The cuts: five BBC language services will close (Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean). Seven more language services, including Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, will be cut back from radio to internet only. A further six services will stop transmitting on short wave.

It means an estimated 30 million fewer BBC listeners worldwide. Will people migrate to the web and to English language news, or will the BBC – and its news values – become less influential?

There was a huge amount of coverage of this story. Most people were critical of the cuts with the British government — rather than the BBC — receiving the blame (here and here for example). But in Britain there is a BBC-despising minority which offered its own spin.

For the pod, I picked some of the best pieces of the BBC’s own coverage: interviews with the director of BBC global news Peter Horrocks, former World Service director John Tusa, and British foreign minister William Hague. Hague heads the Foreign Office, which has presided over the BBC World Service.

I also interviewed Debbie Ransome, head of the axed Caribbean Service. The Caribbean Service could be seen as some broadcast throwback to the days when the World Service was known as the BBC Empire Service. But Ransome says the service is unique in that it is regional, and so rises above the interests of any single country. She says the other broadcast media in the region either take political sides, or play a lot of music and not much else.

So which global radio services will move in to replace the BBC? The pod’s last interview is with journalism professor George Brock. He says that services run by the Chinese and Russian governments are likely to benefit, especially in Africa and Asia. And they don’t have the same news values as the BBC. Where the Beeb is remarkably successful at maintaining its editorial independence, Brock says the Russian and Chinese operations are mainly mouthpieces of their respective governments.

Download MP3

Bush House in London headquarters the BBC office (Photo: Matt Biddulph)

The BBC World Service began broadcasting in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service. Now, it is heard in 31 languages in addition to English. That’s about to change, though.

Wednesday the BBC World Service, which co-produces this program, outlined dramatic cuts. It represents a fundamental shift for one of the world’s best-known broadcasters.

The World Service is paid for by a grant from the British government, and that grant is being cut as part of overall government spending reductions. Wednesday Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC’s Global News, said it means losing a vast audience.

“I’m very sad to say that we estimate that about 30 million people out of the 180 million who use the World Service every week will lose the World Service as a result of these changes.”

Services in five languages — Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian and Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean — will close completely.

Radio broadcasts in Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese and a number of other languages will stop, though there will be online and cell phone services. Short wave broadcasts will be severely reduced, and some English language programs will be dropped. 


In the House of Commons Wednesday, opposition Labor Member of Parliament Denis McShane accused Foreign Secretary William Hague of ruining the World Service.

“He’s doing, in part, what no dictator has ever achieved,” McShane said, “silencing the voice of the BBC, the voice of Britain, the voice of democracy, the voice of balanced journalism, at a time when it is more needed than ever.”

But Hague said it is past time for the World Service to change its ways.

“The BBC is not immune from public spending constraints,” he said. “While any closures may be regretted, they would not have been necessary at all were it not for the inherited BBC pension deficit and the vast public deficit inherited from the previous government.”

World Service managers said the cuts are painful. Yet even they admit changing technology makes some services almost obsolete. The BBC’s Liliane Landor noted that the Russian service has an illustrious past, but she pointed to Monday’s suicide bombing at a Moscow airport as an example of why radio no longer matters so much in Russia.

“When these attacks happened, do you think people were thinking, I’ve got to wait to hear what the Russian Service has to say on radio?” Landor said. “No. People went immediately to a website and this is where they expected to find the latest information.”

That is one reason for the switch to distributing news via the internet or cell phone. Radio will still be heard in many parts of the world.

But a shrinking World Service will be forced to pick and choose just who hears what the BBC has to say.

• Gorbachev listens while being held captive
• 75 years of BBC World Service history
• The impact of the BBC World Service

• BBC’s The Strand

• The Wall by Michael Schmacke
• MyWorld
• Top Tips for Great Film-Making

This episode of the podcast stays on the story from Haiti and the US response. We go to the BBC’s Andy Gallacher for the view from the ground in Port-au-Prince. The World’s Katy Clark talked with some Haitian-Americans in Boston. And then, correspondent Amy Bracken – who’s been reporting from Haiti for several years – has a reporter’s notebook.

Looking at the images coming out of Haiti, it’s striking how far the relief effort has yet to go to reach so many of the victims. And then, beyond that, how far this tiny nation will still have to go just to get back to where it was before the earthquake.

Write to me with ideas, comments, suggestions: theworldpolitics at gmail.com. And thanks for listening!

Matthew Bell

When you break down the cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan by US spending per American soldier on the ground, turns out it’s more than twice as expensive as the Iraq war. That’s what Todd Harrison at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments discovered. For this episode of the American Influence podcast, I talked with Harrison about some numbers, including the 30 billion dollar figure that Barack Obama used in his much-awaited speech on Afghanistan early this month.

The story of the Kajakai dam project offers the long view of US involvement in Afghanistan. It’s actually a relic of the Cold War, an American effort to blunt Soviet influence in the region. But in recent years, the dam has also been a huge reconstruction priority for the US and its allies. Problem is, the dam is located in Helmand province, where the Taliban insurgency is raging. And the road to the dam has been too dangerous to continue work there.

Finally, the podcast wraps up with a great interview with Scott Horton. He’s an international and human rights law expert in New York. Horton’s been following the story of CIA “black sites” closely – and writing about it at his blog, here. (Some great background reading on the issue in this post.) I talked with Horton about those two secret CIA detention facilities in Lithuania, just confirmed by an investigation there.

That’s all for now. Write me with ideas, comments, suggestions: theworldpolitics at gmail.com.

Happy holidays everybody, and thanks for listening!

Matthew Bell

• The BBC World Service Trust Iran Project
• Cyrus Farivar on detained Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Persian language bloggers, both inside and outside Iran, have been weighing in on the days events in Tehran. Those bloggers are the focus of new research by the BBC World Service Trust and a Persian-language website called Balatarin. Our technology correspondent Clark Boyd has been speaking with the people behind the research. And Clark you’ve reported quite a bit on the so-called Iranian blogosphere over the past five years. Anything new and interesting here?

CLARK BOYD: Well I think one of the interesting things for me that it does is reinforce a breakdown of stereotypes. I think in the west especially we tend to get caught up in oh it’s a Persian-language blogger. It’s a blog about Iran. It must be about politics. It must be about nuclear weapons. It must be about US-Iranian relations or something like that. And what this research has really shown in collating a wide number of Persian-language blogs is that by and large Persian-language bloggers are blogging about a lot of the same things that we blog about. Sure some of it may be political but some of it may have to do with what they fed their cat yesterday. One of the interesting things though is that they noted that there were a lot of blogs about poetry and about literature. Now that’s not so strange.

WERMAN: Strong tradition there.

BOYD: Very strong tradition there. But what’s interesting is how the language in those blogs is being used. We can hear now from Mehdi Yayanajad who is the director of this website called Balatarin.

MEHDI YAYANAJAD: They are using poetry language to kind of show what is going on and what’s wrong with politics, what’s wrong with economy. But they are using poetry language because it’s safer to use that. It’s not direct and poetry language helps them to say things that they can’t say normally.

WERMAN: So Clark these bloggers are hiding from the sensors by creating blogs that are ostensibly about poetry but seemingly about politics underneath?

BOYD: Yes and no. Again I think there are political messages that seem to be embedded in the language of these blogs but at the same time they’re also celebrating the Persian language itself. And like we said before there’s actually a very long tradition in Iran not only of using poetic language but using that poetic language in service of politics. So in that sense they’re just using one of the tools that readily available to them to make their statements.

WERMAN: So what other things did the BBC World Service Trust research unearth?

BOYD: Well another interesting thing they noted is this rise of the conservative Persian blogosphere. And I think that what we’re seeing here is concerted effort on the part of the authorities in Iran to get more people who agree with them blogging about it. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself has a blog. He hasn’t updated it for a long time but he does have a blog. So you’re seeing this rise of conservative blogging. And of course Iran is famous for being a regime that really knows how to play defense right. I mean they really know how to keep information out. They’re very good at filtering the net. But what we’re seeing now that they seem to be actually be going on the offensive here and recruiting people to go out and blog their side of things.

WERMAN: And the World Service is also behind this Persian-language website aggregating all this Persian-language content. What’s the end result do they hope?

BOYD: What they really want it to be is a service. There’s no overt political goal here according the people that I spoke to about it. They really just want it to be a service. A resource for Persian speakers. And eventually what they would like is to get a team of volunteers together who would help translate all of this Persian-language material into English. I’m sure it would make absolutely fascinating reading for us.

WERMAN: Well we’ll stay on top of this. I’m sure you will. The World’s Clark Boyd. Always a pleasure. Thanks.

BOYD: You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

J Street calls itself a pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby group that’s trying to change the dynamic of Middle East politics in Washington. One thing that sets it apart from other liberal advocacy organizations is that J Street isn’t just a PR effort. The group is raising money to support candidates running for office in the US who share its views on US policy in the Middle East.

Among the group’s outspoken critics is Isi Leibler – columnist at the conservative Jerusalem Post. I talked with Leibler from his home in Jerusalem about why he thinks J Street is bad for Israel.

MJ Rosenberg is a veteran US liberal activist on Middle East affairs. Rosenberg thinks J Street’s time has come. He told me the group is helping give voice to views long stifled by mainstream pro-Israel groups and their supporters.

But Yossi Shain says that’s rubbish. Shain is an Israeli expert in Jewish diaspora affairs, and he splits his time between Georgetown and Tel Aviv University. Shain welcomes the arrival of J Street and doesn’t doubt their sincere desire to help the state of Israel. But he told me the idea that bigger, more established pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC have stifled debate about US policy in the Middle East is a canard.

Finally on the J Street story, I talked with executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami about his connections to Israel, what he’s trying to do, and why he thinks the group has generated such controversy.

Next, US-supported Palestinian security forces. The American element of the program is led by three star Army general, Keith Dayton. His effort has been held up as a rare example of real progress on the ground in the West Bank. But some Palestinians are still asking questions about these security forces. My report from the West Bank wraps up this episode of the podcast.

Pakistan’s foreign minister spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations last week and Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi assured the audience that his government takes the threat from extremist and militant groups seriously. He said:

We, as a democratically elected government, have very clearly defined our goals. We do not differentiate between sort of, you know, the good — you know, the good terrorist and the bad terrorists. Terrorists are terrorists.

Qureshi was asked about the extremist groups that have historically been focused on Kashmir and India, including the group said to be responsible for the attack in Mumbai last year, Lashkar-e-Taiba. He said they are no friends of Pakistan.

Christine Fair has serious doubts, however, about Pakistan’s willingness and ability to crack down on insurgent groups. She gives a blunt assessment of what she calls a “partial war on terrorism” by Pakistan’s military. Fair is worth listening to ahead of what looks like it’s going to be another riveting Frontline documentary on the war in Afghanistan and how insurgent groups based in Pakistan are a huge part of the problem.

The bulk of this episode of the podcast however is an interview I did with Akiva Eldar, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and author of the book, Lords of the Land. Eldar was kind enough to put up with me, my digital recorder and my questions at his home in Netanya, Israel. I started off by asking him if saw the recent Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas summit in New York as just a photo-op. Eldar said it might be worse than that. It might have been a real setback.

Thanks for listening folks, and keep the feedback coming. Email me at theworldpolitics at gmail dot com.

The latest episode of the podcast gets into the difficult choices facing president Barack Obama in Afghanistan. After eight years of war, the US military is now thinking about starting all over in Afghanistan by implementing the kind of counterinsurgency strategy that helped avert complete disaster in Iraq. At the top of the agenda is defeating the Al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taliban allies. But would that necessarily require transforming a nation that has suffered more than a generation of war, turmoil and complete economic stagnation? And can the US afford to do what it would take to even help this country give itself a decent shot at success?

For Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, the answer to that last question is a simple one. No. Bacevich is an ex-Army officer who’s become a leading voice against doubling down in Afghanistan. He says it’s high time for Mr. Obama to start lowering expectations for the US and its partners in that country.

In many ways, Rory Stewart is on the same page as Bacevich. He’s a British scholar who’s spent a lot time in Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia and the Middle East. Stewart says the US and its allies owe it to the Afghan people to be more honest about what they can really accomplish there, which is likely to be something far less ambitious than even the kind of tenuous nation-building that’s taken place in Iraq since 2003.

Military analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations argue that the US cannot afford to let Afghanistan go back to being a safe-haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Send me an email to thworldpolitics [at] gmail [dot] com.

And thanks for listening!

Three stories today: the first is a look at an impressive piece of engineering – a cooker that its makers claim reduces carbon emissions by a staggering degree.

Then there’s a check-in with Kiva, the microlending organisation based in the States. For the most part, they’ve been working to get people to support projects overseas. Now they’re extending their efforts to projects here at home too.

Finally we’ve got a kind of child development / thinky piece about growing up in an online world. Kids, it would seem, are going to be way better at this stuff than those of us who remember, say, Metal Mickey. Plus some brilliant new music from the Brookyln electropop supaproduca (and, er, ‘singa’) Alan Wilkis. Enjoy.