Publication Date

10-15-2013

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Religious Studies

Keywords

Islamic studies, Radio history, British media, Middle East history

Abstract

From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations – but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates.

Through three case studies – a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS’ “Jerusalem Direct News Service”, and the NEBS’ Islamic broadcasts –, this article charts the evolving relationship between Great Britain and its Arab-world radio stations. Examining these three stations in tandem tension between national and regional broadcasting mandates, as well as the challenge that managing each station raised for British officials in the UK and in-country. It moves away from a focus on the disembodied spheres of ideology and propaganda, and toward the messy administrative decisions that reflected British officials’ on-the-ground efforts to navigate the administrative control and programming decisions in the perplexing world of semi-independent radio broadcasting stations in the Middle East. It closes by noting that while UK-based British officials saw these three stations as operating under the aegis of British governance and on the model of the BBC, the ESB and the PBS, in particular, reflected and projected not a British imperial identity but an Egyptian and a Palestinian nationalist one.

Copyright Date

10-15-2013

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights Holder

Andrea L. Stanton

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

15 pgs

File Size

171 KB

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

Stanton, A. L. (2013). Part of imperial communications: British-governed radio in the Middle East, 1934-1949. Media History, 19(4), 421-435. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2013.847141

Publication Title

Media History

Volume

19

Issue

4

First Page

421

Last Page

435

ISSN

1469-9729

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