Persian Service

The BBC and British Interests in Iran

Annabelle Sreberny, Massoumeh Torfeh

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848859814
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857736611
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Rumour and speculation in Iran have been rife for generations that the BBC has had a hand in every political upheaval in the country. In this vein the BBC has become a notable element in the complex and tortured narrative of Anglo-Iranian relations. The BBC Persian Service was initially developed in 1940 to prepare and broadcast British war-time propaganda. And it has since been seen by many in Iran as an integral part of British policy-making in the region. Thirty years ago, the Shah of Iran regarded the BBC Persian Service radio as his 'enemy number one' and held it responsible for promoting the revolution of 1979. Only a couple decades earlier, the BBC Persian Service was widely accused for having been complicit in the CIA-led 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Musaddiq. And a decade earlier, the BBC Persian Service was strongly linked to the British-planned removal of Reza Shah in 1941. The BBC Persian service has frequently been perceived as an entity which was not simply a vehicle to record the changes occurring in Iran and throughout the Middle East, but rather an active agent of change.
In this book, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh track the history of the BBC Persian Service, critically analysing both the assumptions that the BBC is a standard bearer for objective reporting and representations of it as a simple tool of Western interests. Also examining the history of relations between the Foreign Office and the BBC Persian Service, they demonstrate that these have never been pre-defined or rigid. Instead, they explore how both institutions have moved from an interest in what can crudely be called state-orchestrated 'propaganda' to a more subtle advocacy of fair and balanced journalism as the best agent of British values and influence.

1

From Propaganda to Public Diplomacy: The Changing Paradigms

Human history is in many ways a history of differing forms of communication, from warlike aggression to trading relations. New technologies have always played a key role in enabling different kinds of communicative patterns. The advent of print revolutionized how people lived, first in Europe and then spreading across the world. The creation of the telegraph aided the development of train schedules and the linking of continents, providing the infrastructure for international news agencies such as Havas and Reuters to produce shared news stories for national newspapers by the mid-nineteenth century.

It was the development of radio in the 1920s that truly began to link national audiences together. The early choices about ownership and control of radio also set patterns that endure to this day. The revolutionary Russians invested heavily in radio development under the centralized People’s Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs (PCPT), establishing a model for the state control of broadcasting that still exists in many countries. The US chose a privately owned and advertising-funded path of commercial radio development in its 1927 Radio Act. Britain trod a third path.

The establishment of the BBC

The beginnings of broadcasting in Britain came in the early 1920s. The British Broadcasting Company was established as a commercial entity in 1922 by a UK electro-technical industry consortium that included Marconi, Metropolitan Vickers, GEC, British Thomson Houston, Western Electric and the Radio Communication Company. The new company built a national network of radio transmitters in London, Manchester and Birmingham as the basis for a UK-wide broadcasting service. It was replaced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 under the leadership of Director-General John Reith (1889–1971), who reportedly boasted that the organization ‘has never attempted to give the public what it wants. It gives the public what it ought to have.’¹ He famously defined its ongoing ethos as one of ‘public service’ broadcasting, of an independent British broadcaster able to educate, inform and entertain the whole nation, free from political interference and commercial pressure. The innovation of a Post Office licence fee of ten shillings (currently worth around 50 pence), of which half went to the BBC, ensured that the BBC was not financially dependent on the government of the day nor on advertising revenue. The BBC remains funded by the licence fee which is transferred via Parliament to the BBC. In December 2010 the annual fee was set at £145.50 for up to 15 sets, while a black-and-white TV licence was £49.

However, the World Service model of financing was very different again. We need to tell a different story.

The Empire Service

On 19 December 1932, the BBC set up a short-wave Empire Service that was intended to address English-speaking diasporas, the embodied remnants of empire strewn around the world. It was built around new short-wave radio technology that allowed signals to be broadcast over vast distances. It could be called a practice of ‘communicating with ourselves abroad’, aimed at strengthening British diasporic ties with the homeland and building a sense of dispersed community. The BBC’s director-general John Reith was wonderfully unenthusiastic to begin with, famously warning in early broadcasts: ‘Don’t expect too much in the early days; for some time we shall transmit comparatively simple programmes, to give the best chance of intelligible reception and provide evidence as to the type of material most suitable for the service in each zone. The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good.’² Yet the broadcasts received praise, and were further boosted by the support of the first ever Christmas message from King George V to the Empire a few days later. The BBC Empire Service went on air to five world time zones on its first day, with the ‘Australasian Zone’ the first to receive the broadcast that started with what became its well-known signature phrase: ‘This is London calling.’³

World War II changed everything. Britain was in a state of total war with every resource focused on winning the battle against the Axis powers. At first, the BBC’s role was somewhat uncertain. The BBC Archive timeline recounts the story of the first days thus:

Managers at the fledgling corporation debated whether the BBC should report the conflict objectively – or contribute to the war effort by broadcasting morale boosting propaganda. By the autumn of 1940, Britain was suffering almost nightly bombardment from German planes. On 15 October a delayed action bomb hit Broadcasting House in London. It landed in the music library at 2010 GMT and exploded 52 minutes later, killing seven people. Listeners to the Nine o’clock news heard the announcer pause, and then continue reading.⁴

The BBC reinvented itself during World War II, more than doubling in size and adopting a new culture and outlook. The biggest expansion came early in 1940–1, ahead of American involvement in the war, when the outlook for Britain was bleakest. The Churchill government asked the BBC to increase its overseas effort threefold. A special service for North America was introduced, offering entertainment as well as news of the British struggle. There were services in every major European language and services were introduced for the Soviet Union, India, Japan and more. Suddenly the BBC was radio broadcasting in eight languages including English, in recognition of the need to communicate to others in their countries of origin; this was the formal start of organized and publicly funded international communication to foreign audiences. The war proved to be a tough test of the BBC’s independence. At times the government and the military wanted to use the BBC to counter crude propaganda from the Nazis and the Italians, and there was even talk in Westminster of taking over the BBC. So it was wartime necessity that saw a huge expansion of the international remit of the service, now renamed the Overseas Service, with coverage in over 40 different languages by the end of the war. A dedicated BBC European Service was added in 1941. Known administratively as the External Services of the BBC, these were financed not from the domestic licence fee but from government grant-in-aid out of the Foreign Office budget. Also in 1941, its activities became centred in Bush House where it remained until its move to New Broadcasting House in 2012. The service was renamed the BBC World Service in 1965.

While the BBC World Service is considered to function in ‘the national interest’, it has always striven to remain editorially independent of its paymaster, the Foreign Office. Thus it has functioned with a deep and intriguing tension at the heart of its activities. The World Service has been subject to the changing priorities and concerns of British foreign policy. However, the language services themselves have always argued for and have come to operate under the sign of impartiality and distance from direct government influence, which is the rubric of the BBC. The exploration of this tension, the inelegant dance between financial control versus editorial independence, is one of the core strands of this book.

The Middle East was central to the early expansion of the service, revealing early foreign-policy concerns. BBC Arabic began broadcasting in January 1938, the first foreign-language transmission. Persian-language broadcasting was established in December 1940, organized into a separate department of Near East Services along with Turkish-language broadcasting. For a decade after World War II, the BBC World Service could be said to have enjoyed ‘radio superiority’ in the region, based on the continuity and experience of its personnel, their long residencies and their knowledge of the cultures, and had built up regular listenerships.

The BBC Arabic Service’s main competition in the late 1940s was from the Near East Arab Broadcasting station, Sharq al-Adna, which operated as a supposedly independent commercial station from Palestine, relocating to Cyprus in 1948. Actually, it was operated by the FCO in secret in order to present British polices from a standpoint sympathetic to Arab audiences. It was very popular but more propagandist than the BBC and listened to in Middle Eastern coffee shops. It was likened to the Daily Mail, which had a large circulation but still did not rival The Times. The BBC itself was really targeting the influential intelligentsia in the region, not the so-called ‘Arab street’. It brought in Arab literary and cultural figures such as Taha Hussein and in 1944 was called ‘the university of modern times’ by an enthusiastic listener.⁵ Of course, both of these channels competed for audience attention with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs (Sawt al-Arab) that broadcast on Cairo Radio from 1952 and became the main voice of the popular revolution. Strongly anti-colonial and pan-Arabist, it helped Nasser’s leadership of the Arab nationalist movement and his move into the Egyptian presidency.

By the time of the Suez Crisis, BBC Arabic was broadcasting for over 30 hours per week, compared with French radio’s three hours per day, Radio Moscow’s one hour and Voice of America (VOA)’s three hours, which was increased to six in November 1956 in response to the political instability growing in the region as a result of the crisis. So Britain was clearly not alone in investing in international radio broadcasting to reach foreign audiences and shape public opinion inside other countries.

As the Middle East was central to the development of foreign-language radio broadcasting in the 1940s, so it was also the first region in the roll-out of World Service television, which was launched in March 2008, broadcasting first in Arabic.⁶ Persian was the second language service to move into television; this is explored in detail in the last chapter. The move into television was paid for by the elimination of a number of radio language services to countries then deemed to be on the road to democracy and no longer in need of the BBC’s content. So assessments of political need and British government priorities have directed the flow of FCO funds, but the governmental hand that made the payments could not directly determine the content.

Our analysis of archived documents reveals the tussle between the two interests – British government priorities and BBC editorial independence – from the beginning, even at times of war. BBC’s audience research has also repeatedly proved that the greatest single factor contributing to whatever success BBC foreign broadcasts have achieved is the integrity of the news content. The BBC’s journalism for international audiences ‘should share the same values as its journalism for UK audiences: accuracy, impartiality and independence’.⁷ As a result, the BBC claims that ‘levels of trust among BBC World Service audiences remain very high. And the long tradition of global audiences turning to the BBC for trustworthy news in times of crisis continues strongly.’⁸

The development of international radio was perhaps the critical moment when media institutions began to conceive of and develop forms of communication that addressed foreign audiences, even if this is now supplemented with television and the internet. So the actual practices of international communication have prefigured the various academic attempts to conceptualize and define these practices. There is growing competition to name this new type of communication, usually as forms of emerging ‘public diplomacy’, and its translation into policy tools of international diplomacy, often in a rather weakly conceptualized manner. We will now look briefly at these rhetorics as developed within the Western academy. Later, we explore how this language has been adopted by the Islamic Republic.

A brief history of ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘soft power’

In any discussion of this subject, we are confronted by a semantic soup of terms used to define international communication, from the usually pejorative ‘propaganda’ – which other countries practice – to the more anodyne ‘public diplomacy’ which ‘we’ do, and from psychological warfare to ‘soft power’ and nation-branding.

Public diplomacy as a distinct mode of foreign policy was developed as countries sought to communicate directly with overseas publics, and its modes have included a mix of cultural programmes, educational exchanges and mediated communications, often targeting educated elites. The actual coinage of the term is most often connected to Edmund Gullion, when he established the Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy in 1965. As the University of Southern California website clearly notes, the term ‘public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations’.⁹ Hans N. Tuch describes the purpose of public diplomacy as a ‘government’s process of communicating with foreign publics in an attempt to bring about understanding for its nation’s ideas and ideals, its institutions and cultures, as well as its national goals and current policies’.¹⁰

The scholarly field of public diplomacy is strongly American in origin, and even the emergence of what is called ‘new public diplomacy’ developed there after the September 2011 attacks. Then the Bush administration oversaw the creation of the Office of Global Communications to coordinate the global public relations efforts of the US government through a variety of platforms such as advertisements, websites, radio programmes and news stories. US public diplomacy efforts targeting the Middle East were intensified and greatly expanded under the direction of former advertising executive Charlotte Beers who headed the State Department efforts.¹¹

‘New public diplomacy’ was defined more broadly than activity unique to sovereign states. It reflected the changing face of international relations as a range of non-state actors gained a role in world politics and it recognized that diverse supranational organizations, non-governmental organizations and corporations now communicate directly with foreign publics and thereby develop and promote public diplomacy policies, and practices of their own. Thus the epoch of state-centric foreign relations has been replaced by a more complex global environment that is composed of multiple actors and networks who are elaborating new issues and concerns. To quote Pamment:

[T]he new public diplomacy (PD) is a major paradigm shift in international political communication. Globalization and a new media landscape challenge traditional foreign ministry ‘gatekeeper’ structures, and foreign ministries can no longer lay claim to being sole or dominant actors in communicating foreign policy. This demands new ways of elucidating foreign policy to a range of nongovernmental international actors, and new ways of evaluating the influence of these communicative efforts.¹²

Many now see public diplomacy as merely a form of international public relations. As Wang and Chang¹³ argue, public diplomacy and public relations both seek to reach out to target publics with the goal of maintaining and managing images, and the two practices share a great deal of strategic and tactical commonalities.

Beers herself compared public diplomacy efforts to marketing, drawing out the impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction – The BBC World Service and Iran: 70 Years of the Delicate Dance
• 1 From Propaganda to Public Diplomacy: The Changing Paradigms
• 2 The Establishment of BBC World Service Persian Radio
• 3 The BBC World Service, the British Government and the Nationalization of Iranian Oil
• 4 The BBC and the Iranian Revolution of 1979
• 5 BBC Broadcasting to Afghanistan
• 6 Culture Wars as Foreign Policy: BBC Persian Television and the Islamic Republic of Iran
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography