BBC World Service is celebrating its 75th anniversary. They must be happy about such achievement and they deserve to.
But for the rest of world two aspects of its operations, at least, are very problematic:
a) That its funding is entirely coming from The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and therefore it affects the perception of its editorial independence among the audiences
b) That history shows how such close ties with the government has actually produced embarrassing moments. The best example for that could be the BBC's role in relation to the CIA-MI6-engineered coup against the Iranian prime minister, Mohamad Mossadegh, in 1953 which is documented in Stephen Kinzer's book, All the Shah's Men:
Roosevelt told the Shah that he was in Iran on behalf of the American and British secret services, and that this would be confirmed by a code word the Shah would be able to hear on the BBC the next night.
Churchill had arranged that the BBC would end its broadcast day by saying not "It is now midnight," as usual, but "It is now exactly midnight." Such assurances were hardly necessary, the Shah replied. (p. 9-10)
Don't you think this would make the whole population of Iran always suspicious of the BBC's journalism?
Yesterday, Reuters reported that pop-musician, Chirs De Burgh, is going to perform live in Tehran in early summer next year with the Iranian pop-music band, Arian.
Arian's manager, Mohsen Rajabpour, who runs a record label in Tehran, has said to Reuters that the ministry of Culture has approved of the performance and has officially given the license for the performance.
This is hugely significant in that it is the first time Iranian state is officially allowing a 'Western' non-Iranian pop-music act to happen and also because it is Ahmadinejad's government that is behind that.
So you would expect this to be at least covered by those media outlets which have always been interested in showing how Iran treats the 'Western' culture, etc.
But surprisingly enough, the news has not been covered at all in the British-funded BBC Persian, US-funded Radio Farda or Dutch-funded Radio Zamaneh. I wonder if it is just a matter of accident or it has political reasons.
It's not a secret that these media outlets are usually giving a big amount of time and space to reports about Ahmadinejad's alleged anti-Western actions and rhetoric. But ignoring such an important development is just strange.
Is it because they are not comfortable to report on something that counters their ideological discourse that Ahmadinejad is turning Iran into Taliban?
Is it just me or you also think the climate change has become a convenient escape for many celebrities who are under social pressure to get involved in public activism, but can not afford the risk of antagonizing certain sources of political power?
I mean, don't you think for, say Paris Hilton, it is much less risky to fight for the cause of climate change rather than the Iraqi occupation?
Ultimately, the responsibility for climate change is so distributed that it almost doesn't bear on anyone's shoulders, and at the end of the day, you can always blame God or nature, anyway.
Just a thought, while I'm supposed to finish four essays until the first week of January. :)
Last week, Akbar Ganji received the annual award from Right and Democracy (or International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development), a Canadian government-funded organisation which is known to be the Canadian version of the American National Endowment for Democracy.
In his speech, he openly called for Western government's support to spread democracy and human rights in Iran, according to the Persian version of his speech, published by Dutch-funded 'pro-democracy' projects, Rooz Online and Radio Zamaneh.
The award was given to him by Saad Eddin Ebrahim one of the most avid supporters of the now-defunct Neo-conservative plans to spread democracy in the Middle East, who has also been the director of Rights and Democracy and now sits on its board of directors. (Ibrahim was previously the director of the American Islamic Congress and is still on its board, is on the advisory committee of the Journal of Democracy, published by the National Endowment for Democracy, and is exclusively represented by Benador Association. See where else he is or has been serving.)
The award was supposed to be given to Ibrahim. But according to Janice Stein, the chair of the Rights and Democracy board that also include Mr. Ibrahim, decided to award Ganji instead of Ibrahim. (Source: Rooz Online)
Before handing the award to Ganji, Ibrahim praised Ganji and talked about the many similarities between himself and Ganji. Ironically, among other things, both men have been previously praised and supported by George W. Bush.
When Ibrahim was arrested and eventually found guilty and sentenced to seven years of hard labour by the Egyptian state, Bush suspended a $150m aid package to Egypt, as a result of the verdict. He later met Bush in a 'democracy' conference in Prague in 2006 and recalled Bush telling him: "So don’t lose hope. We are supporting you, and we are with you."
Akbar Ganji, too, while spending the last months of his sentence in 2005, enjoyed Bush's unprecedented and firm support. "Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you," he said in a statement published by the White House.
How do you think one should interpret all this?
Ganji has increasingly become outspoken against military attack and sanctions against Iran and I personally admire him for his courage to do so.
But one has to be quite naive not to see the obvious contradictions between his anti-war and anti-sanction stance and his justification and calls for foreign intervention in Iran with the usual pretext of 'human rights' and 'democracy'. (Interestingly enough, Ibrahim calls for Western help toward democratization in the Arab world in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.)
To me, Akbar Ganji's opposition to Bush and his administration's hardline stance against Iran doesn't mean he is in principle against foreign intervention. In fact, in his own words 'Western governments' should 'support human rights and democracy in Iran,' and that is exactly what the American Democrats think too.
Just wait and see how, with a change of administration in the forthcoming U.S. elections, Ganji and similar figures (such as Shirin Ebadi, Abbas Milani, Ali Afshari, etc.) would become proponents of the new policy toward Iran which, according to a friend, would try to buy the Iranian revolution, rather than bombing it.
Three months in the wonderful SOAS' MA programme as the Film and Media centre, I can say the most important thing I've learned so far is summarised in two readings:
Both are challenging the notion of the society as a systematic, coherent and total(ised) entity, as well as demystifying the concept of masses, as a de-historised, finalised, totallised, passive and easily controllable concept.
Basically, unlike what a lot of media theories constitute, media can't simply control the masses, even though the elite who runs the media tend to think so.
A great recent example to me is a new poll (I know that polls are not reliable for the same reason that there is no such thing as masses, accorind at least to Baudrillard) that shows two third of the Israelis are not yet bought into the idea of the necessity of attacking Iran; and all this despite such severe and ongoing propaganda against Iran in Israel by almost all the media outlets.
That doesn't mean activists should not resist the process of hegemonic articulation according to the interests of the rich and the powerful in any given society. But they (or maybe I should say we here) should all be aware that putting all our energy in countering these processes of articulation is as ineffective on the public opinion as the attempts by those who run the media.
Roger Hardy was at SOAS last week. He has been a Middle East expert and analyst for the BBC for the past two decades. (So either he has started with the BBC when he was a teenager, or he is actually older than what appears.)
I wanted to ask a question that I didn't get a chance for and I'm raising it here now.
A lot of stuff that Hardy and many other journalists at the BBC doing is also being used by the BBC World Service. In other words, their salary must come from both entities as their service is used by the both.
Now, given that the BBC World Service is wholly funded by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, unlike the rest of the BBC that is funded directly by the British citizen's license fees, How can Roger Hardy and other journalists in the same situation reconcile these two sources of funding and thereby control? What are their mechanisms to guarantee their indepndence, while they are actually on the payroll of the UK government?
The other side of the question, which is even more important, would be that how this question of independence from the government is perceived by the world wide BBC audiences? What effect such perception, right or wrong, would have on they way the people see the BBC journalists?
I would suggest to rethink and review the kidnapping of Alan Johnston a while ago in this light. Maybe things would look a bit differently.
I learnt a big lesson form my last month's visit to the United States:
A country whose leader's name (say, King Abdollah in Jordan) you can't pronounce loud in public is quite similar to one where you can't say the name of it's biggest enemy (say Osama Bin Laden in the U.S.) loud in public.