They
think money is going to fix it.
Sometimes it helps to have truth on
your side.
"International
alarm over the rise of Kremlin-funded news, led by 24-hour news
channel Russia Today, has intensified following Vladimir Putin’s
military intervention in Ukraine and his feud with the west"
BBC
World Service needs more funds to compete with RT - former chief
BBC,
22
December, 2014
The
BBC World Service is “financially outgunned” and losing ground to
Russia’s RT, warns the service’s ex-chief. The UK and US may be
ceding their dominant position to the “Kremlin propaganda”
mouthpiece with a global audience of 700 million, he said.
Peter
Horrocks, who stepped down as the top executive of the BBC global
news operations earlier this month, told the Guardian that Britain
should consider allocating extra funding to counter the growing
influence of Russia’s global TV news channel RT.
“Medium-
to long-term there has to be an anxiety about the spending of others
compared to what the BBC are putting into it,” Horrocks
said. “You can take a
view of the overall national interest and things we spend on
international influence, like military spending. When you look at
that it would take it in a certain direction.”
Outgunned
& outspent
If
Britain wants to combat Moscow’s growing influence in global
information, the country’s ministers had better consider additional
funding for the BBC World Service, Horrocks said, revealing that the
BBC has already questioned the Foreign Office on “whether there’s
anything they want to do with development funding for extra
programming for Ukraine.” No reply has been received so far.
The
BBC’s future is dependent on supplementary funding if UK
authorities want to maintain the World Service as Britain’s major
influence overseas, insists the former BBC boss.
"We
are being financially outgunned by Russia and the Chinese, but
there’s no way we’re being outgunned on the results [global
audience]. The role we need to play is an even-handed one. We
shouldn’t be pro one side or the other. We need to provide
something people can trust,” Horrocks said.
“It
is frightening the extent to which we are losing the information
war,” the Guardian quoted John Whittingdale, chair of the Commons
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, as saying.
World Service fears losing information war as Russia Today ramps up...
"On
a global scale the BBC are concerned because they are being outspent
by the Russians and Chinese on a spectacular scale,” said a former
ITN CEO, Professor Stewart Purvis. “It’s the soft power war
that’s replaced the Cold War. The Russian and Chinese channels are
clearly proxies for their governments and Britain is being vastly
outspent,” he said.
Rise
of RT
RT
currently broadcasts in English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, with
plans to launch French and German channels in 2015.
The
BBC World Service, a leading international radio and internet
broadcaster providing programmes and content in English and 27 other
languages, has a budget of £245 million ($382 million) that is
funded from UK TV license fees. RT, with its 24-hour TV and internet
coverage in English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, plus French and
German services ready to be rolled out in 2015, will reportedly have
a combined budget of 15.38 billion rubles ($271 million as at
December 22, 2014) for 2015.
The
BBC World Service has showed good results recently with a record 265
million viewers a week, despite certain service closures and cuts
since 2010. RT is available around the clock to 700 million viewers
in more than 100 countries around the globe.
“Russia
Today’s expansion is part of a big investment in soft power,”
said Richard Sambrook, director of the Cardiff School of Journalism,
and a former head of BBC Global News. Yet while the World Service had
“a fraction of the budget” of Chinese and Russian state-run media
outlets, it nevertheless remains influential in world news, he
claimed.
Ukraine
crisis coverage alarmed Europe
The
political crisis in Ukraine, which turned into a fully-fledged civil
war in 2014, made European politicians ring alarm bells over the news
presented by 24-hour RT news channel broadcasting from Moscow.
Unlike
EU broadcasters, RT has also been showing the other side of the coin
of the Ukrainian unrest: eastern provinces of Ukraine devastated by
Kiev troops, neo-Nazi militants ravaging the rebellious Donetsk and
Lugansk Regions, an unprecedented number of civilian victims caused
by the so-called ‘anti-terrorist’ punitive operation initiated by
the Kiev authorities.
After
the issue was raised by leaders in the Baltic States at the G20
summit in Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed
to US President Barack Obama his concerns about Russian news channels
“pumping out a distorted picture” of events in Ukraine.
In
November, RT UK was threatened with “statutory sanctions” for
allegedly breaching the UK's broadcasting code.
UK
media watchdog Ofcom threatened RT after it ruled that the TV channel
had “failed to preserve due impartiality” in four of its news
bulletins aired in March this year and covering events in Ukraine.
RT
Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan responded to the ruling by saying:
“We accept the decision of Ofcom… We look forward to Ofcom
applying today's ruling impartially to all broadcasters reporting on
any government, irrespective of its political leaning."
From
the other great purveyer of propaganda, the
Guardian:
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