Last weekend BBC Arabic celebrated 77 years since John Reith (as he then was) launched the first foreign-language service of the fledgling BBC Empire Service with an announcement (in English) in which he declared that the programmes would always be ‘reliable, accurate and interesting’, values that have become virtually cast in stone as the Reithian model of broadcasting.
‘You have to remember the BBC was very, very young at this time, but there was no limit to its ambition,’ says Tarik Kafala, the current head of BBC Arabic, which now broadcasts on radio and (since 2008) on TV also, 24 hours each and every day. Reith’s statement was ‘a fabulous declaration of intent’, an intention which has meant 77 years later that BBC Arabic reaches 36.2 million listeners and viewers throughout the Arab-speaking world in places as far distant, and as different, as Juba in south Sudan and Bahrain, via Benghazi, Casablanca and Oman.
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