Journal article
Reporting on Europe’s migration ‘crisis’ for BBC Radio 4: journalists and the geopolitics of storytelling
- Abstract:
- This paper contributes to critical and popular geopolitics by exploring the production of BBC Radio 4’s reportage on Europe’s migration ‘crisis’. It draws on original interviews conducted with journalists, producers, editors, and senior commissioners at the BBC to uncover the thought-processes and practices that lie behind its diverse coverage. The paper identifies the professional codes that govern BBC journalists and documents the strategies of storytelling journalists employ to try and secure listener engagement and spark their geographical imaginations. It highlights the power and agency of journalists to construct geopolitical scripts on migration, but also points to creative room for journalists to inflect broadcasts with personal styles of witnessing and reporting. The journalists interviewed emerge as thoughtful and self-reflexive geopolitical ‘agents’ who are aware of their representational power and recognise the tension between objective and impartial BBC reportage and critical issues of emotion, positionality, and situated knowledge. Overall, the paper answers calls for more ‘peopled’ accounts of geopolitics and highlights the importance of investigating the production and practice of journalistic storytelling.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 922.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/14650045.2024.2379314
Authors
+ Economic and Social Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/03n0ht308
- Grant:
- 2095621
- ES/X006905/1
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis Group
- Journal:
- Geopolitics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 465-497
- Publication date:
- 2024-07-24
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-07-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1557-3028
- ISSN:
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1465-0045
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
2022341
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2022341
- Deposit date:
-
2025-06-26
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Alice Watson
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s)or with their consent.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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