Technology and trust are two sides of the same coin

LONDON — In the past years, traveling for pleasure, I soon realized that any country I had just visited was either going up in flames or becoming unsafe and out of bounds — Lebanon, Syria, Myanmar, Bolivia and Ethiopia, to mention a few. Surely, it was not me.

Similarly, any language service my former and much-admired employer, BBC World Service, was closing, under financial duress, seemed to be immediately needed in the countries assessed to be democratic and pluralistic. 

The closure of BBC radio services in Russian, Arabic, Persian and Thai, to mention a few, was immediately followed by coups and wars while the listeners were denied access to unbiased news and information. The most trusted international news organization, the BBC, paid the price, too: Closures such as Arabic and Persian radio (mainly) have already led to a loss in the BBC’s global audience of around 40 million.

Polarized and unpredictable

Maybe it is not a coincidence that the world is now more polarized and unpredictable, and we are denying the scenarios of media strategists and bean counters. They have been planning a smooth transition from old media, like analog radio and television, to IP, TikTok, streaming and easy and cheap generative AI, which is a source of good things but also disinformation. Reality never matches the plans cooked in advance, though. 

According to the BBC Director General, Tim Davie, journalism is entirely or partially blocked in around 75% of the world. Only 20% of people now live in what are considered truly free countries — a proportion halved within a decade.

After closing valuable radio services in foreign languages — 75% of the BBC World Service audience is not English-speaking — the broadcaster’s decision was followed and sometimes exaggerated by other public broadcasters in Europe, the United States and Australia. And then other well-funded state players instantly filled the vacuum created. In Lebanon, Russian-backed media is now transmitting on the radio frequency previously occupied by BBC Arabic. Under challenging financial constraints, Kenya’s state broadcaster, KBC, has taken up Chinese output on TV and radio, as has Liberia’s state broadcaster, LBS.

Aware of these facts and following vigorous BBC lobbying, the British government has included an unspecified financial provision for maintaining the BBC World Service language services in its recently announced budget. The BBC is also lobbying more generally for a return to its pre-2014 funding model (directly from taxpayers via the Foreign Office, and not partly using license fee).

How should we use digital technology, then?

Radio is not immune to change and challenges despite its role in delivering accurate, unbiased information on time. Denying the progress of digital technology and looking back at the glory years of public analog radio and television is retrograde. 

The question is not whether digital radio should be implemented but when, how and where. In rich countries like Norway and Switzerland (which is now pushing for an FM switch by 2025), faced with an aging and energy-hungry FM network or pressures on the cost of the license fee, DAB+ is perhaps the solution, at least for the public broadcasters in these non-EU countries. 

Other broadcasters, public or commercial, need to stay financially viable and meet socio-economic imperatives. Larger countries like China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and South Africa have examined the benefits and costs of digital radio and adopted their own solutions. The pillar of their digital radio advancement is purely DRM, such as in Pakistan and India, or DRM coupled with another standard (DAB in Indonesia and South Africa and CDR in China). 

International broadcasters need to keep pace with this changing digital landscape. Emergency BBC analog radio services for Gaza or Afghanistan are praiseworthy, but emergencies are now a permanent part of many people’s lives. Using digital radio, primarily DRM, to reach conflict and disaster areas from outside the affected regions is a great advantage. Investing in online services, such as streaming, might sound pleasant to European ears, but digital radio, like DRM, could enhance hundreds of millions of lives with education and training content and emergency alarms in the correct language when and where needed. All this while saving serious money on energy.

Lamentation and ambivalence

Currently, BBC News in Hausa has a weekly radio reach of 20 million people across countries like Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger, audiences that cannot be easily reached via IP. The same applies to the Horn of Africa, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Enhancing and modernizing radio using digital standards, like DRM, would keep and enhance these audiences. While getting a cash injection to maintain the 42 language services of the BBC World Service is good, investing in digital transmission, especially in DRM AM, and cheap, solar-powered receivers is equally essential.

Some critics lament the demise of shortwave and medium-wave radio and the slow pace of digital radio adoption. This has many causes, such as legacy, a different attitude toward radio than TV, the ubiquity of cell phones and the automotive industry’s resistance toward including radio in the dashboard. 

Success will come, though, only to those who invest flexibly, implement digital radio in all frequency bands (see AM mandate for cars in the U.S., enhancements to medium wave with DRM in China, India and Pakistan and other places like New Zealand) and use the newest technology wisely. There are many balls to keep in the air, but the promise that only one solution, such as IP or 5G, will replace everything that came before is unrealistic. Perhaps now is the time to get the media strategists and accountants to meet the content providers and the digital technologists.

The author is chair for the Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium.

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