What Becomes Of BBC World Service Radio?

Philip M. Stone October 20, 2010 Follow on Twitter

As part of the UK government’s massive spending cuts announced Wednesday the BBC license fee of £145.50 (€160, $220) is going to remain frozen for the next six years, but the public broadcaster is losing its Foreign Office grant of some £272 million (€297 million, $412 million) that annually funds its World Service radio.

The BBC is famous for having so many journalists in so many places who actively report for domestic and international radio and TV let alone other journalists who report for the myriad of foreign language services World Service produces. The question becomes how much of that £272 million went to finance that foreign reporting operation? Surely there will now have to be a cull of foreign correspondents now that the BBC is financially responsible for those services.  

The BBC also got saddled with funding a Welsh language TV channel, and funding broadband to rural areas so all in all that’s around £400 million extra annually the BBC may have to come up with if there are no cuts and this in an environment where it is trying to cut expenses far and wide, knowing that inflation will bite and yet no additional funding for six years. Something has to give, after all the BBC only has some £3.6 billion (€3.95 billion, $5.45 billion) to play with each year.

So now it’s time for some fundamental questions: Should UK license payers have to finance all those international broadcasts around the world?  When the Foreign Office paid that was understandably a foreign policy decision, but the BBC is not in the foreign policy business and if the Foreign Office says it doesn’t want to pay then why should the license payer? Perhaps the most fundamental question becomes whether BBC World Service Radio is necessary anymore? Many countries have already gotten rid of their international radio services and replaced them by Internet products.

No one is arguing against the great quality and the good these BBC radio services do, but if the government of the day says they’re not important enough to be financed as a matter of foreign policy, then why shouldn’t the license payer say the same?

The government apparently twisted the BBC’s arm by threatening that if it didn’t take over the new financing responsibilities then it would saddle the public broadcaster with paying the license fees for those over age 75 – a cost of more than £550 million and likely to grow as the population ages, so the broadcaster accepted the least painful option. We haven’t seen the small type that tells us just what kind of World Service the broadcaster must maintain.

The arm twisting the past couple of days was really vicious -- the coalition government showing a whole new level of political hardball -- with the government using the threat of the free license fee for the over 75s to wring all sorts of concessions restricting BBC activities. Local media, for instance, have long protested over the BBC's plans to set up local news Internet sites.The BBC over time has given up a little here and a little there but with one knock-out punch the government has laid down the law -- it will not set up local news sites!

And that's a loud round of applause you're hearing from Rupert Murdoch over the public broadcaster's agreement to spend less on its core Internet activities. Murdoch has long complained that the free terrific BBC news site is one of the biggest threats to the paywalls for his UK national newspapers. Another David Cameron payback for the support of Murdoch's four UK newspapers in the May general elections?

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