Intelligence

BBC slashes the World Service to fund Arabic TV channel

Telegraph | Expat | BBC slashes the World Service to fund Arabic TV channel

By Tom Leonard
(Filed: 26/10/2005)

The BBC World Service is closing 10 foreign language radio services - most of them in the former eastern bloc - to pay for a new £19 million Arabic television news channel, it was announced yesterday.

Services in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Slovak, Slovene, Kazakh and Thai will cease transmission by March, with the loss of more than 230 jobs.

Many of them were set up during the Cold War and provided listeners with their only non-state controlled news.

Journalist and broadcasting unions attacked the cuts, saying that they undermined the World Service's claim to be a truly global operation and ignored evidence that some of the affected countries were far from thriving democracies.

Unveiling the biggest reorganisation of the World Service since the end of the Second World War, its director, Nigel Chapman, said the BBC had to respond to changing geopolitical circumstances.

"Many of the European services being closed had their roots in the Second World War and have served their audiences well right through the Cold War years," he said.

"But Europe has changed, fundamentally, since the early Nineties. Now the countries to which these languages are broadcast are members of the EU, or are likely to join soon."

Mr Chapman acknowledged that the World Service's presence in such countries brought prestige to Britain and had "contributed to the building of freedoms now enjoyed by their citizens". However, he said there were now rival news services in these countries which "subscribe to similar values as the BBC" and were eating into the corporation's audiences.

The 10 countries will continue to be served by World Service radio in English. The move will cut the BBC's portfolio of language services from 43 to 33.

Although the World Service is paid for directly by the Foreign Office and the changes had to be approved by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, Mr Chapman said there had been no interference from the Government. He said it had been the BBC's idea to start the Arabic channel.

The new channel, the BBC's first publicly-funded international television service, will be competing against al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news service which has been accused of being anti-western.

Hosam El Sokkari, the new station's head, said it would be "impartial in the whole process" in the Middle East.

Despite claims that the channel would be met with suspicion by many Arabs, the BBC said its research had found strong demand for it in the Middle East.

Around 200 new jobs have been, or will be, created by the new investment programme, with 148 new posts at the Arabic channel.

Jeremy Dear, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said the cuts could cause "massive damage to Britain's influence in a significant part of new Europe".

tleonard@telegraph.co.uk

October 26, 2005 at 08:11 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home