Revisiting Transnational Broadcasting

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of original papers and research project reports considering the history of the BBC foreign-language services prior to, and during, the Second World War. The communication between the British government and foreign publics by way of mass media constituted a fundamental, if often ignored, aspect of Britain's international relations. From the 1930s onwards, transnational broadcasting, that is, broadcasting across national borders, became a major element in the conduct of Britain's diplomacy, and the BBC was employed by the government to further its diplomatic, strategic and economic interests in times of rising international tension and conflict. A review of the literature on the BBC's foreign-language broadcasts sets the stage for the presentation of the articles that compose this special issue of Media History.

KEYWORDS:

• BBC
• transnational media
• propaganda
• Second World War
• public diplomacy
• broadcasting

Although scholars of international relations have long ignored the importance of transborder communication,¹ there can be no doubt that the media have played a significant part in establishing new diplomatic practices. Prior to the First World War, traditional diplomacy was based on secrecy, formalised relations between governments and diplomats, and interpersonal communication between the diplomatic representatives of nation states.² The technological inventions of global communication during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—wireless telegraphy, radio, television—greatly expanded the scope of communicating across borders. For instance, the reach of radio broadcasts is almost unlimited by geographical frontiers, and their reception difficult to control. All this makes radio an ideal medium for governments to spread political communication and propaganda.³ Because of the advances in global communication technology, and because of the increasing interest of the public in foreign politics, governments could no longer afford to limit their diplomatic practices to traditional channels and to ignore public opinion—domestic and foreign—in their decision-making.⁴

Thus, what came to be known, in the wake of the Second World War, as the ‘new diplomacy’ takes place in the public view through the media.⁵ From the Cold War to the recent activities of the terrorist organisation ‘Islamic State’ and the tensions between Russia and the West, international relations and conflicts are not only subject to mediation on the diplomatic stage, but the political actors involved use the media to gain international support for their policy or to disseminate fear among those whom they consider to be their enemies. It was, in fact, the recognition that the media do play a major role in conquering foreign publics that led Edmund Gullion in the mid-1960s to coin the concept of ‘public diplomacy’ as ‘the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries’—a new expression for the old but discredited term ‘propaganda’.⁶ According to Nancy Snow, public diplomacy ‘has been about governments talking to global publics [.], and includes those efforts to inform, influence, and engage those publics in support of national objectives and foreign policies'.⁷ And Philip M. Taylor argued: ‘This new phrase formally recognised information as an instrument of national power, alongside diplomatic, military and economic power.'⁸ In a similar vein, Joseph Nye proposed in 1990 the concept of ‘soft power’ to explain how countries can exercise a significant international influence not only through their military capacity (‘hard power’), but also through the dissemination of their values, culture and ideology. These are spread not exclusively, but to a considerable extent, through the media.⁹

In times of diplomatic crisis, and even more so in times of war, no government can afford to ignore the technological means and the techniques to inform and influence foreign publics in a desired manner. This deliberate use of information for manipulative purposes has long been termed ‘propaganda’. In everyday language, ‘propaganda’ is often regarded a synonym for lies and ideological indoctrination—a connotation that it acquired in the wake of the First World War. However, despite the controversial debates, during the interwar years, on the nature of the concept (see below), between 1939 and 1945 it was widely used in British government circles, in the BBC, and in public discourse to describe Britain's information policy at home and abroad. Recent communication and historical scholarship has tried to free the term from its pejorative connotation.¹⁰ Following Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, propaganda can be defined as ‘the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist'.¹¹

Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, and in an era of globally operating digital media and omnipresent propaganda spread by states and non-state actors, such as terrorist groups, alike, it seems an opportune moment to reconsider the novelty of transnational broadcasting during the 1930s and early 1940s. First, however, let us briefly explain what is meant by the term ‘transnational broadcasting’. According to Michael Brüggemann et al., transnational media are explicitly addressed to audiences outside national borders. Four ideal-kinds of transnational media can be distinguished: First, national media with a transnational mission; second, international media, that is, media from more than two nations that co-operate together and address two or more national audiences; third, pan-regional media that address a specific world region; and fourth, global media that are not restricted to a specific world region, but address a broad transnational audience.¹² The BBC foreign-language services analysed here belong to the first category; they are ‘national media with a transnational mission’ that aim ‘to reach an audience outside the national territory with some kind of political mission that is defined by national governments’.¹³

Today it is taken for granted that nation states and political non-state actors make significant investments into reaching foreign audiences via the media. However, in order to develop an understanding of how these ‘public diplomacy’ strategies are constructed, it is important to look back into the past at a time when the first electronic mass medium, radio, was a novel tool for disseminating messages to foreign publics. Being a medium that could easily cross national borders, radio was already used in the 1920s for transborder broadcasting in foreign languages. The Soviet Union took the lead, and after the inauguration of Radio Moscow in October 1929 it initiated regular transmissions in French, English and German. Other European countries with colonial empires also started transnational radio broadcasts directed at their colonies in the late 1920s (e.g. the Netherlands) and early 1930s (e.g. France, Belgium and Great Britain).¹⁴ However, these transmissions were operated exclusively in national languages and targeted at the white settlers in the overseas territories under colonial rule. This opened the way for the Axis powers, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, to assume the lead in foreign-language broadcasting during the interwar period.¹⁵

Although transnational broadcasting played an important role during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—with Italian and Portuguese stations supporting Franco's uprising against the Republic and Radio Moscow supporting the Madrid government¹⁶—it was taking centre stage as a weapon of propaganda and counter-propaganda only in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. On the outbreak of war in 1939 the German Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft was already broadcasting from 39 shortwave transmitters, reaching North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. Other transmitters would be added to the network during the war, enabling it to broadcast in 53 different languages by 1943.¹⁷

The BBC, on the other hand, was a latecomer in the field of foreign-language broadcasting as it took British broadcasters and the government until quite late to overcome hesitations regarding the nature of propaganda. Following the First World War, ‘propaganda’ had become a word with a pejorative connotation; disseminating propaganda was regarded as something ‘“un-English”, something foreigners did and democracies only resorted to in wartime’.¹⁸ Thus, while other nations had long begun to address foreign audiences outside their national borders, in the late 1930s there was still a running debate inside and outside the BBC ‘as to whether propaganda was “a good thing”’.¹⁹

Hence, although the Corporation had started its Empire Service as early as 1932, it initiated transmissions in foreign languages only in January 1938 with the launch of the Arabic Service. The service was started on the explicit request of the British government and was London's desperate response to Radio Bari, a station set up by the Fascist government in the south of Italy for disseminating anti-British propaganda in North Africa and among the Arab population of Palestine. This propaganda severely threatened British diplomatic and strategic interests in the Middle East.²⁰ Now the die was cast, and the BBC began to rapidly expand its broadcasting services in foreign languages. In March 1938, news bulletins in Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America followed. They aimed to counter the anti-British propaganda disseminated by German radio stations in South America that threatened to impair Britain's economic and diplomatic interests.²¹ During the Munich crisis in September 1938, broadcasts in German, French and Italian were added—the first British broadcasts directed at foreign audiences in Continental Europe.²² As previously, these broadcasts were inspired by Whitehall's geopolitical concerns; they were a desperate response to the worsening international climate that threated to develop into a wholesale European war.²³

When war did finally break out in September 1939 the BBC, again on the initiative of Whitehall, greatly expanded its foreign-language services. The introduction of new languages followed by and large the sequence of Germany's occupation of countries across Europe. Alban Webb writes: ‘The Second World War was the making of the multilingual “world service” we recognize today. [ … ] This explosion in foreign-language broadcasting was consequently imprinted with wartime contingencies and exigencies [ … ].’²⁴ During the war, the BBC assured that the publics in allied, neutral, enemy and enemy-occupied nations alike could hear the British interpretation of events. By mid-1945, it was broadcasting from 45 high-powered transmitters in 45 languages into almost every corner of the world, totalling an equivalent of 850 hours per week. More than half of the BBC's foreign-language services were directed at countries in Europe.²⁵

Today, the BBC World Service, as it was renamed in 1965, is still broadcasting in 30 languages—excluding English—across the globe. However, since the introduction of the first foreign-language services in 1938, a dramatic shift in languages has taken place reflecting the changes in Britain's international relations. Whereas during the Second World War and during the Cold War the focus had been on European audiences, today the majority of the services are aimed at Asian populations.²⁶ Over the years, the BBC foreign-language services also underwent changes in their name. British transnational broadcasting had begun in December 1932 with the inauguration of the BBC Empire Service, a shortwave service aimed principally at English speakers in the British Empire. With the introduction of foreign-language services on the eve of the Second World War, the BBC Empire Service was renamed into BBC Overseas Service in November 1939. To this was added a separate BBC European Service in 1941—a consequence of the massive expansion of foreign-language broadcasting during the war. These broadcasting services were administratively separate from the BBC Home Service (for British listeners); they were not financed from the domestic licence fee but from a government grant-in-aid coming from the Foreign Office budget, and they were collectively known as the BBC External Services. As mentioned, in May 1965 the BBC External Services were renamed into BBC World Service.²⁷

We have seen that the BBC was a latecomer in the field of transnational broadcasting—only in 1938 and on the initiative of the British government had it begun to create a foreign-language service. The choice of each new language during the late 1930s and early 1940s was dictated by political, economic and strategic necessities; the radio transmissions were meant to compensate for the loss of Britain's influence in the world in the diplomatic, economic and military sphere by rallying the sympathy of foreign publics for the British cause. As Philip M. Taylor has put it:

[F]or Britain [the use of radio propaganda] was symptomatic of a declining power searching for new and alternative means of defending her prestige from constant attack. It was an attempt to preserve credibility not only for Britain but for democracy as a viable alternative to totalitarianism.²⁸

As with its domestic transmissions, the BBC adopted in its foreign-language broadcasts a strategy of presenting itself as a credible and objective source of information in opposition to German and Italian broadcasts that were known for frequently presenting lies. Indeed, the BBC's claim to objectivity functioned as ‘a propaganda weapon—a demonstration of the superiority of democracy over totalitarianism’.²⁹ In internal discussions, however, the Foreign Office made no secret that it considered the BBC foreign-language broadcasts the propaganda arm of the state, yet this fact had to be kept secret in the public's eye so as not to jeopardise the credibility of the Corporation. A memorandum of early 1938 stated:

It was [.] decided that it was important to safeguard the independence of the BBC in the eyes of the public [ … ]. In point of fact the BBC work in continuous consultation with die Foreign Office [ … ] as regards the policy on which the foreign language broadcasts are based and as regards the matter broadcast.³⁰

Nevertheless, although the Corporation ‘was neither independent nor truthful during the war’,³¹ it became the most important instrument for disseminating news in Europe—in enemy and enemy-occupied territories as much as in the neutral countries under authoritarian rule (such as Spain and Portugal). While listening to foreign radio stations was forbidden under threat of punishment in Germany and in German-occupied territories, a large number of people did take the risk of listening to the British broadcasts. In neutral countries, in contrast, listeners would often gather in private houses and public places to hear the latest news from London. The BBC thus became one of the most important tools used by the Allies to win the minds and hearts of foreign publics during the war, and it was instrumental in creating a transnational communication space for the British interpretation of the conflict.³² As a result, listening to the BBC's news bulletins—often secretly and under life-threatening circumstances—has in many European nations become an integral ingredient of the historical memory of the Second World War.³³

Historians have emphasised the importance of the BBC's foreign-language broadcasts in supporting British diplomacy during the 1930s and in reinforcing Britain's war effort against the Axis powers. Asa Briggs’ multivolume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, originally published between 1961 and 1979, and Gerard Mansell's Let Truth Be Told published in 1982, remain important sources for the history and organisation of the BBC Overseas Service as a whole as well as for individual services in particular.³⁴ Philip M. Taylor has traced the evolution of the BBC's foreign-language services within the framework of Britain's ‘cultural diplomacy’ during the interwar years.³⁵ Michael Stenton has highlighted the role of the BBC in Britain's policy of stirring up popular resistance against the German occupation forces in France, Denmark, Poland and Yugoslavia, while David Garnett provides a general account of British political warfare, in which the BBC played a central part.³⁶ In her unpublished M.A. thesis, Helen Giblin studied the evolution of the BBC's foreign-language services from the perspective of Britain's political priorities.³⁷ Two recent edited collections of essays offer insights into various aspects of the history of the BBC World Service without, however, dealing specifically with the late 1930s and early 1940s.³⁸ Other recent studies of the BBC foreign-language services have primarily focused on the Corporation's role during the Cold War.³⁹

Nonetheless, there are still surprisingly few historical studies of individual BBC foreign-language services attempting to synthesise the history of transnational broadcasting with British government policy prior to, and during, the Second World War. The best documented service is probably the French Service.⁴⁰ Peter Partner's 1988 history of the Arabic Service remains the most comprehensive study of the BBC's oldest foreign-language service, while Niccolò Tognarini and Arturo Marzano have focused on transnational Anglo-Italian propaganda interactions in the Mediterranean during the 1930s.⁴¹ An early study by Jeremy Bennett focused on the role of the Danish Service in supporting the Danish resistance movement, whereas Nelson Ribeiro has recently analysed the BBC broadcasts directed to neutral Portugal.⁴² Ioannis Stefanidis has provided a comprehensive account of British propaganda to the Balkans which attempted to compensate for the lack of Britain's diplomatic and military power in that region. His study deals extensively, among other forms of propaganda, with the BBC broadcasts directed to Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia.⁴³ So far no systematic studies are available on the German Service or the service directed to neutral Spain during the Second World War.⁴⁴ Similarly, study of the BBC's services directed to Eastern Europe has been very limited.⁴⁵ As regards the BBC's Italian broadcasts, we are similarly lacking a thorough analysis of the service as a whole, but Ester LoBiundo has recently published a short book focusing on the year 1943.⁴⁶

This special issue seeks to stimulate further research by revisiting selected BBC foreign-language services directed at European audiences before and during the Second World War. The articles, based on original archival research, are arranged in accordance with their chronological focus. While the focal points and methodological approaches of the case studies vary, they are connected by a number of common interests: First, they investigate the political circumstances under which the individual foreign-language services were introduced and address the sometimes thorny relationship between the BBC and the British government with particular reference to British foreign policy towards the countries in question. Second, the articles raise issues of journalism ethics by exploring the delicate relationship between truth and objectivity on the one hand, and propaganda on the other, in broadcasting under wartime conditions and governmental control. Clearly, Whitehall and the BBC's journalists were pursuing conflicting interests in the sphere of transnational broadcasting: Whereas the government pursued a propaganda strategy in support of its diplomatic interests and strategic necessities, the journalists were committed to the principles of truth and objectivity in selecting news items for broadcasting.⁴⁷ Still, the BBC foreign-language services acquired a reputation for accuracy and credibility that holds until this day. Third, the articles consider the BBC's foreign-language services from a transnational perspective: Before and during the war, the BBC was deeply involved in the foreign policy process of the British government, transmitting London's foreign policy and warfare to European publics and thus creating a transnational communication space.

The special issue opens with Stephanie Seul's study of the early years of the BBC German Service during 1938–1940 as an example of British attempts to influence public opinion in (potentially) enemy countries. The article reveals how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to integrate transnational broadcasting into his appeasement policy and later warfare towards Nazi Germany in a desperate attempt to win over the German public to his foreign policy aim of saving peace in Europe. However, the BBC's employment for official propaganda raised delicate issues of the control of the Corporation by the government and hence of the objectivity and credibility of its broadcasts. The article traces the evolution of a propaganda strategy in which the claims to ‘truthfulness’ and ‘objectivity’—as compared to the lies of Nazi propaganda—became key arguments.

The following two articles shift the focus from broadcasting to an enemy audience to broadcasting to neutral countries. As Nelson Ribeiro and Gloria García González demonstrate, the BBC's Portuguese and Spanish transmissions, inaugurated in June 1939, were considered strategically important by the British government due to the authoritarian nature of the governments in Portugal and Spain and the persistent attempts of German and Italian radio to influence public opinion on the Iberian Peninsula. Ribeiro's article analyses the editorial line of the BBC Portuguese Service and the difficulty of steering a middle course between selling British policy, which demanded from Portugal to end exports of raw materials to Nazi Germany, without offending its authoritarian ruler, Oliveira Salazar. García González, in turn, focuses on the BBC's delicate mission, during 1939–1945, of keeping Spain out of the conflict and possibly inducing Francisco Franco's regime to a favourable stance towards the Allied cause. This, however, led to severe tensions between Britain's ambassador in Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, and the BBC.

In contrast, Kay Chadwick explores the British broadcasting strategy towards the French audience living under German occupation. More specifically, she focuses on representations of Britain to occupied France in the programme ‘The French speak to the French.' After examining the establishment of the BBC French Service and the formulation of a British propaganda strategy, Chadwick investigates the efforts of the service to explain and justify British war policy and to foster the belief of the French population in Britain as a reliable friend and ally after the German occupation of Paris in June 1940.

Hans-Ulrich Wagner's contribution takes us back to Germany, offering yet another perspective on the transnational dimension of the BBC's broadcasting services. His article directs the attention from British broadcasting to an enemy country in wartime to the transfer of the BBC's broadcasting philosophy—and of part of its wartime personnel—to the newly established broadcasting system in Northern Germany in the immediate post-war years. The BBC and the ideals of British public service broadcasting thus became a role model and laid the ground for the new broadcasting system in the British occupation zone. Repatriated Germans, who had worked for the BBC German Service during their exile in London, came to play a crucial role as representatives of a new generation of German journalists with a democratic political outlook. They heralded the idea of public service broadcasting, but were often exposed to pressure from conservative forces in West Germany.

Finally, in the research project reports section, doctoral students Agnieszka Morriss and Erica Harrison present their ongoing research on the BBC's role in broadcasting to Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. As regards the latter, the study focuses specifically on the broadcasts of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile transmitted by the BBC. The research project reports take us back to the issue of how to address an audience living under German occupational rule while fulfilling the demands of Britain's policy towards an increasingly close Soviet ally, whose own political and strategic ambitions ran counter to Poland's and Czechoslovakia's national interests. Both BBC services have hardly been studied; the Ph.D. projects will therefore contribute significantly to our knowledge of British foreign-language broadcasting to Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War and the dawning Cold War.

This collection of articles and research project reports can by no means cover the whole range of BBC foreign-language services during the Second World War, or all the diverse aspects of British transnational broadcasting and its legacy. Even so, the editors hope that, taken together, the papers will provide an encouragement to further research in this field.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the articles by Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Nelson Ribeiro and Stephanie Seul were originally presented in a panel to the ECREA 4th European Communication Conference held in Istanbul in October 2012. The editors wish to thank the authors who have contributed to this special issue, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Tom O'Malley and Stephanie Jones for their unfailing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stephanie Seul http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2616-1366

Nelson Ribeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4724-550X

Additional information

Nelson Ribeiro, Faculty of Humanities, Catholic University of Portugal, Palma de Cima, 1649–023 Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy, 1.

2. Frankel, International Relations, 123–5; Gilboa, “Diplomacy in the Media Age,” 1; Snow, “Rethinking Public Diplomacy,” 6; Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy, 6.

3. Thussu, “Information Economy,” 536; Fickers, “Radio,” 870; Fickers, “Broadcasting,” 106.

4. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy, 6.

5. Gilboa, “Diplomacy in the Media Age,” 1–2.

6. Taylor, “Strategic Communications,” 6; Cull, “Public Diplomacy,” 19. The quotation is taken from an early brochure of the Murray Center of Public Diplomacy, quoted in Cull, “Public Diplomacy,” 19. See also Webb, London Calling, 2–3.

7. Snow, “Rethinking Public Diplomacy,” 6.

8. Taylor, “Strategic Communications,” 6.

9. Nye, “Soft Power,”

10. Taylor, “Strategic Communications”; Bussemer, Propaganda; Jowett and O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion; Welch, Propaganda.

11. Jowett and O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 7.

12. Brüggemann and Schulz-Forberg, “Becoming Pan-European?,” 698–700; Brüggemann et al., “Transnationale Öffentlichkeit in Europa,” 396–7.

13. Brüggemann and Schulz-Forberg, “Becoming Pan-European?,” 699. On the transnational character of broadcasting see also Fickers, “Broadcasting”; Fickers, “Radio.”

14. On broadcasting to the British Empire see Potter, Broadcasting Empire. See also the reviews and comments by Hajkowski et al., “Roundtable.”

15. Walker, Skyful of Freedom, 26–9; Wasburn, Broadcasting Propaganda; Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy, 7–8.

16. Ribeiro, “Using a New Medium.”

17. Bergmeier and Rainer, Inside Story.

18. Taylor, British Propaganda, 91.

19. Briggs, War of Words, 81.

20. Partner, Arab Voices; Taylor, Projection; Briggs, Golden Age; Marzano, “Guerra delle onde.” See also Webb, London Calling, 1–2; Clark, “The B.B.C.’s External Services,” 173.

21. Whitton and Herz, “Radio in International Politics”; Taylor, Projection of Britain; Webb, London Calling, 1–2.

According to Clark, “The B.B.C.’s External Services,” 173, the broadcasts for Latin America also served the purpose of cloaking the BBC's propaganda activities in Palestine.

22. For detailed accounts of the step-by-step introduction of new foreign-language services by the BBC see Taylor, Projection of Britain; Briggs, Golden Age and War of Words; Seul, “Appeasement und Propaganda.”

23. For the circumstances that led to the introduction of German, French and Italian broadcasts by the BBC during the Munich crisis in September 1938 see Stephanie Seul's article in this special issue.

24. Webb, London Calling, 13.

25. Mansell, Let Truth Be Told, 104, 123; Webb, London Calling, 2, 15; Footitt and Tobia, WarTalk, 69; Clark, “The B.B.C.’s External Services,” 173.

26. Information retrieved from the BBC World Service's homepage, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ws/languages [last visit: September 18, 2015].

27. Walker, Skyful of Freedom, 24, 31, 60, 77–8; Browne, “Going International”; Clark, “The B.B.C.’s External Services,” 175.

28. Taylor, Projection of Britain, 215.

29. Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 166.

30. Foreign Language Broadcasting, undated Foreign Office memorandum, The National Archives, Kew, London, FO 395/564, P 1263/5/150.

31. Nicholas, Echo of War, 8.

32. Badenoch, Fickers and Henrich-Franke, “Airy Curtains,” 14 have stressed the ‘important role of broadcasting as a central actor in creating a transnational and European communication space’.

33. Lo Biundo, London Calling Italy, 9; Seul, “Appeasement und Propaganda,” 1356–9.

34. Briggs, Golden Age; Briggs, War of Words; Mansell, Let Truth Be Told.

35. Taylor, Projection of Britain; Taylor, British Propaganda.

36. Stenton, Radio London; Garnett, Secret History of PWE.

37. Giblin, “BBC External Services.”

38. Gillespie and Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy; Gillespie, Webb and Baumann, BBC World Service.

39. Webb, “Auntie Goes to War Again”; Webb, London Calling; Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy. For a more general study on cold-war broadcasting see also Badenoch, Fickers and Henrich-Franke, “Airy Curtains.”

40. See the literature review in Kay Chadwick's contribution to this special issue. Another recent study is Launchbury, Music, Poetry, Propaganda.

41. Partner, Arab Voices; Tognarini, “Race for the Arabian Audience”; Marzano, “Guerra delle onde.”

42. Bennett, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement; Ribeiro, BBC Broadcasts to Portugal.

43. Stefanidis, Substitute for Power.

44. The focus of Seul, “Appeasement und Propaganda” is on the period 1938–1940, while Brinson and Dove, ‘Stimme der Wahrheit’ present essays on various aspects of the history of the BBC German Service during 1938–1999. An early study by Wittek, Der britische Ätherkrieg does not make use of official government documents and is largely outdated.

For a review of the research literature on the BBC Spanish Service see Gloria García González’ article in this special issue.

45. See the literature reviews in the research project reports of Agnieszka Morriss and Erica Harrison in this special issue.

46. Lo Biundo, London Calling Italy. The volume contains a brief review of the literature.

47. On journalism ethics see Ward, “Journalism Ethics”; Kaplan, “Origins of Objectivity.”