out of online news.
If, on the other hand, we talk about ‘funding models’, we see a different picture. The BBC has a funding model which is very successful and the big commercial organisations have one which, thanks to big cultural and technological changes, is currently less so. The BBC model — non-commercial news provision funded by what is effectively a hypothecated tax — is a triumphantly brilliant idea which has served this country extremely well for many decades.
BBC output is high-quality, trustworthy, independent, accessible and fantastically popular. (Yes, they get things wrong sometimes, but producing a news service is not like running the Faberge egg factory: perfection is not an option.) More than that, the BBC provides a benchmark for all the other journalism we see; by its example and reach, it keeps journalism (relatively) virtuous in this country.
If commercial organisations have trouble making money on the internet, let them go away and find a solution. That their funding model doesn’t work is no reason to go smashing up one that does.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
4 Feb 2011 | Uncategorized
At a parliamentary briefing this week on the World Service cuts (five language services to close, end of radio programmes in seven languages, 650 jobs lost), MPs were puzzled about the logic of the government’s actions. Why was the World Service being so brutally diminished when the government is actually increasing its foreign aid spending? Surely Bush House should qualify for some of that funding? There can be no doubt that World Service programmes contribute substantially towards the goals of international development: increasing access to information and freedom of expression around the world, essential for the foundation and health of any democracy. Well, it turns out that the Foreign Office (which has always funded the World Service till now) actually counts £25m of its grant-in-aid to the World Service towards meeting the government’s development goals. At the briefing in Westminster Hall, the former diplomat Lord Hannay declared it was a “con trick” — the World Service helps the government meet its target without entailing any further spending and without actually receiving development funding for its significant contribution. When you consider that the cuts over the next three years are totalling £46m and destroying Bush House’s position as the world’s single largest international broadcaster, receiving £25m would have averted the catastrophic blow that has just been delivered. Bush House has as much claim to international aid as the British Council (which received £40m in international development funding last year via the Foreign Office). The government urgently needs to rethink its strategy and at the very least justify why the Pope is deemed worthy of foreign aid, yet one of our greatest cultural institutions is disqualified: £1.85m of the development budget was spent on the papal visit last year.
