Written evidence from NUJ (BBC0002)

NUJ briefing on the future of BBC Monitoring (Foreign affairs committee evidence)

The NUJ is deeply concerned about the effects of the latest round of cuts at Monitoring and the plan to move it out of Caversham. Monitoring provides a vital and unique service. In these uncertain times, with the threat of ISIS and the deterioration of relations with Russia, this service is crucial to the UK.

In the next charter period the BBC will have to make further cuts of possibly up to 20 per cent to cover shortfalls and to pay for the free licences of the over-75s. BBC Monitoring must not be allowed to become a forgotten corner of the World Service. Proper funding must be found and the present vicious cuts rescinded so that Monitoring can maintain its global and constant watch.

BBC MONITORING

BBC Monitoring (BBCM) provides open-source information from the world’s broadcast, print and, increasingly, social and online media. It selects reports, translates them when necessary, and informs its users of political, economic, security and media news.

In addition to verbatim reports, Monitoring also publishes analytical and thematic briefings. It offers insight into how UK policy and actions are perceived. It also sheds light on countries where news is scarce or tightly controlled.

BBC Monitoring is based at Caversham Park, on the outskirts of Reading in Berkshire, and has several offices overseas. It also has an important and valuable information-sharing agreement with its much larger US partner organisation, Open Source Enterprise (OSE). It is part of the BBC World Service and since 2013 has been funded by the licence fee. Prior to that, its government clients contributed to the budget.

It was established in 1939 to listen in on World War II propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the British government. Since then its remit has expanded to global coverage and BBCM has played an important role informing its customers about the Cold War, the collapse of communism, the Balkan wars, the Falklands war, the turmoil in the Middle East and other geopolitical events.

Open Source helps to assess the political climate in past and present theatres of conflict, identify future security issues, and understand the causes of social unrest and the potential for political instability. It is an important component of soft power, and maximises the benefits obtained from other forms of intelligence.

Representatives of the defence, intelligence and security communities are on record when evaluating the importance of BBC Monitoring (the Intelligence and Security Committee has described it as “indispensable”).

A cursory search of the web finds BBCM often mentioned in two contexts: open-source intelligence and funding cuts (which are discussed separately).

It is important to point out that BBCM deals only with open-source material – that is, material intended for public consumption. BBCM’s output may be used for classified purposes by some, and BBCM may liaise with such users, as it does with all others, but there is nothing classified about what BBCM does. Its staff are BBC journalists, not intelligence operatives.

Monitoring’s main users are the BBC and the UK government, particularly the FCO, MoD, and Cabinet Office. But it has many others with an interest in geopolitics and/or security-related issues and/or the media environment:

• intergovernmental organisations such as Nato and the OSCE; the European Union, its Council and Parliament; International Criminal Court; African Union and UN agencies including the IAEA and World Food Programme;
• other governments and agencies: ministries of defence, foreign affairs, justice and interior affairs, and intelligence and security bodies;
• embassies;
• universities, think tanks and research institutes in the UK and other countries;
• corporations, in particular major players in hydrocarbons, but also many big names in other fields;
• UK and foreign media organisations and agencies;
• other UK government bodies and agencies: police forces and units; plus the Home Office, Treasury and other non-ministerial departments;
• charities, particularly those working in areas of instability.

“The work of BBC Monitoring at Caversham Park remains as relevant today as it was at the height of the cold war,” The Guardian wrote in 2010 during a previous round of spending cuts. “An internet connection gives anyone the opportunity to monitor open sources of information around the world. But few would have the time, the languages or the knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff in the press, TV and radio reports from 150 countries in more than 100 languages... BBC Monitoring is a vital resource, it has proved itself and should be kept.”  (http://bit.ly/2c4orJn)

THE FUTURE OF BBC MONITORING

In July 2016 BBC Monitoring announced a comprehensive restructure under the title The Future of BBC Monitoring. It had been given a £2.5m savings target to meet by April 2017, in addition to an ongoing £1.5m shortfall. The overall savings target for BBC News was £10m, so the economies required of Monitoring were greatly disproportionate.

Monitoring’s budget was £23m in 2010/11. By 2016 some of its parts had been incorporated into the BBC’s reporting and funding structures, leaving an operating budget of £13.2m. Faced with the need to find £4m in savings from that already reduced amount, it is shedding 40 per cent of its UK staff and 21 per cent of its employees in offices abroad. The total number of BBCM employees will fall from 320 to 220.

The proposed new structure is simpler and brings Monitoring’s job titles and descriptions into line with the rest of the BBC. But these drastic cuts put in doubt Monitoring’s ability to monitor – that is, to maintain a global and constant watch.

The changes include the following.

Monitoring Research

This unit has a global coverage remit and is staffed by linguists, regional experts, historians and information management specialists, all graduates and many postgraduates.

It maintains a unique and authoritative collection of information on:

• countries, governments and government departments, political parties, and national, regional and international organisations;
• leading political figures from every country, including cabinet members, ministers and judicial and other figures, and diplomats and military personnel;
• a comprehensive diary of forthcoming elections.

Its research website includes pages for countries, detailed individual biographies, cabinet lists, diplomatic representations, armed forces and more.

Monitoring Research offers a dedicated enquiry service for BBC personnel, official and government and commercial users, ranging from checking names and spellings to trawling BBCM’s vast back-catalogue of reports for specific events or names or organisations, or links between them.

This team will no longer be a separate entity and its members will be dispersed to the language teams or, mostly, to the new News Desk. The number of researchers is to grow slightly but their duties will expand as the number of monitors and editors diminishes and other supporting roles vanish. The database will also be reviewed to decide which parts to maintain in future.

Video Unit

Monitoring’s Video Unit provides a bespoke service directly to a department of the MoD which requires video material of hostilities, weapons, military and strategic infrastructure, VIPs, regular and irregular forces and other items of interest. Its editors select from broadcasts covered by Monitoring and its US partner, OSE, and from other open-source material not otherwise covered.

MoD and other military clients regularly visit the Video Unit. They speak highly of it and have said its material is used in high-level decision-making. Regular feedback indicates that very little of what it sends is discarded.

This unit is due to close with the loss of its dedicated team of editors. Monitors will themselves be tasked with identifying and supplying video material of interest, not exclusively for the MoD but for all customers. However, this will be an additional duty imposed on already diminished teams and it is hard to see how the service to the MoD can be anything but severely degraded.

Afghan editors

This team of journalists work on reports produced by Monitoring’s offices in Afghanistan. They liaise with and mentor their colleagues abroad and select and edit material for publication. This team will be abolished and the work transferred to the staff based in Afghanistan. BBC Monitoring closed its UK-based Afghanistan office once before, in the late 1990s. In 2001, it had to be rapidly re-assembled.

Media Hub/News Desk

The Media Hub is BBC Monitoring’s main, but not exclusive, gateway to the rest of the BBC. It is one of several teams with a thematic and global remit rather than country or regional.

Its work divides into three categories:

• news updates and alerts and supplying multimedia content to the rest of the BBC;
• features and write-ups, briefing documents in the format of Q&A or backgrounders about events or personalities in the news;
• thematic roundups, in particular for counterterrorism (jihadist and other developments); news about traditional and social media and media freedom, and shipping movements and events.

Media Hub also runs the new BBC Monitoring Portal (https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/#/) and Monitoring’s social media presence (Facebook and Twitter), and maintains the BBC’s country profiles. This team is to get more staff, but the composition changes. It loses half of its editors and gains most of the researchers from Monitoring Research (see above). Rebranded as News Desk, it also assumes the editorial leadership and co-ordination functions previously carried out by a separate team of senior editors (which is being halved in number).

Source Management

The role of the Source Management team is central to Monitoring – acquisition, distribution and research of media sources. Its data comes via an array of satellite dishes at Caversham Park and a remotely-operated receiving station at nearby Crowsley Park. For access to material that cannot be received in the UK, it co-ordinates with Monitoring’s overseas offices. Its radio input comes from satellite and terrestrial broadcasts, and the Internet is now also a major factor. The team also maintains rolling archives of more than 40 sources, which it was planning to increase.

Working with the monitors, Source Management identifies and catalogues sources’ affiliations and contributes to decision-making on which media are the most useful to cover in a fast-moving news environment.

It is a team of technical ingenuity. Monitoring has in the past accessed remote radio receivers over the telephone in such places as Helmand Province, Baghdad and Amman, and has used Internet telephony to receive Friday prayers from Tehran.

The Source Management team will cease to be a separate entity and lose half of its operators. The remaining three will be transferred to the BBC’s engineering structure. Its future hours of coverage and ability to acquire and research sources will inevitably diminish. The future of the satellite infrastructure when Monitoring leaves Caversham Park is unclear.

Web team

This is one of BBC Monitoring’s most valued teams. Its editors monitor and analyse extremist content on the Internet, particularly from Islamist and jihadist organisations. It is regularly the first to report claims of responsibility for acts of violence. It also supplies audio and video material from websites, for example speeches and hostage reports, for BBC and other customers. This team is to increase in size.

Language teams

The language teams are the foundation of BBCM. Put simply, the monitors watch and listen to the broadcast sources and read the print and social media. They select reports of interest, translating as necessary and presenting them in the most appropriate format: verbatim text or excerpts, or, increasingly, as complex write-ups bringing the essence of the story to the fore and discarding the extraneous.

Monitoring in the three top priority languages – Arabic, Persian and Russian – is carried out at Caversham Park. These languages are also covered by overseas units. Other overseas units monitor and edit material in further languages. Lower-priority languages, such as eastern, central and western European including the Balkans, have gradually been reduced to residual or no coverage under the impact of successive cuts in the past 10 years.

Under The Future of Monitoring the Arabic and Persian staffing in the UK reduces slightly. That of Russian reduces by half. Overseas staffing is largely unchanged.

Support and administration

The administrative and production support teams will either close or be significantly reduced, with their functions either lost or transferred to the (already-depleted) teams of journalists and editors.

Customer liaison

In line with the reductions in other parts of Monitoring, the team that liaises with users and customers is being significantly cut.

Overseas offices

This document focuses on the UK presence at Caversham Park. However, BBCM has a number of offices abroad, including in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kenya, India and Afghanistan. It is opening further offices in the USA, Turkey and Israel. There is an overall reduction of about 20 per cent in the overseas headcount, but the larger offices retain significant staffing levels and there will be increased use of freelancers.

Caversham Park

Finally, the BBC has confirmed that it has decided in principle to move Monitoring out of its historical UK base at Caversham Park to one of the buildings in London W1, at a date to be determined. A date has not been set, but when it happens, Monitoring will inevitably lose yet more staff who are unable to make the move. At this point, Monitoring will no longer be a separate unit with its own identity. We fear it will eventually be reduced to a rump within BBC News and World Service: a couple of desks in a corner of a newsroom.

IMPACT ON SERVICE

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee described BBC Monitoring as “a strategic asset, with the government being the main customer”. Although part of the BBC, it said, Monitoring’s “priorities are also influenced by its government stakeholders”. It added that: “Once the BBC assumes budgetary responsibilities, it will need to agree a new framework for the adequate supply of monitoring services to the Government.” Presciently, it identified “scope for tension under the new funding arrangements if the government stakeholders wanted to maintain or expand monitoring services that the BBC judged to be unaffordable”.

The Intelligence and Security Committee has expressed concern about cuts to Monitoring and the consequent impact for government users. A senior security official has spoken of the need to obtain “binding commitments” from the BBC as it takes on sole funding of Monitoring. Equally presciently, he added: “You can never say absolutely never when you are transferring something out of your direct control.”

In its presentation to staff on the latest cuts, Monitoring said it had carefully considered the effect on its services. It would work hard to maintain the “crucial” partnership with OSE and “continue to consult on strategic priorities, locations and shared operations”. It was in negotiation with government clients, whom it had briefed and who “understand the need for the changes... and the strategy we are proposing to meet our financial targets”.

Before 2011, when Monitoring received funding from the government, editors aimed for a balance between the needs of government and other users when they selected material. But since 2011, when the transition from grants to the licence fee began, the focus has shifted towards the BBC. This is natural, since the BBC has become the sole source of finance (apart from limited commercial income).

Increasingly, the day’s agenda derives not from the target media (which often have different priorities) but from the BBC’s news agenda. The method of work is also shifting from monitoring in the sense of keeping a more or less constant and round-the-clock watch towards sampling the media to contribute to the BBC’s stories of the day. However, senior managers have recently intimated that the pendulum may have swung too far in this direction.

But with fewer monitors, something has to give. The kind of monitoring valued by government customers, such as military news, is taking second place to current affairs material more of interest to the BBC.

September 2016