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Bush House in London headquarters the BBC office (Photo: Matt Biddulph)
The BBC World Service began broadcasting in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service. Now, it is heard in 31 languages in addition to English. That’s about to change, though.
Wednesday the BBC World Service, which co-produces this program, outlined dramatic cuts. It represents a fundamental shift for one of the world’s best-known broadcasters.
The World Service is paid for by a grant from the British government, and that grant is being cut as part of overall government spending reductions. Wednesday Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC’s Global News, said it means losing a vast audience.
“I’m very sad to say that we estimate that about 30 million people out of the 180 million who use the World Service every week will lose the World Service as a result of these changes.”
Services in five languages — Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian and Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean — will close completely.
Radio broadcasts in Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese and a number of other languages will stop, though there will be online and cell phone services. Short wave broadcasts will be severely reduced, and some English language programs will be dropped.
In the House of Commons Wednesday, opposition Labor Member of Parliament Denis McShane accused Foreign Secretary William Hague of ruining the World Service.
“He’s doing, in part, what no dictator has ever achieved,” McShane said, “silencing the voice of the BBC, the voice of Britain, the voice of democracy, the voice of balanced journalism, at a time when it is more needed than ever.”
But Hague said it is past time for the World Service to change its ways.
“The BBC is not immune from public spending constraints,” he said. “While any closures may be regretted, they would not have been necessary at all were it not for the inherited BBC pension deficit and the vast public deficit inherited from the previous government.”
World Service managers said the cuts are painful. Yet even they admit changing technology makes some services almost obsolete. The BBC’s Liliane Landor noted that the Russian service has an illustrious past, but she pointed to Monday’s suicide bombing at a Moscow airport as an example of why radio no longer matters so much in Russia.
“When these attacks happened, do you think people were thinking, I’ve got to wait to hear what the Russian Service has to say on radio?” Landor said. “No. People went immediately to a website and this is where they expected to find the latest information.”
That is one reason for the switch to distributing news via the internet or cell phone. Radio will still be heard in many parts of the world.
But a shrinking World Service will be forced to pick and choose just who hears what the BBC has to say.
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