Diasporas and Diplomacy by Marie Gillespie Alban Webb

Author:Marie Gillespie, Alban Webb [Marie Gillespie, Alban Webb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138822962
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

7 The BBC World Service from wartime propaganda to public diplomacy

The case of Iran

Annabelle Sreberny and

Massoumeh Torfeh

Introduction

Over the summer of 2011 a compelling TV drama called The Hour was aired on BBC2. Focusing on BBC TV news at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis, it showed Foreign Office (FO) officials concerned that Russian secret agents might be working inside the BBC and, more significantly, wanting the BBC to present the rationale for a war with Egypt. The journalists, however, wanted to tell a more complex story, including anti-war demonstrations. In a sense, this plot can be seen as the domestic BBC learning what the BBC World Service had always known: that the relationship with the FO (since 1968 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO]) was difficult and had to be constantly renegotiated.

This chapter focuses on the 70-year history of the BBC Persian Service as a case study of the complicated relationship between the World Service and the FO. It documents the initial diplomatic intention for the World Service to function as a propaganda arm of the FO, and the struggle within it to develop an independent broadcasting process in terms of the emergent practices of cultural diplomacy, subsequently public diplomacy.1

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