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. (shrink)

Presented here is the transcript of a BBC radio broadcast by Elizabeth Anscombe that was recorded in May 1953 – the month when Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared in England for the first time. In her radio talk, Anscombe provides some biographical and philosophical background for reading the Philosophical Investigations. She addresses the importance of the Tractatus and of the literary qualities of Wittgenstein’s writing. Anscombe warns that it would be fruitless to adopt slogans from Wittgenstein without insight. She also calls (...) it a misunderstanding to think that Wittgenstein had championed something like the Ordinary Language Philosophy as it was practised at the time of the recording. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper we explore how a public national media outlet, the British BBC, represents an international legal case which has a highly political nature. The case is US versus Huawei/meng Wanzhou, which took place between 2018 and 2021. Accusations were that the Chinese technology company committed fraud, leading the global HSBC bank to breach US sanctions against Iran. The charges were made by the US using what is called an ‘extraterritorial law’, which, while rejected as law by governments (...) around the world, is policed by US economic powers and control over international finance. Using Critical Discourse Analysis we show that, while the BBC presents much detail of legal process, the actual nature of the law the US uses to bring criminal charges against international companies and banks, is neither considered nor questioned. Our interest is how such a law, which has a huge influence over global trade and politics, is presented to the public in this particular case. We contribute to the position that the nature of laws, how they are used and known, must always be understood within the prevailing discourses of the moment. (shrink)

We say we can no longer trust our public services, institutions or the people who run them. The professionals we have to rely on - politicians, doctors, scientists, businessmen and many others - are treated with suspicion. Their word is doubted, their motives questioned. Whether real or perceived, this crisis of trust has a debilitating impact on society and democracy. Can trust be restored by making people and institutions more accountable? Or do complex systems of accountability and control themselves damage (...) trust? Onora O'Neill challenges current approaches, investigates sources of deception in our society and re-examines questions of press freedom. 2002's Reith Lectures present a philosopher's view of trust and deception, and ask whether and how trust can be restored in a modern democracy. (shrink)

Employing the ideological square model (Van Dijk, 1998, 2000), this article examines polarization strategies of positive and negative representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in ideological discourse on the rise of China by Western media. We analyzed discourse properties in the narratives of five podcast episodes of the BBC World Service about the Chinese Dream, one episode each on Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, and Kenya. The results revealed prevalent negative representations of ‘them’ – emphasizing negative characteristics and de-emphasizing positive ones of (...) China. However, discourse strategies of emphasizing positive characteristics about ‘us’ and de-emphasizing negative things about ‘us’ were only found in Australia and Canada. The podcasts hardly avoided discussing negative aspects of India, Indonesia, and Kenya. In doing so, the BBC’s ideological discourse excluded these countries from ‘us.’ Our study indicates that the ideological square approach is not only useful to elucidate discourses behind positive and negative representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ but also can identify nuances in discursive construction of ‘us.’. (shrink)

This paper examines how the slogan of the “Chinese Dream” is represented in two western news reports on the CNN and the BBC websites. They are among the first news reports which introduce the “Chinese Dream” into the US and the UK, respectively. The analysis of both the verbal news texts and the visuals shows that the reporters use different discursive strategies to manipulate the ideological orientation of the social actors and social actions in discourse. Through the analysis, this study (...) shows how different discursive resources conceptualized in Theo van Leeuwen’s work, Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis, are used to stereotype “the other’s” politics and political discourse in BBC and CNN’s news texts, and perpetuate a Eurocentric view on perceiving contemporary Chinese political discourse. (shrink)

Despite a proliferation of research on Islam and Muslims in the media, very little work has focused on Muslim women, a much-debated social group that merits special consideration. This article aims to investigate how Muslim women are represented in BBC News website texts using a purpose-built corpus. The research employs analytical tools from the discourse-historical, socio-cognitive, and sociosemantic approaches to critical discourse studies. These are combined with corpus-based methodologies to investigate the semantic macrostructures that tend to be associated with Muslim (...) women and the discursive strategies employed in the representation of the hijab. The study is novel in its exhaustive approach to identifying salient and underreported issues related to Muslim women in news discourse. It also introduces a more integrated analysis that combines manual and automated techniques and tackles the quantification of qualitative results where possible. Findings suggest that Muslim women’s representations are largely restricted in terms of regional coverage. Semantic macrostructures related to conflict and crime are prevalent. The hijab remains a nodal discourse surrounding Muslim women whose function as a descriptive feature is often unclear, raising serious questions about its relevance. A number of recommendations are made for journalists to become cognizant of their own context models when reporting on Muslim women. (shrink)

The Theological Consequence is of a more scandalous nature for Catholic ‘insiders’—the literate laity etc.etc.—than is the ‘mere’ ‘Humanist’ one. The pair together can to ‘Evangalisation’ no good at all.The Eminence, who on the BBC programme looks slightly comic. is, when one reflects a very disquieting figure indeed. So: A squib is comic: a serious one is, serious.Note the ‘BBC Panorama’ presentations have been seen in Australia, and so, possibly, in other countries in which this Journal is read.

Existing studies have extensively explored audience engagement in TV news, but not enough attention has been paid to the discursive presentation of this phenomenon in the discourse of TV news kernels. Based on a pool of news items collected from BBC News at Ten, this article aims to investigate how the discourse of news kernels is constructed and presented to engage the audience. The analysis shows that news values and journalist–audience interaction are two main ways employed by the journalists to (...) achieve audience engagement in presenting TV news kernels. On one hand, a news kernel tends to cover the most newsworthy information of the news story, and the news text; on the other hand, it is often styled as newsworthy, too. In the meanwhile, the presentation of the news kernel tends to create a sense of interaction between the journalist and the audience by practices such as pre-opening remarks, introducing the reporter and alerting the audience, among others. The findings reflect quite different journalistic practice of TV news kernels from that of print news leads. (shrink)

The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in (...) part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalance and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of reflexivity based on a more differentiated account of reflexivity than is found in the speculative, often normatively-directed writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of reflexivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space. (shrink)

Originally published in 1960, The Future of Man is a chronicle of Professor Medwar's Reith lectures of 1959. The book outlines his predictions about the future estate of man, with the 'process of foretelling, rather than with what is actually foretold'. He asks, can we predict the future size of populations? What is the evidence and theoretical background for the belief that human intelligence is declining? Could human beings become uniformly excellent or is inborn diversity and inequality a necessary part (...) of the texture of human populations? The lectures tried to answer these questions and attempts to end with a definition of the biological standing of man. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, biologists and natural historians. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

У статті на підставі аналізу наукової літератури, експертних інтерв’ю, інформаційних ресурсів світової комп’ютерної мережі Інтернет, зокрема електронних варіантів таких видань, як BBC news, BBC Future, Financial Times; офіційних інтернет-порталів міжнародних організацій ООН, ВООЗ, українського Національного інституту стратегічних досліджень та ін. розглядаються питання щодо того, який вплив виказала пандемія COVID-19 на релігію і релігійні практики за час тих «жнив скорботи», які вона вже здійснила, та що чекає на них у майбутньому, коли пандемія таки припинить свій руйнівний хід по планеті. Авторка поставила (...) за мету – на основі аналізу новітньої інформації щодо впливу пандемії COVID-19 на релігію і релігійні практики виявити і представити ті важливі моменти, які вже є актуальними для них у нинішній момент, а також ті, що ще тільки починають проявлятися і будуть актуальними в пост-пандемічну епоху. В якості провідного метода дослідження використовувався метод Desk Research, який дозволяє як швидко отримувати інформацію, так і плідно зіставляти джерела інформації між собою з метою досягнення ефективного дослідницького результату та формулювання аргументованих висновків. У статті розглядаються питання: Якими були причини того, що пандемія фактично «перевернула світ»? Що це означає для майбутнього релігійних зборів, ритуалів та подорожей, враховуючи, що все це може посилити передачу вірусів у глобальному масштабі? Чи гряде кардинальна трансформація всього релігійного життя людства? А чи не є це вже початком кінця релігій, як це передбачали деякі соціологи минулого? Питання, як бачимо, фундаментальні. І їх поставила перед нами саме пандемія. Тож, вочевидь, праві ті вчені, які завжди відзначали, що кризи несуть в собі не тільки негативні явища, а й дають шанс на позитивні зміни в людському суспільстві. І, зіставивши думки філософів минулого, які вважали, що релігія, ця «стара магія» і «розчарування світу», скоро відійде в минуле, а «тотемом нового виду стане туризм», з тим, як пандемія COVID-19 вплинула на релігійну свідомість людей в усьому світі, авторка доходить висновку, що ці прогнози не справджуються. Релігія нікуди не дінеться, а ось самі вчення і релігійні практики чекають певні трансформації. Як також церкви будуть зобов’язані дотримуватись вимог епідеміологічної безпеки під час церковних заходів і подорожей. Оскільки впливи пандемії COVID-19 у науковому середовищі ще осмислюються і література тільки починає з’являтись, то у даній статті викладено авторську позицію з проблем, які в ній піднімаються. (shrink)

Through examining the BBC television series, Black and British: A Forgotten History, written and presented by the historian David Olusoga, and in extending Paul Gilroy’s assertion that the everyday banality of living with difference is now an ordinary part of British life, this article considers how Olusoga’s historicization of the Black British experience reflects a convivial rendering of UK multiculture. In particular, when used alongside Žižek’s notion of parallax, it is argued that understandings of convivial culture can be supported by (...) a historical importance that deliberately ‘shocks’, and subsequently dislodges, popular interpretations of the UK’s ‘white past’. Notably, it is parallax which puts antagonism, strangeness and ambivalence at the heart of contemporary depictions of convivial Britain, with the UK’s cultural differences located in the ‘gaps’ and tensions which characterize both its past and present. These differences should not be feared but, as a characteristic part of our convivial culture, should be supplemented with historical analyses that highlight but, also, undermine, the significance of cultural differences in the present. Consequently, it is suggested that if the spontaneity of conviviality is to encourage openness, then understandings of multiculturalism need to go beyond reification in order to challenge our understandings of the past. Here, examples of ‘alterity’ are neither ‘new’ nor ‘contemporary’, but instead, constitute a fundamental part of the nation’s history: of the ‘gap’ made visible in transiting past and present. (shrink)

In autumn 2009, BBC television ran a natural history series, ‘Last Chance to See’, with Stephen Fry and wildlife writer and photographer, Mark Carwardine, searching out endangered species. In one episode they retraced the steps Carwardine had taken in the 1980s with Douglas Adams, when they visited Madagascar in search of the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur. Fry and Carwardine visited an aye-aye in captivity, and upon first setting eyes on the creature they found it rather ugly. After spending an hour (...) or so in its company, Fry said he was completely ‘under its spell’. A subsequent encounter with an aye-aye in the wild supported Fry's judgment of ugliness and fascination for the creature: ‘The aye-aye is beguiling, certainly bizarre, for some even a little revolting. And I say, long may it continue being so.’. (shrink)