During a civil war, sometimes the most reliable news comes from very far away. As Sudan became a conflict zone last April, the BBC World Service launched an emergency “pop-up” news outlet to keep local listeners informed about the deteriorating situation in the country, providing bulletins in Arabic from London, Amman, and Cairo. The global news channel deployed old and new technologies side by side: shortwave radio, the medium of choice for international broadcasters since the 1920s, was combined with feeds on digital and social media channels. The aim, according to the director of the World Service, was to bring “clear, independent information and advice at a time of critical need.” Such language, perhaps unconsciously, built on a conceit that dates to the eve of World War II: that the BBC altruistically and impartially presents its global audience with truthful, trustworthy news. Indeed, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the World Service in 1999 as “perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world this century.”

The World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages, reaching an estimated 365 million people each week through radio and digital outlets. It is operated by the United Kingdom’s biggest public service broadcaster. The BBC is, in theory at least, independent from day-to-day Government intervention, protected by a royal charter that makes it responsible to the British Parliament rather than to government ministers or officials. It is funded mainly by a television license fee, which everyone in the United Kingdom who watches BBC programs, broadcast or online, is legally obligated to pay.

Today, the BBC claims that an unprecedented number of people around the world consume its news, with some estimates placing its global audience upward of 500 million. The World Service brings in the lion’s share of this audience and can claim with some justification to be one of the ways the United Kingdom still maintains an outsized role in the lives of people around the world. And yet, despite its obvious importance at a time of rising international tensions, the World Service has recently found itself in financial peril. In September 2022, the BBC announced a major retrenchment at the World Service, with the projected loss of almost 400 jobs and the winding down of broadcast radio services (digital offerings would continue) in a range of Asian languages. In January, the World Service ended its Arabic-language broadcasts, which had been in operation for 85 years. Seen in this light, the creation of a pop-up service for Sudan seems less a mark of the World Service’s strength and more a recognition of the damage caused by recent cuts. 

The World Service is vulnerable to such cuts because, crucially, it is run not by the British government or a state broadcaster but by the BBC, the same organization that supplies British domestic audiences with much of their news and entertainment. This gives the World Service access to huge technical resources and reserves of talent and to the BBC’s reputation for Broadcasting truthful, trustworthy news. The entanglement of international and domestic broadcasting, however, also leaves the World Service exposed. Hostility to the BBC among certain groups in British public life, especially the Conservatives who have governed the country for over a decade, has placed major constraints on the funding of public service broadcasting. Because the BBC itself currently pays much of the bill for the World Service, attempts to reduce the BBC’s overall funding have had the knock-on effect of hurting the World Service. Seemingly oblivious to the international consequences of their campaign against the broadcaster, the BBC’s domestic opponents are putting at risk what is one of the United Kingdom’s key tools of global soft power.

SERVING THE WORLD

The relationship between the BBC and the British government has always been a complex and ambiguous one, with the broadcaster notionally independent from the state but often cooperating with it. The BBC was established just over a century ago with a state-sanctioned monopoly of all broadcasting in the United Kingdom. The monopoly, which lasted until 1955, was granted for domestic reasons, including a desire to avoid both competition with the newspaper press and unregulated, U.S.-style clutter and chaos on the airwaves. The creation of such a powerful broadcaster at home subsequently allowed the country to punch above its weight in the global radio arena. From 1932, when it established its first regular international transmissions in the form of the Empire Service, the BBC became the sole voice of the United Kingdom as far as overseas radio listeners were concerned.

In the arena of international broadcasting, there was often close behind-the-scenes consultation between the BBC and the government. For instance, the Foreign Office enlisted the BBC to broadcast in Arabic to listeners in the Middle East in early 1938 to combat Arabic-language propaganda produced by fascist Italy. That same year, the BBC began broadcasting in a range of European languages, again in close consultation with the Foreign Office, in response to Nazi radio propaganda and Hitler’s territorial ambitions. The outbreak of war in Europe saw a massive expansion of the BBC’s foreign-language services, directly funded by the British state. These developed significant audiences across occupied and enemy territories: by 1944, the Gestapo estimated that the BBC had 15 million listeners in Nazi Germany. Into the Cold War, the BBC continued to act as subcontractor for the British government, broadcasting in 19 different languages by 1946, including a new Russian service. By this point, the Empire Service was no more, and the BBC was running a broad range of so-called External Services, which together employed over a quarter of the BBC’s staff.

Listeners in the Eastern bloc must have known, on some level, that the BBC’s various foreign-language services were tools of British international influence. Nevertheless, many regarded them as the best source of news available: even if the BBC was not entirely independent of the British government, many other international broadcasters were under direct state control, and the effect of state involvement on the content of their news services was often obvious. The BBC’s nominal independence helped buttress its claims to impartiality and rigor. So, too, did the fact that the BBC also broadcast to, and generally enjoyed the trust of, domestic listeners in the United Kingdom. Few other countries established a single broadcaster to carry out all their domestic and global radio work. In the United States, for example, state-funded bodies such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe did the job of attempting to reach across the Iron Curtain, rather than entities affiliated with domestic radio and television networks. The U.S. equivalents never enjoyed the same level of trust among their audiences as the BBC did.

Throughout the Cold War, and in the decades that followed, those running the World Service balanced their desire to serve British foreign policy interests and agendas with the need to retain audience trust. They emphasized the importance of the BBC’s editorial independence: in the last resort, BBC staff had to be the ones who determined what went out on air, even if government officials provided them with information and advice. The BBC’s External Services were used to inform listeners in the Eastern bloc about the dynamism of democracy and debate in the West while also subtly questioning communist policies and driving a wedge between the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The BBC played a key role in keeping Eastern bloc listeners informed at moments of Cold War crisis, such as the Hungarian Rising of 1956, when news issued from London became more reliable than that of any local media. In 1988, External Services were rebranded as the World Service and in that guise played a significant part in covering the end of communism in Europe. During the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev was imprisoned in his Crimean dacha, he kept up with unfolding events in Moscow by using a shortwave radio to listen to the World Service.

DOMESTIC ENTANGLEMENTS

It has not always been smooth sailing for the World Service. Housing British domestic public service broadcasting and international radio in a single organization has had its drawbacks. Crucially, this arrangement has left the World Service vulnerable at key moments to British politicians seeking to wage war on the BBC. Outraged at the BBC’s coverage of the Suez crisis in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden famously threatened to cut funding and take the World Service under direct government control. Subsequently, other prime ministers went ahead and reduced the Foreign Office grant to the BBC, even in the midst of the Cold War, forcing it to close down or scale back some of its foreign-language services. The collapse of communism brought further cuts, as one of the main reasons for funding international broadcasting disappeared.

The World Service nevertheless did a good job of reorienting itself to serve British international agendas after the Cold War. It provided expertise and programming to support a range of local democratic media and educational and community building initiatives across the former Eastern bloc and in the global South. It created global television channels and, later, online services to reach new audiences and exploit new media platforms. After the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the World Service focused much of its energies on reaching audiences across the Middle East and in Afghanistan, reflecting the changing priorities of the British government.

Yet the World Service could not insulate itself from a fresh wave of domestic hostility to the BBC. In recent decades, private media conglomerates have sought to weaken the position of public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Some figures on the right wing of British politics believe that the BBC has limited the space for private enterprise in the British media industry while also displaying an inherent left-wing political bias in its domestic programming. These attacks intensified from 2010 onward, driven by a range of political and commercial groups that wanted to see the BBC cut down to size or eliminated entirely and that seemed to care little about how this might affect the World Service and British soft power. That year, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government led by Prime Minister David Cameron imposed a tough new financial settlement on the BBC. As part of the austerity measures designed to reduce public expenditure, the government grant that had funded BBC international broadcasting since World War II was withdrawn with effect from April 2014. Many observers believed this move was politically motivated and reflected deep-rooted Conservative hostility to the BBC at home. The result was a round of savage cuts at the World Service, which was even obliged to move out of its historic home in London’s Bush House and squeeze into the BBC’s domestic news base in Broadcasting House. To insiders and outsiders alike, this seemed to mark the end of an era and a significant loss of prestige.

Since then, the World Service has been financed on a hand-to-mouth basis through occasional installments of state funding. Managers cannot rely on this to continue, and the BBC’s dependence on these injections of money threatens to reduce its day-to-day autonomy from the government. In 2015, money was hastily diverted to the World Service from the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office’s Official Development Assistance fund to prop up services in Arabic and Russian, and to target areas of crucial geostrategic interest in Africa and Asia.

RELINQUISHING SOFT POWER

The British government seems torn between its hostility to the BBC at home and its realization that the World Service offers a key tool of global soft power, one that keeps the United Kingdom central to how many listeners imagine the world and helps to subtly promote British perspectives on international affairs. The result has been sporadic doles of grudging emergency funding to meet periodic crises, leaving little certainty about the future. For instance, in the interest of supporting the BBC’s goal of offering global audiences truthful and trusted news—crucial in an era of “fake news” and Russian and Chinese propaganda—in 2021, the government provided the World Service a one-off payment of eight million pounds (around $10 million) to fund initiatives to combat disinformation. In 2022, the government released another 4.2 million pounds (around $5 million) in emergency funding to enhance BBC services aimed at audiences in Russia and Ukraine. The BBC reactivated shortwave radio services to ensure that news from British sources reached listeners in Russia and Ukraine at a time when local independent media might be shut down, broadcasting and Internet infrastructure attacked, and firewalls erected to block foreign digital news. In March, the World Service secured another one-off government payment of 20 million pounds (around $26 million) to keep at-risk foreign-language services going for two more years.

At the beginning of this year, the BBC’s chairman (who has since resigned following a controversy about his links to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson) argued that the state should resume its historic role of providing full funding for the World Service. He claimed that only this would allow the BBC to compete in the new “information cold war” and “battle for global influence” in the face of massive Russian and Chinese propaganda and disinformation campaigns. This seems a forlorn hope in light of continuing government hostility to the BBC and the wider attack on public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom.

The BBC’s opponents have imperiled one of the United Kingdom’s key tools of global soft power.

One solution might lie in cutting the cords that bind British domestic and international broadcasting together, splitting the World Service into a separate organization funded directly by the state. Such a separation could make international broadcasting less vulnerable to domestic political pressures. But it would also almost certainly dilute the appeal of those services to global listeners. The BBC’s brand name and reputation for truthfulness remain major assets. Keeping the World Service under the umbrella of the BBC protects its status as an independent voice reflecting the plurality of British democracy. Under direct government control, it might instead appear to be simply an organ of state propaganda, merely a British iteration of Voice of America. Its global reach and influence would surely decline.

It seems likely that, in the short term, the World Service will continue to operate in its current guise, reliant on ad hoc funding extracted from a government unconvinced of the sustainability or desirability of public service broadcasting. Eventually, the government may implement root-and-branch reform of British broadcasting, with profound consequences for the World Service. Or perhaps the current muddle will continue, to the further detriment of British soft power and global influence, already dwindling after the country’s departure from the European Union.

Thanks to the World Service, and to the BBC’s wider global commercial distribution of content, the United Kingdom continues to punch above its weight in the world’s media arena. The soft power that this generates is surely more important than ever before, at a time when the United Kingdom’s allies and rivals alike are pumping resources into winning hearts and minds. It would be an act of self-sabotage if British policymakers were to destroy, inadvertently or on purpose, the assets of trust and goodwill that have been key to maintaining their country’s voice on the international stage since World War II.

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