Bbc world service

This is Bush House in London, headquarters of the BBC World Service. From this building the BBC broadcasts radio programmes to the whole world.

The World Service used to be called ‘The Empire Service’. When it started in 1932, it broadcast only in English and provided news and information to people in the British colonies.

The announcers used formal English and used to speak very slowly and clearly. After six o’clock they used to change into dinner-jackets to read the news.

In the 1930s Hitler and Mussolini started broadcasting propaganda to the Middle East.

So in 1938 the World Service also started broadcasting to the Middle East, in Arabic, to counteract the influence of the fascist propaganda. Very soon the BBC was broadcasting to all the countries occupied by the Nazis.

During the Second World War the BBC reported British defeats as well as British victories, and so it got a reputation for honesty and accuracy. After the war the BBC continued its foreign language broadcasts, and to this day broadcasts the news in thirty-nine languages.

Here in the Newsroom a hundred and forty journalists work day and night, writing two hundred news bulletins every twenty-four hours.

Every news story is checked at least twice before it is broadcast. The BBC will not broadcast a story until it is sure that it’s true.

When President Gorbachev was put under house arrest in the Soviet Union in 1991, he said that he learnt the truth about what was happening in his country by listening to the BBC World Service.

This means the World Service is not always popular with governments. For example, the former Soviet Union jammed the broadcasts for many years so that it was difficult for Soviet people to listen to the BBC news. Even the British Government was very angry when the World Service broadcast a speech criticizing the Government during the Suez crisis in 1956.

The BBC is the world’s largest international broadcaster. Every week, one hundred and thirty million people listen to BBC World Service radio. In 1992 the World Service started broadcasting television programmes, too, via satellite, to Europe, Asia and Africa. Now people in countries all around the world can see as well as hear the news from the BBC.