Reporting on Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’ for BBC Radio 4: Journalists and the Geopolitics of Storytelling

Abstract

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.