By Kit Klarenberg – The Grayzone
Leaked documents reveal how a shadowy BBC unit is “embedding” staff in foreign media outlets to “contest the information space” and generate “behaviour change” in favor of London’s geopolitical objectives.
Though BBC Media Action (BBCMA) portrays itself as the “international charity” of the British state broadcaster, files show the group frequently carries out politically-charged projects overseas with government funding. Furthermore, the group consistently trades upon the BBC’s reputation and its intimate “links” with the British state broadcaster when pitching for contracts with donors, including the Foreign Office, which operates in tandem with MI6.
The leaks reveal that BBCMA’s work is explicitly “driven by a social and behaviour change communication approach.” The organization’s “project design” is informed by “psychology, social psychology, sociology, education and communication,” and consideration of “the specific factors that can be influenced by media and communication that could lead to changes in behaviours, social norms and systems” in foreign countries. Which is to say, BBCMA is concerned with psychological warfare, warping perceptions and driving action among target audiences.
“We recognise that different formats achieve different things when it comes to change… and consider audience needs, objectives and operational context when deciding which format to use,” BBCMA asserts in one file. In another, the organization crows, “people exposed to our programming are more likely to: have higher levels of knowledge on governance issues; to discuss politics more; to have higher internal efficacy (the feeling that they are able to do something); and participate frequently in politics.”
BBCMA’s internal research indicates audiences exposed to the organization’s “output” are widely encouraged into “taking action,” and concluded: “At scale this is powerful.” A cited example was BBCMA’s production of a “long-running” radio drama in the former British colony of Nigeria, Story Story, which reached an estimated 26.5 million people across West Africa. Surveys indicated 32% of listeners “did something differently as a result of listening” to the program – of those, 40% were persuaded to vote differently in the country’s elections.
BBCMA has operated at once secretly and in plain sight since its 1999 founding. The leaked files’ contents raise obvious, grave questions not only about the organization’s activities globally, but whether BBC staffers who conduct overseas missions for Media Action truly cease being intelligence-connected state propagandists and information warriors when they return to their day jobs in London, producing ‘factual’ and entertainment content for the British state broadcaster.
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine in BBCMA’s crosshairs
In February 2021, The Grayzone exposed how BBCMA managed covert programs training journalists and cultivating influencers in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, while helping produce news and entertainment programming for local media outlets pushing pro-NATO messaging. These activities were funded by the British Foreign Office, forming part of a wider clandestine effort by London to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” at home and in neighboring states.
Another previously unreported component of this malign initiative saw BBCMA channel £9 million ($12.8 million) in government funds from 2018 to 2021 into “innovative… media interventions” which targeted citizens of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine via “radio, independent social media channels, and traditional outlets.” The project was managed and coordinated directly by BBCMA from BBC Broadcasting House, in London. Thomson Reuters Foundation, the global newswire’s “non-profit” wing, supported the effort via Reuters offices in Kiev and Tbilisi.
BBCMA and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) operatives met in private every four months to discuss the operation’s progress with representatives of the Foreign Office, and British embassies in the three target countries. In advance of the project, the pair leveraged their “strong profile” in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine to conduct “broad consultations” with neighborhood news outlets, media organizations and journalists.
The National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA:PBC) was offered “essential support,” aimed at “improving its existing programs” and “developing new and innovative formats for factual and non-news programs.” The broadcaster was reportedly “very interested” in BBCMA developing a “new debate show” and “discussion programming” on its behalf. Additionally, BBCMA was “already working on building the capacity” of nationalist Ukrainian outlet Hromadske, which was also receiving funding from the US government via USAID. 
Meanwhile, BBCMA visited the offices of Georgia’s Adjara TV “to discuss training priorities and possible co-productions.” The station was especially keen to develop “youth programming” – “a gap in the market” locally. BBCMA and TRF furthermore proposed to tutor and support ostensibly “independent” online Georgian news portals like Batumelebi, iFact, Liberali, Monitor, Netgazeti, and Reginfo. “Local” and “hyperlocal” media platforms, as well as “freelancer journalists,” bloggers and “vloggers” were also considered important targets. “Mentors” were “embedded” in target outlets, providing “bespoke support across editorial, production and wider management systems and processes as well as on the co-production of content.” Those “mentors” included current and former BBC reporters.
“Our ability to recruit talented and experienced BBC staff is a great asset which will be harnessed for this initiative,” BBCMA bragged. The British state broadcaster was glowingly described as “well-known and highly regarded” in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and thus well-placed to begin “encouraging” journalists to meet with “local stakeholders,” including politicians, in order to “cement the media as a key governance actor” in the region. This would hopefully ensure “a more enabling operating environment” for secretly British-sponsored “independent” media platforms.
The “long track record” of BBCMA and TRF in conducting comparable efforts elsewhere had purportedly “shifted government policy.” This included states “experiencing Arab uprisings.” Elsewhere, BBCMA cited TRF establishing “the award-winning Aswat Masriya” in Egypt as a major success. As The Grayzone revealed, this secretly British-funded, Reuters-run outlet worked overtime to undermine Cairo’s first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, and helped lay the foundation for his removal by a violent military coup in July 2013.
Seemingly emboldened by this experience, BBCMA proposed the Thomson Reuters Foundation create a comparable “news platform” in Ukraine which was “timed for the run up to the 2019 elections,” which ultimately put Volodymyr Zelensky on the world stage.
The pair planned to “replicate” the exercise for Georgia’s elections the following year. “This platform” – “staffed entirely by local editors and journalists,” the BBCMA wrote, “would publish independent and vetted news content, freely syndicated to local and national media,” and “provide a vital service.”
London exploits BBCMA to ‘hold governments to account’
The unified nature of BBCMA and the British state broadcasting body of the BBC is undeniable in leaked documents related to the former’s activities in the former Yugoslavia. Submissions to the Foreign Office boast, “BBC Media Action was created to harness the reputation; resources and expertise of the BBC…[its] trainers and consultants are working journalists, editors and producers with substantial newsgathering, programme-making and editorial experience in the BBC.” A specific selling point was BBCMA’s “access to the wider BBC’s wealth of experience and talent.”
This global army of BBC apparatchiks “have a wide range of format and production experience with partners and beneficiaries including factual programming, dramas and the development of social media.” Media outlets in which BBCMA’s operatives are embedded are also granted access “to a broad range of innovative digital tools” created by the British state broadcaster, and “BBC connected studios.”
A BBCMA pitch for a Foreign Office project set to run from 2016 to 2019, ostensibly concerned with “promoting freedom of expression and public dialogue” in Serbia and Macedonia, proposed a team comprised almost exclusively of BBC veterans, some of whom had occupied senior positions with the British state broadcaster for decades. One had worked for BBC World Service’s Bulgarian division since the 1980s, eventually leading the entire operation from 1996 to 2005.
Their CV states they managed “all aspects of BBC broadcasting to Bulgaria, including strategy, editorial supervision; budget and staff management and training,” while “negotiating and achieving partnerships with Bulgarian radio stations and other media and representing the BBC in the target area.” Another had likewise headed numerous divisions of the British state broadcaster at home and abroad over their lengthy career, and was credited with “masterminding election and other big-story coverage”.
This experience may be relevant to a prior BBCMA project, cited in the leaked pitch. From November 2015 to March 2016, the organization “worked on helping the Macedonian media to effectively cover elections.” As The Grayzone has revealed, Macedonia’s 2016 election was triggered by an MI6-sponsored “colorful revolution”, which dislodged a popular nationalist administration from power. In its place, a doggedly pro-Western government scraped into office. We can only speculate whether BBCMA’s clandestine sway over how local news outlets reported the vote influenced its outcome.
That the Foreign Office uses BBCMA – and the BBC by extension – for nakedly political interference overseas is spelled out in leaked documents detailing yet another covert British safari in the Balkans. While ostensibly concerned with “supporting greater media independence” in the region, BBCMA acknowledged that its news reporting was “a means to an end.” The ultimate objective, according to the internal documents, was holding “governments and powerful entities to account” should they fail to act as required by London.
BBCMA Balkanizes the Balkans
According to BBCMA documents, Britain sought to “contest the information space” throughout the Balkans through a series of campaigns to “diversify the information, sources and perspectives available” to local populations. In this case, diversity was a clear subtext for amplifying pro-NATO, UK-centric viewpoints.
BBCMA goals included “supporting current and future media outlets, actors and journalists to provide high-quality output and content, and to operate safely, sustainably and more viably.” For instance, the supposed charity proposed a “training and mentoring” initiative, which would “prioritise female defence and diplomacy journalists.”
“As well as developing current journalists, in order to create a pipeline of future women, the programme will include an outreach element with activities undertaken in universities to encourage women to consider journalism as a career,” BBCMA pledged. This would not only bring “female journalists to the forefront of the industry’s consciousness” in the region, but “improve the perception of the UK with these participants, who are influencers in the Western Balkans.”
The funding proposal sent by BBCMA to the FCO reveals the extent of their contempt for women and the working class, who were meant to be targeted with fictionalized content rather than hard news. “Drama can be a useful tool for engaging poorer and female audiences,” BBCMA explained.
BBCMA further pledged to “support the creation of new media” across the region, assisting “entrepreneurs to establish new media titles” that would amplify “independent, local voices.” Britain was described as “expert at providing the space and opportunity” for news “start-ups.” London’s overt backing of such projects explicitly aimed to exploit the dearth of job opportunities on the local scene to “increase positive perception of the UK with younger target audiences.” Among the outlets to be bankrolled would be a regional “news wire” producing “quality content (written, images, and video).”
Also among the proposals were so-called “Citizen Content Factories,” consisting of “two-week long, highly-publicised, content creation camps” in the Western Balkans. These British-backed summer camps would “bring young people from across the region together for a YouTube training and partnership camp that will teach young people to become content producers” as well as “provide a very public programme of activity that will improve the perception of the UK.”
Elsewhere, popular local vloggers would be employed to produce videos “in which they share highly inflammatory disinformation, some of which will include conspiracy theories about NATO, before revealing that it is fake and calling out their follower community for possibly believing them.” The rationale was, “audiences dislike being accused of succumbing to disinformation,” which would in turn make them dismissive of facts and perspectives unwelcome to the British Foreign Office. In practice, the campaign seemed designed to taint all criticism of NATO as potential disinformation.
BBCMA also sought to recruit and cultivate a legion of “opinion formers” across diverse fields, particularly in London’s “priority areas of defence, security and diplomacy… who will be advocates for the UK” in the West Balkans. Associated activity included training “young people to become content producers” and “news generators,” via a “citizen content factory.” Media training programs would enable BBCMA assets “to become more effective public speakers,” and the organization would “then work with media partners in-country to provide opportunities for them.”
No area of the West Balkans was considered off-limits to BBCMA. A “media literacy roadshow” would tour “rural areas and towns” throughout the region. “Areas outside major cities” were “identified as priorities due to the smaller information environment of which they are likely to be part.” Even schools were proposed for infiltration, with BBCMA stating local curriculums should be reviewed to “ensure explicitly recognising disinformation is included.” If not, “an education package could be created” with “pre-created lesson plans and materials” for teachers.
One document boasted that BBCMA had dedicated offices in 17 countries on every continent, employing hundreds of people. At the time it was written, BBCMA was managing 68 “live projects, with most offices running several simultaneous programmes.” The organization’s intimate connections to BBC World Service, active in “more than 100 cities globally,” meant BBCMA’s information warfare could reach audiences totaling hundreds of millions worldwide.