Words on war

It’s really hard to imagine now a world before 24-hour news, continually and constantly accessible in a never-ending stream of on-the-spot, up-to-the-minute reports. What, then, would it be like to have no news summaries on the quarter-hour, no ‘live’ bulletins, no way of knowing what’s going on at this very moment in Kathmandu, Kabul or Khartoum? In his new three-part series for the World Service, War and Words (Sundays), Jonathan Dimbleby looks back to the late 1920s, when the fledgling BBC was not allowed to broadcast any news item until it had first appeared in print. Newspapers reigned supreme when it came to reliable and up-to-date reportage. The Corporation had no specialist news team, no foreign correspondents, no ‘embedded’ reporters in war zones (the Spanish Civil War changed all that). It relied for its copy on independent news-gathering agencies such as Reuters and the Press Association and, at the end of every bulletin, the BBC announcer had to state that the information just broadcast was the copyright of Reuters, etc.