BBC’s “position” on Belarusian language
Maybe some of you remember, recently a British EU minister said there are no plans whatsoever to have BBC in Belarusian language. A fellow blogger Halldor2 (from the United Kingdom?) wrote an inquiry to BBC, to which he actually received a reply. Here’s BBC’s answer about Belarusian language broadcasting:
Dear Mr McDuff,
Thank you for your email of 20 April to the Rt. Hon. Douglas Alexander about Belarusian language broadcasts on Russian/Ukrainian language service from the BBC. Your letter was passed on to the relevant department dealing with Belarus. I have been asked to reply.
The BBC World Service broadcasts in Belarus in the Russian, Ukrainian and English languages via its shortwave transmitters. A key issue facing the World Service in Belarus is the practicality of reaching its audience. Shortwave transmission is not as audible in some regions as FM transmissions, which are broadcast locally and produce a strong signal. Ideally, the World Service would like to work with FM partners to deliver its product in Belarus, but the media market is tightly controlled and regulated. Given the current political situation, there is no possibility of the World Service or any other western broadcaster getting air time on an existing FM frequency within the country. Therefore, the World Service offering remains shortwave only in a market that is largely FM-dominated. We are aware of no jamming issues.
On several occasions in recent years, the World Service has examined the possibility of special programming for Belarus. The problem surrounding delivery of the product into the region remains the key stumbling block. The World Service is available on-line, but again, access in Belarus is difficult, as home internet usage is low. On-line facilities are mostly available in work places or in public internet cafes.
Yours sincerely,
Daniele Marzocchi
Dear Ms. Marzocchi, it truly amazes me how you managed to write a reply by totally ignoring the original question. The question was not at all about broadcasting to Belarus on shortwave in Arabic, English, Urdu, Russian or Swahili, the question was (as you probably understood very well but chose to ignore) about Belarusian language broadcasts of BBC.
May 8th, 2006 at 3:03 am
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May 8th, 2006 at 9:49 am
I’ve posted the text of my letter to Douglas Alexander here:
http://halldor2.blogspot.com/2006/05/bbc-belarusian-broadcasts-iii.html
Daniele Marzocchi’s response was fairly predictable, I think: as you point out, she evaded the central issue almost completely.
DM
London, U.K.
May 8th, 2006 at 10:10 am
David McDuff: Oh, OK. That changes the situation slightly. You actually inquired about Russian and Ukrainian services. Because I thought she went totally off-topic from the start. ;)
May 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am
The thing I don’t follow is why the BBC can’t broadcast in the Belarusian language. As far as I can see, Ms. Marzocchi’s reply doesn’t address that question - she merely talks about restricted audibility in “some regions”. Yet there are no jamming issues. Surely the Belarusian broadcasts could go out in the same way as the already-existing Russian and Ukrainian ones, even if they have to be shortwave only.
May 8th, 2006 at 11:13 am
If more Belorussians send such inquiries to BBC, the British broadcaster will eventually take it seriously and respond appropriately, not with this buck slip or a kiss-off.
May 8th, 2006 at 11:24 am
I must say I think it would be a good idea if as many Belarusians as possible were to write to Douglas Alexander and/or the BBC World Service with inquiries of this kind. Though the BBC is something of a monolith, it does respond to public pressure.
May 8th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Hmmm ok so their main reason is that they are unable to reach the Belarusian audience?
May 8th, 2006 at 11:54 am
}T{Reme [Q_G]: Yep, that’s their logic. Aristotle must be turning in his grave. ;)
May 8th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Many thanks for ‘Shumski in English’ link :)
May 8th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Indeed, they went on a tangent )))). But as I’d previously said, it would be awesome if the EU and the US chose to (a) invest into expansion of RFE\RL transmissions; and (b) set up transmitters around Belarus for FM reception at least in the border regions.
I strongly believe we need a well-planned investment strategy with the coefficient of efficiency in mind.
May 8th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Option (b) sounds cool, but it is unfortunately illegal, plus it won’t work that well (Minsk, Homel, Mahilou can never be reached with this method).
May 8th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
If I can ask, what is at stake for Belarusians who don’t have BBC news broadcast in their language? Is this about the current political situation, a point of national pride, a way for Belarus to identify itself as an entity separate from other nations in the region, something else, or a combination of different factors?
May 8th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
K: The problem is information vacuum. Belarusians have virtually no (nil, zero, nada) mass-media except Lukashenka’s propaganda outlets.
May 8th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
I may be stepping into a territory that will expose my ignorance (but bear with me–I’m trying to learn), perhaps the BBC has faced the same obstacles to broadcasting in Belarusian that other potential mass-media organizations have? If mass-media is controlled so tightly, is there some reason that BBC should be able to overcome these barriers? It seems reasonable to me that Lukashenka would wish that his propoganda be distributed in the national language, but any other news to be filtered through a less-popular medium–and perhaps the FM providers are are willing to cooperate with him?
May 8th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
K: As a counter-example, I can mention that U.S. government sponsors Belarus Service of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty for 53 (!) years already. And in my opinion, it’s a great success. It does have an impact.
May 9th, 2006 at 12:42 am
Hmmmm interesting comments. Im reminded about a number of articles posted in the past… such as one where I did say that the BBC is not a charity. For them to broadcast in Belarusian language they do need an audience. Since the most of that audience is located in/near Belarus, they’d need transmitters in that area. They dont have / will never have access to transmitters owned by the state for propaganda reasons therefore they would be forced to invest in private transmitters (Im ignoring the political battle with the regime to even get the paperwork sorted). Broadcasting a signal accross borders is possible, but yes indeed illegal altho I dont see what the Belarusian government could possibly do to neigbouring countries as pretty much the whole world looks down upon the regime.
In response, it IS possible to reach even Minsk using FM waves. Reception would be near horrible but it is possible. Ive received FM transmissions from as far as Berlin using a really cheap radio set by connecting it to some water pipes.
As Administrator said… independent news reports have been reduced to pretty much non-existent. Everything currently available is state-run propaganda. Also a large majority is spoken / written in Russian. To preserve Belarusian language, a key part would be to have atleast a few sources of media in Belarusian so people would be able to use this language. Anyone whom speaks more than one language knows that if you dont use something for a long time, you start to forget things. The propaganda currently being broadcasted also affects people’s look upon the regime. Everything bad is hidden, stories are made up to make things look better etc etc. People like the image that is created for them, despite it being very flawed.
K does have a point. Like Google’s search filter for China, it is most likely that the BBC ran into problems while making agreements with the regime to create any such service. Google yielded by altering their search engine to meet the desires of the Chinese government. The BBC’s only option would be to transmit in Russian but that would completely annialate the point of setting up a Belarusian service.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Several interesting comments from Livejournal Linguaphiles:
oh_meow
2006-05-08 02:43 pm UTC
The point is though, that although the BBC are keen to provide open information to countries with restrictive governments, it is not their main purpose and not the area where the majority of their funds are targeted. The BBC’s purpose is to provide advert-free, high quality entertainment, education programmes and news to people in the UK, who are required by law to pay £120 per year to the BBC for the privelige of receiving tv. They are a not a charity or a humanitarian organisation, they are a broadcasting company, and although they do provide humanitarian broadcasting services such as worldwide radio in different languages, it comes second to them providing the services that receiving the tv licence fee legally binds them to providing. i.e. tv shows for the UK. Any extra money has to be shared out between a vast number of different operations, and setting up an effective extra radio service for a country with incredibly tight media censorship that speaks what is essentially a minority language but whose people can generally understand the similar languages of neighbouring countries, and who can pick up the already existing bbc world service broadcasts in these languages in the limited areas which the new service would be able to be broadcast is probably not top of their huge list of things to spend a limited amount of available money on. If the EU decided to put pressure on the Belarusian government, and provided funding for the BBCs broadcasts, I’m sure they would do it. But the BBC can’t cover everything.
By the way, writing to the UK Government to get the BBC to do something is utterly pointless. The Government has absolutely no control over the BBC whatsoever, for plenty of good reasons. The BBC are an independent organisation.
2006-05-08 03:58 pm UTC
If BBC is an independent organization, how come your minister makes statements on behalf of BBC?
oh_meow
2006-05-08 04:16 pm
That man is not the “EU minister” anyway, there is no such thing, he was a junior officer at the foreign office (headed by the Foreign Secretary), and he is now in charge of Transport so that quote is a bit out of date. Their inability to fact check makes me dubious of their ability to correctly quote people. Maybe it was just a poor translation, but the article was unclear and jumbled.
2006-05-08 05:02 pm UTC
> there is no such thing
English Wikpedia says he’s a Minister of State for Europe of the British cabinet.
“The Minister of State for Europe is an executive position in the Government of the United Kingdom, in charge of affairs with the European Union.”
oh_meow
2006-05-08 05:05 pm UTC
yes but that is a new, kind of half-cabinet position. We submit politicians as special EU parliament ministers, and they are the people who really sort out the EU stuff. The UK government is a bit perverse in titles, often the people with important sounding titles aren’t, and the really important ones are called something like “secretary”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament EU stuff is done here by collaboration between MEPs from all the EU countries
evig_lilje
2006-05-08 03:00 pm UTC
I think it’s kind of funny that in that article it shows all the languages saying (presumably) “BBC World” and then the fake Belarusian one says “BBC Belarus” (or Belarussian?) instead of “World”.
2006-05-08 04:03 pm UTC
It should’ve been “сьвет” then. :)
pne
2006-05-08 07:17 pm UTC
You presume wrongly; the top three are “Farsi”, “`Arabi”, and “Urdu”, respectively.
targaff
2006-05-08 10:07 pm UTC
I know you and I have had our difference in the past, but in all honesty, even if he had correctly addressed the question I suspect that the answer would have fallen back on the issue of practicality: it is more viable for them commercially to put out a single broadcast in a language that is likely to reach as wide an audience as possible (a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that Russian is a language that is at least understood by about 250 million people) than to cater for a comparatively small audience (7-8 million). It would be nice if they were able to do that, but the fact is that economically at least, the numbers are unfortunately stacked against you.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that he might have deliberately “dodged the issue”, if you will. From reading things you have written in the past (though I can’t find this on your blog; don’t you have a standing website on the topic, too?), my understanding is that the (rightly or wrongly) ruling bodies prefer Russian as the national language over Belarusian, whose status as an official language thus (again, rightly or wrongly) seems - officially - to be nominal, at least internally. To that end, the British government is likely to at least honour that whether they agree with it or not until such time as the situation changes. “Ah, but this is the BBC!” I hear you cry, but it is important to note that for all its supposed independence, the BBC’s Charter is still one granted by the nation, and so it is entirely possible that even if they sympathise, they would still not broadcast in Belarusian on diplomatic grounds; it would be unusual in those circumstances for the national broadcaster from another country to do something that might be perceived as being outright antagonistic (not to mention contrary to their purported neutrality in such matters).
I don’t necessarily agree with that, of course, but I can see where they might be coming from.
May 9th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
I notice in reading the Linguaphile posts that some people are under the mistaken impression that the World Service is independent of the British government. While it’s true that the rest of the BBC is funded by a licence fee, the BBC World Service is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
May 10th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
It is unrealistic to think that by writing to the BBC will pursuade them to transmit in Belarusian. It would be better to lobby for the british council to re-open in minsk. only last week the head of british council russia was in town (minsk). the BC would allow people to access the BBC service and more (free internet access, newspapers etc..).
Appreciate the concerns raised above regarding belarusian language being ’sidelined’ but i guess the BBC could argue taht russian IS one of official languages in belarus, and so there is no need to broadcast in belarusian (unlike ukraine, where ukraine is the only ‘official’ language). To this extent the BBC does not have responsibility to promote people’s national languages/cultures but to broadcast ‘impartial’ information. Thus if russian is an official language and spoken/understood by the a very very large proportion of the population (as is the case in Belarus) then the is no case (let alone a business case!) for them to broadcast in Belarusian.
on the point of a vacum of information. yes, limited access but the impression that is given is that people, if they want, can access alternative sources of information than to the state tv. e.g. internet access, cable tv and RFL! So to claim an information vacum exists is factual incorrect.
re minister’s job. Douglas Alexander is no longer Europe Minister. What someone maybe trying to say re the official position is that it is more of what is called a ‘portfolio position’ . this happens in British gvt. People are given jobs that effectively are to keep people happy/reward them. For example the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or worse still as the recent reshuffle has shown the Deputy PM of Britain seems to now have this kind of role! that is not to say that writing to them doesn’t yeild an effect, and yes they are still invite to cabinet, and may say a few things but their powers are limited and no where close to those of a ’serious’ minister (which conincidently Douglas Alexander now is)
PS it might be worth writing/lobbying the British Amb in minsk, Brain Bennett. by the sounds of things he would sympathetic to the plight of promoting Belarusian language (which version is another isssue!). Address/contact details can be found at:
www.britishembassy.gov.uk/belarus
if everyone sends him e-mail/letter he might put pressure on FCO to do something. especially as it would help their project
May 10th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
green_river1985: Thank you very much for such an insightful comment. You seem pretty knowledgeable about our sitatuation. I wonder how come? Just curious…
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Thanks for sharing
March 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well.