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Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

BBC Arabic was just discontinued last week. FTA: The move came as part of cost-cutting measures under which the news service is also ending its radio programming in 10 other languages, including Persian, Chinese and Hindi.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/business/media/bbc-arabic...

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Having discontinued most of the over the air broadcasts to Eastern Europe they turned them back on pretty quickly starting in February last year - I've no doubt that once Ukraine is finished the Foreign Office will be nagging to withdraw the funding again.

So stupid, it's a lot of soft power for peanuts. Probably the suits are saying "but what about the internet" but the people you want to reach are the people whose internet is likely to be turned off when you want to talk to them.

You might have missed that Broadcast onto Ukrain territory / Central and eastern Europe in general has been turned off again.

It's an absolute disgrace and I hope everyone who is represented by an MP is writing to them to protest. Its bad enough to Brexit but to willingly give up soft power to save a tiny sliver of budget is shocking.

Whoever figured "well its on the internet" appears to have forgotten that its purpose is to serve people under the sorts of governments that would aggressively block internet access to news sources unfriendly to the government.

That's tragic and shortsighted... for whatever faults BBC coverage might have, those 39M listeners it was reaching will now no longer have these alternate perspectives easily available to them relative to the other media in their countries. Less information is always a loss. And even if we ignore any altruistic motivations, it's a loss of soft power for the British / Western operations.

> That's tragic and shortsighted

Tragic absolutely, shortsighted - no. You can't operate without money and news organizations can't survive in todays environment. The way we consume and gather around information simply isn't the same anymore.

it's the bbc, they are state funded.

They were funded by a separate tax that everyone had to pay which got discontinued recently.

The TV license is still in effect and not everyone has to pay it. [1]

How on earth have you obtained such obvious misinformation and why are you posting it so confidently?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/tv-licence

World service was funded separately from general taxation until a few years ago.

On another note BBC Hausa service is facing mass resignation due to the newly opened TRT Hausa service (Turkey) promising the staff the BBC staff freedom to report positive News about Africa, unlike the BBC that only wants them to report negative and News about war and underdevelopment.

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