Plunging into the increasingly competitive market for the Arabic-speaking audience, the BBC has announced plans to develop an Arabic-language TV station. While Al-Hurra (The Free One), the recent American incursion into Arabic language television, was reviled — Tishrin, a Syrian newspaper, denounced it as “part of a project to re-colonize the Arab homeland that the United States seeks to implement through a carrot-and-stick policy,” — the BBC’s project might well become successful.  

The question of journalistic independence and national partiality is a legitimate concern, since the British Foreign Office will provide the BBC with funding for its venture into Arabic-language TV. Government funding, however, certainly doesn’t preclude journalistic integrity or local popularity and acceptance. While some may regard the American Al-Hurra — to which Congress allocated a $62 million budget for its first year of operations — and its radio equivalent, Radio Sawa, with little more than deep suspicion and loathing, the BBC is both popular and respected.

The BBC World Service radio news broadcast has 1.8 million listeners per week in Baghdad, Basra, and other major cities in Iraq, and it is the largest international radio broadcasting station in the country. These impressive statistics are in spite of the fact that the British Foreign Office currently finances the BBC’s numerous World Service radio stations. The BBC World Service offers news in 43 languages, and an estimated 45 million listeners worldwide tune into the BBC’s English-language radio service.

The BBC’s Arabic-language TV programming, then, may emerge as a healthy competitor for Arab satellite stations, such as Al-Jazeera, which boasts an estimated audience of 35 million viewers in the Arabic-speaking world. Granted, the figure of 1.8 million BBC listeners pales in comparison to Al-Jazeera’s 35 million viewers, but while Al-Jazeera both feeds and panders to a sense of pan-Arab solidarity, the BBC may be able to trade on its reputation as a reliable and accessible source of news. And the BBC knows its competition: When Al-Jazeera was founded in Qatar in 1996, it lured and successfully poached a number of former BBC Arabic staffers.  

Mimi Hanaoka