Communication breakdown

There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time to reduce the BBC’s output in the Russian language when relations between London and Moscow are so frosty? Surely it should be broadcasting more of its impartial, informative news and current affairs to the peoples ruled by President Medvedev’s increasingly authoritarian government, not less? But the World Service has had to face up to a bit of real-economick. The service is funded not by the licence fee but by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (a hangover from the days when it was known as the Empire Service), and has been told that the pot of gold is not bottomless. Cuts must be made — and the obvious place to make them in the Russian service is in radio, for reasons that tell us a lot about how fast the world is changing in this new century.