III.

The Changing Face of the World Service

The collapse of Soviet power also brought reassessments by every international broadcaster and the governments that fund them. For the World Service this was less fundamental than for some others. It had never seen itself as propaganda or a “surrogate” station and had always addressed friends as well as potential adversaries. It aimed to provide accurate information and background, reflect different viewpoints, and let listeners make up their own minds. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later commented: “It has for many years provided the staple diet of news and information on which all of us rely. It serves Britain and the world by being independent and therefore credible.”

So the self-scrutiny at the beginning of the 1990s did not lead to any major changes in the programme or editorial policy of the World Service. Since then, however, there have been a number of reorganizations, most recently as part of a general restructuring of the BBC. A new broadcasting agreement with the Foreign Office replaced some of the arrangements that had been in place since 1946, and gave greater freedom to determine the level of language broadcasts. Some language services, including German and broadcasts in French and Portuguese, have been closed, while new services have been introduced, improving services for Central Asia, the Balkans, and Rwanda. The World Service Trust was established in 1999 to co-ordinate externally funded education initiatives, in areas such as health and civic society. Support for independent media is provided through training courses for other broadcasters, and BBC schools of journalism have been set up in Russia, Romania, and Bosnia.

The major factors currently transforming the climate for all international broadcasters are media deregulation and the unprecedented growth of the Internet. BBC World Service has responded by transforming itself into a multimedia broadcaster, expanding FM output, and making all its language services available to online users. The strategy has been backed by the Government, which has allocated an extra £64 m of funding for online, FM, and short-wave development between 2001 and 2004. By the end of 1999, FM transmissions had been extended to 110 capital cities, well on the way to meeting a target of 135 by 2003. At a time when international radio audiences generally have been shrinking, the World Service’s has been growing, and the current total of more than 150 million regular listeners is higher than ever. Short wave still accounts for more than 70 per cent of the total, however, and transmission quality in important regions is being upgraded by the construction of a new transmitter station in Oman and modernized facilities in Cyprus and Singapore.

Through the Internet, the World Service is reaching new audiences who were previously unable to hear its language services outside the target areas for short wave transmissions. Text and audio in all 43 languages are accessible through the main BBC Online website. Investment will fund further development of continuously updated multimedia websites in key languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Russian, and Spanish. In English, Internet users can already listen to a choice of continuous live news or broadcast output, and the latest editions of regular news and feature programmes. The interactive programme “Talking Point” provides an international discussion forum. By November 2000, total page views for the World Service in all languages were exceeding 29 million a month.

In 2001 the BBC announced the merger of its World Service radio and online news operations with its international TV news channel BBC World, which is funded by advertising and viewer subscriptions. Some of the BBC’s competitors argued that the move would lead to the unfair subsidizing of the commercial channel with public money, but BBC managers maintained there would be no cross-funding between the two operations. The World Service celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2002 with a number of special events including a birthday lecture by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a 14-hour programme live from Table Mountain, South Africa, the site of one of the Service’s first ever broadcasts.

BBC World Service is due to leave Bush House in 2006-2007, when it will join the BBC’s UK radio services and other news operations in a new digital broadcasting complex to be built at Broadcasting House.