United Kingdom
The BBC World Service cuts jobs and languages for news servicePosted Feb 2 2011
The BBC World Service is set to cut 650 jobs and is closing radio programming in five languages—Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa, English for the Caribbean and Serbian.
The BBC also intends to stop evening radio broadcasts in Arabic and cut programs to China, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey.
These cuts stem from a restructuring of the BBC by the newly elected conservative government that requires the world service to slash its budget by 16 percent. These funding cuts are part of the government’s austerity plan of reducing government spending by more than £80 billion pounds from the nation’s budget in order to lower the deficit.
Denis MacShane, a member of Parliament for the opposition Labour Party and former Foreign Office Minister, spoke up in parliament and said that the cuts are achieving what no dictator ever could: “silencing the voice of the BBC, the voice of Britain, the voice of democracy, the voice of balanced journalism at a time when it is more than ever needed.”
The BBC expects that its global audience will fall by more than 30 million from its current weekly audience of 180 million who consume the news service via radio, TV or the Internet.