The Guardian reports that BBC News Global Director Jonathan Munro was out and about lobbying on the fringes of the Labour Party Conference last week. Looking for crumbs, he suggested that some World Service activity might be classified as defence spending on "stability and conflict reduction".
Defence spending is on the up; the FCO's overseas development budget (where rests current BBC spending on the World Service) has been halved.
BBC Monitoring, which used to reside in Caversham Park, sharing a building with the even spookier US OSE listening post, was moved to licence fee funding in 2013. In 2017, it became the subject of a separate agreement of service levels running to 2027, talking about 'core service' provision - still funded from the licence fee, but reduced in spending by some £10m a year, to around £14m.
Current costs aren't clear; there is some income from users of the service outside the BBC. "Spreading the burden" with defence money is an interesting and live concept, given that a substantial chunk of FCO money goes to asylum seekers in this country. But this crumb-hunting indicates that the World Service is very worried about where it might end up in the November budget.
There is nothing spooky about BBC Monitoring. The people who work there are WS journalists like all their colleagues. Labelling them spooks, as Newsnight did some years back, is not only unhelpful but potentially dangerous --- and some BBCM folk work in the countries that are not very friendly to the media.
ReplyDelete