BBC television news in the world: An introduction

Abstract

When we sent out a call for papers for the BBC at 100 special issues, ‘the BBC in the world’was one of the key themes listed therein. It was striking, on assessing the excellent abstracts that were submitted, that the bulk of these took as their subject matter the BBC’s transnational relationships with its near neighbours, either geographically in Europe, or culturally, in North America. This mirrors a general preponderance in the scholarship on the BBC’s global position, written by Western authors who inevitably approach the subject from a particular point of view. Despite the current efforts in the academy to decolonise our thinking, teaching and research, television studies approaches to the BBC remain dominated by Western perspectives. There is therefore a significant gap in studies of BBC television. We need more studies of the work of the BBC from the perspectives of scholars (and audiences) outside of theWest. The following pieces add to the conversation and begin to address this gap. They are written in the Critical Studies in Television tradition of short, punchy ‘provocations’ that present a viewpoint or snapshot, able to be produced more flexibly and responsively than a full academic article. The authors were invited to write on any topic related to the BBC in the world, but – coincidentally or not – both articles present an assessment of the operations of BBC News in global contexts, and the way these are perceived by audiences in Nigeria and India. The BBC’s position as a global provider of news is complicated by its history of broadcasting overseas, one that Marie Gillespie, AlbanWebb and Gerd Baumann describe as ‘little known and perhaps even less understood’ (2008: 453). The World Service, established in 1932 and variously named ‘Empire’ and ‘Overseas’ services during its history, now broadcasts radio content in 42 languages worldwide. Part-funded by the UK government, with historical variations in the amount of control or oversight of the state, the service operates as a form of ‘soft power’ and can be viewed as ‘paternalistic’ at best (Sambrook, 2022), propagandistic at worst. The BBC’s global television news provision operates as a commercial outfit rather than directly as a public service, but retains the institution’s PSB-associated brand values of high-quality, impartial news provision. Daya Kishan Thussu notes that despite its aims of promoting British interests, these services