BBC “plans” daily broadcasts to N. Korea, but plans cost money
Having been fooled once before, I wasn’t about to accept that BBC was going to begin broadcasting to North Korea simply because Time, The Guardian, AFP, and The Financial Times say so. Digging further, these reports all cite this BBC.com report on a speech by Director General Tony Hall on the beeb’s plans for next year. Buried deep within that report is a plan for “significant investment” in the BBC World Service, “including a daily news programme for North Korea.” But plans are one thing; operations are another:
“The BBC is trying to justify its public funding by showing that it can do something political that the private sector wouldn’t do,” said Aidan Foster-Carter, a senior research fellow specializing in both Koreas at Leeds University. “It’s a clever move and will earn political brownie points, but it won’t happen without government money. The North Korean government would be furious.”
Michael Glendinning, who has campaigned for the launch of a BBC service in the so-callled hermit kingdom, is just as skeptical.
He points out that a BBC report, titled The Future of News, from earlier this year mentioned that there would be such a proposal, but it would require between £900,000 ($1.4 million) and £1.2 million in funding from the government per year according to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea (EAHRNK). [Bloomberg]
What I cannot understand for the life of me is why the government of the United Kingdom gives a wet sack of guano what the government of North Korea thinks. The two states have almost no trade relations — indeed, no mutual interests that I can think of.
No doubt, the likes of Glyn Ford and Hazel Smith would gladly exercise their rights to free expression to demand that the North Korean people be denied theirs, but is the Foreign Office really so afraid of getting angry letters from them? There is a certain academic constituency that loves to talk about engagement with North Korea, right up to the point that transformational and subversive ideas make contact with the wavering and hostile classes — the very people who are the most likely to respond to those ideas.
For the time being, broadcasting is the closest we’re likely to get to “engagement” and “people-to-people” contact with those North Koreans who might hope for a life without 6 a.m. criticism sessions, paying MPS agents not to confiscate their stall merchandise, and dusting the portraits of obese men before seeing their stunted children off to school. Governments come and go. It is the people of nations who endure, and who remember who stood with them when things were worst. So long as nations fail to engage the people of North Korea, engagement will continue to fall on deaf ears, and to fail.