When the BBC’s Arabic-language network went out on air for the first time 80 years ago, on 3 January 1938, its mission was to provide ‘reliable news’ to a region that was being fed German and Italian ‘propaganda’ via short-wave transmissions from those countries. News is still its main focus, says Bassam Andari, news-gathering editor for the Arabic service, who has been with the corporation since 1994, arriving in London from Lebanon.
He grew up listening to the station during the civil war in that country in the 1970s. ‘My mother would switch the radio on to the BBC every morning to find out what was happening in the world, not just in Lebanon,’ he recalls. The BBC news coverage was so different from that offered by Voice of America or Radio Monte Carlo (broadcasting from Paris). At BBC Arabic, the news never varied according to who was in power; it was always ‘independent’, recalls Andari.
‘Independence’ is not perhaps the first word you might associate with a radio station that grew out of the BBC’s Empire Service. Originally designed to take BBC English to the far corners of the globe, by 1938 the power of radio transmission was fully understood and it was decided to expand the Empire Service into languages other than English. Radio as soft power. Yet it was laid down from the start, in the BBC’s charter, that the programming on these new foreign-language stations (Arabic was the first) should not be propaganda or anti-propaganda. It has always endeavoured to preserve this impartial status, not flinching from difficult stories nor pandering to those in power.
Most of Andari’s colleagues have been at BBC Arabic for 30 or 40 years, seeking an opportunity to promote trustworthy news. Like Omar El-Tayeb Ahmed, editor and presenter, who joined the BBC in 1993 from Sudan.
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