The idea for this project was born in the classroom when a student asked the question ‘How does the BBC archive represent Britain's Black population?’. Several conversations followed since then, which led to this project whose original title is Decolonising the BBC Archive: radio news and the language of race in post ‐ WWII Britain.
We employ decolonising methodologies to explore the BBC news archive and seek to reorientate thinking around the language of race and its uses. This is an archival and public engagement project that aims to reveal the ways in which the broadcaster constructed notions of national belonging in the 20th century. More importantly, inviting the public to reconfigure and reimagine the BBC's constructions for 21st-century audiences creates a 'living archive' that is active, dialogic and has the potential to continue to spark conversations, learning, creativity and change. You can read a summary of our key research findings, as well as the challenges and opportunities we encountered on this project here.
It is worth noting that, in principle, BBC's values of independence, impartiality, accuracy and balance applied from the start to all its output. BBC radio, and particularly its news, had and continues to have a great impact, often greater than news printed on a page. The impact of the spoken word, so personal in its approach ‐ is much more immediate, its power to shock can be much greater. According to the 1967 BBC News Guide, the number of people who listened to at least one radio news bulletin a day was twenty million. This figure gives us an idea of the wide reach of BBC radio, as well as its potential to shape public opinion and attitudes.
Access to the digitised collection of BBC radio news has allowed us to evaluate reporting from a quantitative perspective as well; for example, there is extensive news coverage on certain topics (e.g. riots/uprisings, police and crime related stories, issues of education), while our research into what we consider to be seminal figures and events in Black British history often yielded very little, or nothing ‐ these are the gaps, or what we call BBC's 'radio silences'. Sadly, this imbalance in news coverage may be unsurprising, and yet, we believe that these imbalances persist to this day across different news organisations.
While access to this database of Home Service/R4 news scripts has been invaluable for our research, we also recognise that the news scripts we read constitute a segment of the BBC's overall news/current affairs output; there were, and still are, several other current affairs programmes, such as Today, The World at One, Analysis and The World Tonight, which complement BBC's news output and run parallel to the news bulletins. This is an important reminder that the conclusions we come to are based only on one section of the BBC's output, which is part of a larger 'flow' of BBC news and current affairs.