Its name - since its launch in January 1938 - has been associated with the chimes of the "Big Ben" clock and the famous phrase for its broadcasters, "Here is London."

After the British Authority announced the cessation of broadcasting in several languages, including Arabic.

About 400 workers in the BBC World Service will lose their jobs as part of a program to cut costs and move to digital platforms, the British Foundation announced Thursday.

The BBC said its global service needed to save 28.5 million pounds ($31 million) as part of broader cuts of 500 million pounds.

At the end of last July, the network revealed plans to merge the BBC World News Channel with the local British channel of the network, and launch the new channel in April 2023.

The BBC World Service is currently broadcast in 40 languages, and is watched by about 364 million people every week.

audience habits

But audience habits are changing, according to the company, and more people are accessing news online, which means the move to "digital first" makes financial sense, especially given the rising operating costs.

“Today’s offerings involve a total net closing of 382 jobs,” the company said in an online statement, and 11 language services that are mainly digital only: Azerbaijani, Brazilian, Marathi, Mundo, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

And services in 7 languages ​​will join the digital services exclusively within the restructuring plans, these services in Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Bidjin, Urdu and Yoruba.

Broadcasting services in Arabic, Farsi, Kyrgyz, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil and Urdu will cease if the proposals are approved by staff and unions.

No language service will stop, according to the British company, but some production centers will move outside London.

The Thai service will move to Bangkok, the Korean service will move to Seoul and the Bengali service will move to Dhaka, and "Focus on Africa" ​​will be broadcast from Nairobi, according to the BBC.

digital transformation

The BBC's director of global service, Lillian Landor, said there was a "compelling case" for expanding digital services, as viewership had more than doubled since 2018.

"The way the public accesses news and content is changing, and the challenge of reaching and engaging people around the world with quality and reliable journalism is growing," she added.

BBC World Service is funded by UK licensing fees, currently £159 for color TV and paid by the family when buying a TV.

The government announced a license fee freeze earlier in the year, which was seen as an attack on a well-established British institution.

But ministers felt that the funding model needed to be revised due to technological changes.


long history

In 1936, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) helped the British Colonial Office set up the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem, a medium-wave broadcast whose purpose was to broadcast British views to the Arab world.

At that time the Italian radio broadcast in Arabic was broadcasting on medium wave from the Italian city of Bari (and also on short wave broadcasting from Rome starting in 1934), and it was aggressively attacking British policies, especially after the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

In the years leading up to the creation of the BBC Arabic Language Service in 1938, there were plans with the British Foreign Office to launch radio broadcasts in Cyprus, then a Crown colony, which was seen as more stable than Mandate Palestine.

At the time, there were discussions at the BBC about news and professional standards, and avoiding being caught up in the propaganda business.

In 1938, 16 years after the founding of the BBC, it began broadcasting in Arabic for 65 minutes, making BBC Arabic one of the oldest and longest-running foreign language news services in British history.

In 1940, the duration of the broadcast increased to one hour and 25 minutes, and by 1942, almost two hours, and by the end of the Second World War the broadcast of the Arabic language extended for 3 hours, and Standard Arabic was used for broadcasting.

The first broadcast appeared in 1938 in a single newsletter, and later by 1940 a second newsletter appeared after the morning reading of the Qur'an.

In 1942, a third "midday" newscast was broadcast at 10:45 GMT (12:45 local time) in the Levant.

Whereas the newscasts were primarily translations of the BBC's Empire Service in English, the radio was in direct contact with Foreign Office diplomatic posts abroad as a source if it was local news.

In 1943, the Arab Department established an office in Cairo, which allowed for the collection of direct news from sources in the Middle East.

The discussion of objectivity was present throughout the history of the BBC Arabic radio station, and it accused the ancient radio station - in its homeland - of siding with the liberal progressive movement.

By the mid-20th century, after persistent allegations by the Israeli government of anti-Israel bias, the BBC chose to create a senior editorial position to advise it, particularly on covering Middle East issues.

In Colonial Re-emergence: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire, published by University of California Press 2021, author Caroline Ritter, a historian specializing in the history of the modern empire, explores how the cultural industries are used. As part of the strategy to extend the life of the British Empire in Africa, the author says that the new radio technologies at the time were put in the service of the interests of the empire.

The author believes that Britain, after the Suez crisis in 1956 (the Tripartite Aggression), began to deal with the issue of decolonization by directing its discourse to the masses and the indigenous people in Africa, and by emphasizing that it is with African independence, so the BBC found itself for the first time “compelled to compete from For the post-colonial audience, at the moment when "the public became more important".