BBC World Service takes millions more while editorial standards raise questions

The BBC World Service got a £27M boost on top of its £104M yearly funding‚ yet questions about its content choices keep coming up

Growing up in South-Asia during the 80s-90s the World Service was a key info-source for many people — its still well-known worldwide but recent years show some not-so-good stuff happening inside

The Arabic Service got into hot-water about 3 years ago when it aired anti-gay comments to its 42M viewers (without any push-back). The channels response was weak: they just said it didnt meet standards but nobody got in real trouble for this mess-up

The Persian service had its own problems too: it posted some real bad stuff about LGBT folks that matched Iranʼs anti-gay views. Even though Iran does terrible things to gay people the BBCs fix was super low-key; they just removed some words without saying sorry properly

The World Services ex-boss who left last summer got heat for seeming to defend Hezbollah which is kinda weird given what we know about their weapon-making in Beirut. Then theres the whole Hamas thing from last Oct — BBC Arabic writers were doing some strange stuff:

• Writing different versions of stories in English and Arabic
• Making light of attacks on social-media
• Posting stuff that made Hamas look good
• Joking about kidnapped people

The BBC keeps saying “were looking into it“ but nobody knows what happened with these check-ups. Until they clean-up their act and show they can rep UK values right — maybe they shouldnt get tax money

These broadcasts did not meet our editorial standards and we apologise to our viewers