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Ukrainian Paper Doubts Viability of BBC Arabic TV Project

Posted on: Thursday, 27 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

Text of report by Ukrainian newspaper Ukrayina Moloda on 27 October

The BBC's new Arabic TV project may be a waste of money, as it will be very difficult for the BBC to enter the Arabic TV market, a Ukrainian daily newspaper has said. The paper regrets that the Arabic project will be pursued at the expense of Slavonic radio broadcasts. The following is the text of an article by Oleksandr Shamanskyy entitled "BBC Akbar" published in the Ukrayina Moloda newspaper on 27 October 2005:

The BBC World Service is closing ten of its language services, and will use the savings to fund its first-ever Arabic TV channel, officials of the British Broadcasting Corporation reported two days ago. Until now, the BBC has been broadcasting its TV programmes all over the world in English only. The new BBC Arabic TV channel will go on air in 2007. It will begin by broadcasting 12 hours a day and later increase that to 24 hours.

Unfortunately, in order to "go Arabic", the BBC will liquidate its radio broadcasts in Slavonic languages. A total of 218 experienced journalists (127 of them in London, and 91 - overseas) from the Bulgarian, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Czech and Hungarian units of BBC will lose their jobs. Many of them spent their whole lives working at the BBC and made a great contribution to the fall of Communism in their home countries and to the democratization of society. Broadcasts in Greek, Thai and Kazakh will also be cancelled. BBC officials probably consider the Kazakh language dead as they continue broadcasting in Kazakhstan in Russian only. These biggest changes in the past 70 years are planned to be finished by March 2006.

Today 149 million people all over the world listen to BBC radio broadcasts in English and 42 national languages every day. The worldwide radio broadcasts are financed by a special grant allocated by parliament, which is an item of the British Foreign Office's budget.

Even though BBC's executive officer has quoted marketing studies that there was a great demand for Arabic TV broadcasts of the British corporation, this "Arabic project" may turn out to be a big failure and a waste of money. Independent analysts are very doubtful that the BBC will manage to win its place in a big Arabic television market with its dozens of news channels and hundreds of news and entertainment TV channels. Qatar's Al-Jazeera TV channel, which is widely respected in the Arabic world, is considered to be the main potential competitor of BBC's Arabic TV. As reported earlier, next spring Al-Jazeera will launch its English-language channel, and will challenge the BBC on its home field.

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

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