BBC Public Radio Channels: Struggling for Survival in a Privatized Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper discusses the claim that the proposed cuts in BBC World Service (Guardian 19-9-2022)-- shedding around 382 jobs, and ending radio production in ten languages including Arabic-- suggests that BBC Radio is losing its political, economic, and ideological power, that its sphere of influence has been reduced to British audiences, and that it is struggling to survive in a cut-throat privatized public sphere. The paper is based on updated theoretical insights into the privatized public sphere, cultural imperialism, the Othering of the East, and the performance of national identities. It investigates official reports and studies on the mission of BBC Radio through Time from its inception as an instrument of elitist national and colonial interests to the present, and uses multimodal discourse analysis of the BBC Radio Internet platform. Based on these insights, it concludes that BBC Radio is in a continuous process of broadcasting and re-constructing British nationalism through its radio programs, popularizing elite capitalist interests, and teaching the broadest range of demographic segments and ages how to perform Britishness: how to construct their own British identities and act them out. In its periodic mission statements, the BBC continues to pledge its energies and support to the dominant political and economic institutions of Great Britain, to the British public and license-payer, and to the British music industry-- and in that sense, BBC Radio is one of the pillars of the privatized public sphere-- surviving through rather than in spite of the privatized public sphere.