The UK is struggling to counter a rise in “pure propaganda” from countries like Russia and China because of cuts to the World Service, the BBC’s director general has warned.
Tim Davie called for more funding for its global services, a decade after the government stopped paying for most of the World Service.
Last year, the BBC ended its Arabic, Persian and Hindi radio services, among others, as part of a plan to save £28.5m a year.
Mr Davie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that, in contrast, “malign powers, frankly – Russia, China, others – see the benefit of investing heavily in media, bordering into pure propaganda”.
Russia and China are filling the gaps by spending between £6bn and £8bn on expanding their global media activities, including in countries like Lebanon, he will tell the Future Resilience Forum on Monday.
In Lebanon, Russian-backed media is now transmitting on the radio frequency previously occupied by BBC Arabic, he said.
BBC Monitoring listened to that Russian output on the day thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded last month.
“What they heard was unchallenged propaganda and narratives being delivered to local communities,” Mr Davie said.
“Had the BBC been able to retain our impartial radio output, these messages would have been much harder for local audiences to find.
“In this context, the further retreat of the BBC World Service should be a cause for serious global concern.”
The UK government paid for the World Service in full until 2014, when it handed over most of the cost to the BBC.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office currently pays £104m a year towards the World Service’s total budget of £366m.
The service reaches 320 million people a week across radio, TV and digital output.
In 2022, the corporation decided to stop broadcasting on radio in 10 languages, and to close more than 380 World Service jobs.
“We haven’t closed a lot of language services,” Mr Davie told Radio 4, saying the cuts that have been made have been a result of “tight funding settlements, and there’s only so much you can ask of the UK licence fee payer to pay for language services”.
“For decades this was funded by government,” Mr Davie continued.
“There are very clear examples, where we’ve taken away BBC Arabic on radio, for instance… [and] others have come in [such as] Russian-backed media coming into Lebanon.
“I’ve got other examples where you see China and Russia deliberately spending billions of dollars on that strategic objective.”
He added: “This has to be a matter long term for the central government decision-making to say, ‘OK, we have to, as a country, invest’, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to charge all of this to the UK licence fee payer.
“It is a strategic decision and one I think we should value.”
A UK government spokesperson said: “We are fully committed to a successful BBC World Service that continues to provide essential, impartial and accurate news coverage and programming reaching millions of people across the globe.”
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy told BBC Radio 5 Live, in response to Davie’s comments: “We are very aware of the pressures that he describes and the way in which other state actors are investing in their own state-backed forms of media. And the critical role that the BBC World Service plays is the light on the hill for people all around the world.
“But he is also very aware of the acute pressures on the public finances that we’ve inherited after a decade and a half of economic mismanagement. And so it’s a conversation that we are going to have… not just around the licence fee, but also early next year (which) will kick off the process to renew the BBC’s charter.”
