Nearly 400 BBC World Service employees will lose their jobs as part of a cost-cutting program and move to digital platforms, the broadcaster announced on Thursday, cutting back on its Iranian-language service, among others.
The BBC, which celebrates its centenary next month, said its international services needed to save £28.5m ($31m) as part of broader £500m cuts, which unions blamed on the government. from United Kingdom.
In July, the broadcaster detailed plans to merge BBC World News television and its UK national equivalent into a single channel to launch in April next year.
BBC World Service, one of the UK’s most recognized global brands, currently operates in 41 languages around the world with a weekly audience of some 364 million people.
But the corporation said audience habits were changing and more people were accessing news online, which, along with the BBC’s funding freeze and rising operating costs, meant the move to ” digital first” made financial sense.
“Today’s proposals imply a net total of around 382 job closures,” the public service broadcaster said in an online statement.
Eleven language services (Azerbaijani, Brazil, Marathi, World, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese) are already digital only.
Seven more will be joined under the restructuring plans: Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu and Yoruba.
Radio services in Arabic, Persian, Kyrgyz, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil and Urdu will cease if the proposals are approved by staff and unions.
Language services will not be shut down, the broadcaster insisted, although some production will move out of London and schedules will change.
The Thai service will move to Bangkok, the Korean service to Seoul and the Bengali service to Dhaka.
The “Focus on Africa” television bulletin will be broadcast from Nairobi, it added.
BBC World Service director Liliane Landor said there was a “compelling case” for expanding digital services as audiences had more than doubled since 2018.
“The way audiences access news and content is changing and the challenge of reaching and engaging people around the world with quality, trusted journalism is growing,” he added.
government criticized
Bectu broadcasting union director Philippa Childs said they were disappointed by the proposed changes.
“While we recognize that the BBC must adapt to meet the challenges of a changing media landscape, once again it is the workers who are affected by ill-judged government policy decisions,” he said.
The government’s freeze on the license fee paid by the BBC World Service had created funding shortages and the need for cuts, it added.
Bectu will push for staff to be redeployed where possible and to ensure it “mitigates the needs of any mandatory redundancies,” Childs said.
BBC World Service is funded by the UK license fee – currently £159 for a color television and payable per household with a television.
The BBC has faced repeated claims from right-wingers since the UK’s divisive Brexit referendum in 2016 for political bias and pushing a “woke” liberal agenda centered in London.
But he has faced similar accusations of pro-right political bias from the left.
The government announced a license fee freeze in January, in what critics viewed as an attempt to save then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s job.
At the time, Johnson was facing increasing allegations of wrongdoing in office, which ultimately forced him to resign.
The ministers stated that a review of the financing model was necessary due to technological changes, including the adoption of streaming services, as well as increases in the cost of living.
However, opposition parties said the monthly payments, equivalent to about £13.13, were small change compared to increases in energy bills that total thousands of pounds a year.
The culture secretary at the time, Nadine Dorries, a Johnson loyalist, had previously accused the BBC of “tokenism” in diversity hiring and elitist “groupthink”, but denied wanting to dismantle the corporation.
