Interesting development. Any information to the people of north Korea is helpful and though I am happy to see that Lord Alton hopes to have talks with the new ROK Administration, I hope that with the US approaching the BBC to do this would be from an Alliance perspective and that this is not purely a bilateral US-UK initiative. Anything we do in north Korea has to be in support of our treaty ally the ROK and must be to further the 2009 ROK-US Joint Vision which is to achieve unification of the Peninsula (hopefully peacefully). Government initiatives should (must?) be in synch with the ROK government and the overall influence strategy for solving the "Korea question." We should be long past trying to do anything unilaterally or not involving the ROK on the Korean Peninsula.
V/R
Dave
How do you solve a problem like BBC World Service Korea?
The US is encouraging the Foreign Office to back plans to establish a BBC Korean service
FRIDAY 28 DECEMBER 2012
The BBC World Service could broadcast programmes aimed at residents of North Korea for the first time, under proposals being discussed by MPs, corporation bosses and US officials.
Barack Obama’s administration is encouraging the Foreign Office to back plans to establish a BBC Korean service to help open up the most secret country on earth.
They believe the BBC’s reputation for impartiality could help build up trust with communist state's 24 million population.
The talks come amid signs that North Korean citizens are increasingly ignoring a ban that forbids them from accessing foreign media. A Korean network is also seen as having potential commercial and cultural benefits in South Korea.
Peter Horrocks, the head of the BBC World Service, will discuss the matter in Westminster with MPs from the All Party Group on North Korea early in the new year. Lord Alton, who leads the group, which has also met with the Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire, said Washington-based officials had recently been in London to support the idea of a BBC service. The US government-run networks Voice of America and Radio Free Asia already broadcast into North Korea.
The peer said: “Within the last month I have had discussions with senior [US] State Department officials. They are very positive about the idea of the BBC becoming involved in transmission.”
(Continued at the link below)
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