International Broadcasting Trust

   An independent, non-profit-making television production company, the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT) was established in 1982 as an educational charity to work with broadcasters, educationalists and film-makers worldwide. Its aim is to communicate global issues through television programmes about development, environmental and human rights issues for broadcast in the UK and also abroad. It was founded by seventy international organizations, including Oxfam, Amnesty International, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth. IBT has been commissioned to make programmes, ranging from adult drama to schools programming, by all the major television companies and has made more than a hundred programmes in the last decade (such as Bitter Harvest, Battle for the Planet, and Young, British and Muslim). The IBT is devoted to promoting international understanding through the media. They contend, for example, that there are only half as many documentaries about the rest of the world being shown in prime time at the end of the 1990s as there were at the beginning of the decade. If international coverage is left to news programmes, it will consist only of disasters and wars. Positive international cultural programming such as Madhur Jaffrey’s Taste of India is the kind of thing the Trust prefers to see promoted, partly to counter latent British xenophobia. It also advocates the use of ethnic minority presenters for programmes about abroad, something distinctly lacking at present on British television.

   MIKE STORRY