The production of ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC Radio 4: A popular geopolitical analysis

Abstract

The production of radio, a medium with the power to shape listeners' geographical imaginations, has received little attention in geography, particularly in comparison to visual media such as photography, television and film. This paper redresses this imbalance by examining the production of From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC), one of BBC Radio 4's longest-running programmes which has broadcast dispatches from journalists around the world since 1955. It explores the representational power of FOOC to script the world for listeners by constructing geographical imaginaries of distant people and places; interrogates who ‘Our’ correspondents are and the structures which underpin whose voices are heard; and reveals the concealed practices, spatialities and temporalities which shape the programme's production and geopolitical scripts it broadcasts. In doing so, the paper makes a significant and timely contribution to popular geopolitics, a subfield of political geography which has traditionally focused on deconstructing geopolitical discourses and imaginaries in ‘texts’, at the expense of investigating where, how and why media are ‘made’. It draws on original interviews conducted with FOOC's presenter, two producers and four correspondents, and reflects on what the programme's production reveals about how FOOC understands, conceptualises and portrays the world. By exploring FOOC, the paper offers important insights into the hidden geographies of production which govern BBC radio journalism as a sonic medium of popular geopolitics.