Words on war

It’s really hard to imagine now a world before 24-hour news, continually and constantly accessible in a never-ending stream of on-the-spot, up-to-the-minute reports. What, then, would it be like to have no news summaries on the quarter-hour, no ‘live’ bulletins, no way of knowing what’s going on at this very moment in Kathmandu, Kabul or Khartoum? In his new three-part series for the World Service, War and Words (Sundays), Jonathan Dimbleby looks back to the late 1920s, when the fledgling BBC was not allowed to broadcast any news item until it had first appeared in print. Newspapers reigned supreme when it came to reliable and up-to-date reportage. The Corporation had no specialist news team, no foreign correspondents, no ‘embedded’ reporters in war zones (the Spanish Civil War changed all that). It relied for its copy on independent news-gathering agencies such as Reuters and the Press Association and, at the end of every bulletin, the BBC announcer had to state that the information just broadcast was the copyright of Reuters, etc.

American radio was way ahead of Auntie in realising the potential of news to capture the attention and hold on to audiences, and also of radio to provide something print never could: eyewitness accounts of events as they happen (although at first these news reports could not be ‘live’ because the technology was not yet capable of broadcasting away from the studio). We heard an extraordinary clip from a Chicago radio station, ‘the prairie farmer station’, dated 6 May 1937.

A reporter, Herbert Morrison, had been sent out with an engineer (who ‘cut’ the recording for later broadcast) to Lakehurst, New Jersey, to watch the arrival of the first airship of the season to cross the Atlantic. A routine assignment, thought Morrison.