The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

An excellent piece of content analysis on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), by Kalev Leetaru (Cline Center for Democracy) from latest issue of Studies in Intelligence (Volume 54, Number 1, March 2010).

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

Kalev Leetaru

ABSTRACT
For nearly 70 years, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored the world’s airwaves and other news outlets, transcribing and translating selected contents into English and in the process creating a multi-million page historical archive of the global news media. Yet, FBIS material has not been widely utilized in the academic content analysis community, perhaps because relatively little is known about the scope of the content that is digitally available to researchers in this field. This article, researched and written by a specialist in the field, contains a brief overview of the service — reestablished as the Open Source Center in 2004 — and a statistical examination of the unclassified FBIS material produced from July 1993 through July 2004 — a period during which FBIS produced and distributed CDs of its selected material. Examined are language preferences, distribution of monitored sources, and topical and geographic emphases. The author examines the output of a similar service provided by the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), known as the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). Its digital files permit the tracing of coverage trends from January 1979 through December 2008 and invite comparison with FBIS efforts.