I first remember listening to the BBC World Service when I was about twelve or thirteen, tuning in on a little shortwave set I inherited from my grand-dad, with a frequency chart for Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, trying to find the perfect spot between the crackle and whizz of the static, and the exotic sounds of French and German international stations. Ten years on, I’m listening on a Wi-Fi radio, freed from static (and straight into the parallel nightmare of buffering and reduced quality streams for non-UK listeners), but the station is almost the same, and I love it just as much. I know that lots of others love the World Service too; it’s the only broadcast station—radio or television—which people will, quite unprompted, lavish praise upon if broadcasting comes up in conversation. It carries an image of British broadcasting which shows it to be amongst the best in the world.

By all accounts, the present British Government should love it dearly as well. In a world in which soft diplomacy counts increasingly, the power of a station spreading—from the shores of the Pacific, to the heart of the Sahel—such a positive image of Britain, cannot be underestimated. This makes it so perplexing that a government which has been acknowledged as having a certain amount of foreign policy nous*, should neglect the immeasurable value which the World Service brings to the country and the world, in its decision to transfer the funding of the station from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to the BBC itself, and to demand budget cuts.

The World Service has already been through a down-sizing, when large parts of the station’s cultural output were lopped off in favour of a more news-focussed schedule a few years ago, but despite that, it has somehow managed to retain its greatness as a radio station. Geographically castrating the service will do nothing to help this, and I can only hope that the ingenuity of the staff will keep the unique character of station alive, even if it loses the estimated 30 million listeners as a result of the cuts.

*Not that, as this post should attest, I agree with this Government on much, including foreign policy.

My support for Britain’s system of constitutional monarchy, and appreciation of the Prince of Wales’s views on many things may be a tad unpopular with a few others in the Green Party, but whether or not you’re a republican, this lecture from Prince Charles is worth watching. A lot of people criticise his insistence on taking ‘political’ stances on things when he’s not elected, but I think he’s useful for encouraging public debate. And anyway, couldn’t the following from his lecture have been written by a green?

But for all its achievements, our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the Earth and we must face up to the fact that the Earth cannot afford to support it. Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts – and paradoxically also facing calls for a return to so-called “old-fashioned,” traditional banking – so Nature’s life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too. So, if we don’t face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it.

Link to video (BBC iPlayer link, UK only)

Link to transcript

Photo credit: rev0lvin on Flickr.

Whenever it was that the news about swine ‘flu broke, I missed it. I missed it because I was at a conference overseas with no connection to the otherwise omnipresent news media save for the occasional glimpse of a copy of The Guardian’s international edition. So it was quite a shock when on my return to Britain, as I was dozing off for the night to the sounds of BBC Radio 4, the presenter was proclaiming the crisis of epic proportions that was presented by swine ‘flu. Did I suffer from not knowing about the first case of swine ‘flu the moment it was found? No, and nor would most people have suffered if they were deprived of such information.

When I did hear about it, I was initially slightly panicked at the idea of a pandemic of a virus which was, according to the Guardian, most lethal to young and healthy people. Over time though, I came to realise that a more peaceful and pleasant life could be achieved by switching off the BBC News Channel and logging off the BBC News Web-site, and limiting my news intake to the World Service (that last bastion of mostly serious news) and the Guardian Weekly.

It annoys me a lot that the press now feels it necessary to sensationalise ‘boring’ (read ‘worthwhile’) stories, taking their coverage beyond all sense of proportion, and stuff the rest of their coverage with trash stories such as whatever it was with Susan Boyle that was so interesting, and the fact that in winter it snowed. The result is a society which is dreadfully informed about what is really happening in the world, satiated on a fast-food diet of celebrity and reality-television trash, where anything serious has to either be ‘deep-fried’ in reality-television oil, as can be seen with the Jury Team’s hideous and thought-free X-Factor style list for the European elections, or sensationalised, as swine ‘flu, and the economic difficulties have been.

Is there an alternative though? Perhaps if it were possible to force all news outlets to behave like the Guardian Weekly, the World Service and the rather good nightly BBC World News, then the public would be excellently informed on the state of the world, engaged with politics and capable of reaching reasonable conclusions on important matters of the day. Unfortunately, though I’d love to see more of the sort of journalism that is found in these publications and broadcasts, it is a sad fact that that would simply turn a lot of people off the news completely. While it is debatable as to whether no news is better than poorly reported news, I can’t see how alienating millions from the news would be beneficial, whatever benefit they are currently able to draw from it. I can’t see how, so long as inequality in education, social status, and income are as sharp as they are now, we can have a mass media which is free from what is essentially prolefeed.

I’ll try to stop this from becoming even more of a premature ‘grumpy old man rant’, and finish by including a knock-off of the well known Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I think it’s quite fitting advice for whatever the next crisis thrown up might be.

I’m afraid I had to post this. Very funny.

To be honest, I’m mainly writing this post because I feel I ought to write something. I’ve been a tad busy lately, with a trip down to Oxford for a political convention over last weekend, and increasing input needed on my studies, but that’s no reason not to keep this blog going, so my topic to get back into the habit of blogging is the nonsense over Brand and Ross at the BBC.

I’m not for one second suggesting that they should be excused for what they broadcast, but the level of media coverage given over to the story seems to have been somewhat out of proportion. It reminds me of the recent car bomb in a European capital city. The most read story on the BBC News site the following day was about hydrogen sulphide, and the bomb story was low on the list of headlines across most outlets of the BBC.

As of writing, the less significant columns on the site are reporting that there has been an earthquake in Pakistan, a ruling on assisted suicide, and the Metropolitan Police have shot dead a man. Of these stories, which is more important: internal disciplinary action for two BBC staff members, or any one of the others?

[End of rant, I'll try to be more positive with my next post.]

Just listening to Analysis on the BBC World Service, the presenter from RIA-Novosti seems to be suggesting that Russia is for Obama. Anyway, just a short post, as I’m off to a long meeting, then to Oxford for a political weekend.