Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at the BBC World Service Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 14 The Aesthetic Alchemy of Sounding Impartial: Why Serbs Still Listen to ‘the BBC Conspiracy’ Kamenko Bulić Tuning In: Diasporas at the World Service, The Open University April 2008 Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, For further information: Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)1908 654458 Fax: +44 (0)1908 654488 Web: www.open.ac.uk Kamenko Bulić was educated at Belgrade's Faculty of Political Sciences and was briefly working as a journalist before the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992. Earning reputation as a anti-war journalist, he left Yugoslavia and spent almost a decade researching the formation of Ex-Yugoslavian diasporas in the West. Supported by the Dutch Exile Foundation Kamenko Bulić completed his research in Western Europe, Australia, and North America in 2004 earning his PhD degree at the University of Amsterdam. Today Kamenko Bulić is working as columnist and commentator for several independent post- Yugoslavian media, provides consultancy on media development and is a university lecturer. The Aesthetic Alchemy of Sounding Impartial: Why Serbs Still Listen to ‘the BBC Conspiracy’ KAMENKO BULIĆ International School of Human and Social Sciences, NL 1011 TD Amsterdam.
[email protected] What impartiality requires is not that everyone receive equal treatment, but rather that everyone be treated as an equal. (Dworkin, 1977: 227) The decisive developments in the region once known as Yugoslavia, notably between 1987 and 2008, received substantial coverage by the BBC World Service both in its regional language services and its world headlines.