Airstrip One

Soft Power - 5th January 2003, 23.58

Walker's World at UPI looks at the current marketplace for English language news, through papers, periodicals and other media covering Europe, the United States and Asia. Luckily for Britain, a large part of this market is taken by offshoots from domestic media. The rest is covered by the international offspring of the United States.

Walker describes the whole of this market as Anglo-American and I would agree that a fair proportion is although I would be hard pressed to think of any American buying the Torygraph for coverage of the cricket. This demonstrates that British cultures and viewpoints are disseminated globally to a diminished extent over the past decade through the efforts of a private sector (and there is an argument that the BBC on the internet counts halfway to this) whereas the government sponsored efforts such as the British Council have declined in value. Only the BBC World Service stands as a counterexample to the superiority of the private to the public sector in this endeavour.