John Reith and the BBC 1922-1939: Building an Empire of the Air?

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

“…In contrast to the original mission of the BBC under John Reith-the original director of BBC Radio and '[an] empire-builder if ever there was, driven by an unstoppable mission to improve and to civilize' (Harris 2021)--this BBC Radio platform reflects tastes as much as it dictates tastes to the British masses. It prides itself both on audience numbers and on quality content: quality (of program) is defined by quantity (of listeners).…”

“…He suggests that John Reith embodied 'paternalistic central authority' rather than 'the Holy Grail' of media impartiality that the BBC supposedly represented, characterizing John Reith the original director of BBC Radio as, 'empire-builder if ever there was, driven by an unstoppable mission to improve and to civilize'. Harris (2021) claims that Reith, 'an engineer, by training and by temperament' resented British government insistence on noncontroversial non-partisan broadcasting and based his rule over BBC staff and discourse on Fear and Efficiency, arguing that 'The BBC would be made to Reith's own design, a vast machine whose every component was conceived to transmit … providential [divine] power'. Reith himself supported the Nazi regime in Germany, arguing that the Nazis 'will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again' and admiring 'the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt against him' and applauding the 'efficiency' of Hitler's military invasion of Czechoslovakia (Stuart 1995: 55-57).…”

“…In the case of Persia, he advocated military intervention, declaring that 'our foreign policy today is utterly pusillanimous … and it seems now as if any dago republic can wipe its feet on us' (Reith 1949: 75). In South Africa he advocated a public broadcasting system akin to the BBC and based on so-called impartiality--in order to protect British colonial values against 'any barbarian breach of the perimeter of his moral civitas' (Harris 2021). Msaddek (2021) provides important insights into the continuation and adaptation of the BBC Radio mission in BBC Arabic, exploring 'the BBC's coverage of the particularly sensitive politics of the Middle East since the 1930s and thereby the delicate relationship between the BBC and the British government'.…”

Confessions of a Monopoly: The Covert Decision Making of the Early BBC

“…The lens through which the BBC is viewed has continually evolved, as the society it serves has followed its own preoccupations and political movements (Marwick 1968;Jones 1983;Miles and Smith 2013;Polkinghorne and Taylor 2019). Depending on the observer's point of view, the BBC can be presented as innovative, conservative, patriarchal or revolutionary (Taylor 2013;Procter 2015;Harris 2021). As Mullen has observed, with such a huge output of programmes, supplemented by innumerable memoranda, letters and ephemera in the BBC archives "it is clear that one cannot simply 'let the archive speak' for itself.…”