There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time to reduce the BBC’s output in the Russian language when relations between London and Moscow are so frosty? Surely it should be broadcasting more of its impartial, informative news and current affairs to the peoples ruled by President Medvedev’s increasingly authoritarian government, not less? But the World Service has had to face up to a bit of real-economick. The service is funded not by the licence fee but by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (a hangover from the days when it was known as the Empire Service), and has been told that the pot of gold is not bottomless. Cuts must be made — and the obvious place to make them in the Russian service is in radio, for reasons that tell us a lot about how fast the world is changing in this new century.
The Russian authorities, with a deviousness once typical of the Cold War, have outmanoeuvred the World Service so that it can no longer broadcast on FM or MW. (The partnerships with FM and MW stations that had been formed have been broken up and the BBC, because of complicated deals made in the less chilly 1990s, no longer has any access to these vital transmitters.) It has to rely on Short Wave, reception of which is notoriously bad. Fewer and fewer listeners are prepared in these hi-tech times to put up with trying to listen to a station that is likely to fade out at a critical moment. In any case, those underground free-thinkers who used to huddle in secret cells around a cheap plastic box fuelled by Ever-Ready batteries are just the kind of people to have access to the internet, which is so much more immediate and interactive.
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