Tim Davie has told lawmakers that the British state broadcaster needs more money to compete with Russia and China.
RT and Chinese media outlets are winning public trust and waging a “cognitive war” on Western audiences, the director of British state broadcaster the BBC has told parliament, at a hearing during which he asked for more taxpayer money.
Tim Davie appeared before lawmakers on Tuesday to argue for continued funding of the BBC World Service, which broadcasts in around 40 languages to an audience it claims is up to 320 million people per week.
Maintaining this service is vital to Britain’s strategic interests, he claimed, arguing that “we are facing a tsunami of bad actors, disinformation, [and] fakery. The threats are overwhelming.”
“As a nation we’ve got a public service broadcaster with the most trusted news service in the world. That’s something,” he said. “The trouble is around us… you’re seeing trust ratings for RT and other Chinese services grow as they just take over more slots.”
“It is cognitive warfare, as it’s been called, as people try and win the hearts and minds of populations and people around the world.”
Davie made similar claims at a speech in London in October, stating that the BBC’s axing of more than 380 jobs and cancelation of radio broadcasts in ten languages, including Arabic and Persian, amounted to a loss in the “propaganda” battle against Russia and China.
Davie told lawmakers that a recently approved £32.6 million cash boost from the UK Foreign Office will preserve the World Service’s current language services, but that additional taxpayer money would be needed to keep these services running past 2026.
The BBC is an almost entirely state-funded operation, financed by an annual license fee of £169.50 ($221) owed by every British household with a television or device capable of receiving broadcasts. The UK’s Office for National Statistics classifies the fee as a tax, and the BBC as part of the “central government sector” of the UK economy.
The British Foreign Office also pays £104 million ($135.5 million) of the World Service’s £334 million ($435.3 million) annual budget, and is the largest financial backer of the BBC’s ‘Media Action’ department. This department, which is also funded by the governments of the US, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the EU, UN, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, claims that it spends this money fighting “disinformation, division and distrust” in two dozen developing countries.
Davie’s grievances echo those of the US State Department. After announcing a raft of sanctions on RT and its parent company in September, department official Jamie Rubin told reporters that “one of the reasons… why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be… is because of the broad scope and reach of RT.”
In a report published on Tuesday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank funded by the US government and almost a dozen arms manufacturers, expressed concern that RT en Espanol is the second-most popular media outlet in Colombia, and along with Sputnik’s Spanish-language service, has an audience of approximately 32 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. US state-run Voice of America (VOA) is not even among the top 100 outlets in the region, CSIS noted.
Like Davie, CSIS claimed that the problem can be fixed with more money. Ukraine and its Western backers, the report recommended, should invest in pro-Kiev news outlets in Latin America and hire local influencers and social media personalities to spread “high-quality” propaganda created in the US.
1) Disparage and denigrate the 80% white British population at every conceivable opportunity. Remake classic TV shows and films with “diverse” modern actors to the point where your citizens feel like strangers in their own country.
2) Openly mock their religions, traditions and institutions. Call for (and openly celebrate) their replacement through mass migration.
3) Force leftist propaganda and LGBT insanity down everyone’s throats for a decade or more, champion Covid lockdowns and vax mandates. Assist in the coverup of grooming gangs and glorify the malicious prosecutions of ordinary citizens who dare speak up. Tow the government line at all costs.
4) Remain conspicuously silent as one after another, many of your top people are outed as perverts and child predators.
5) “Oh my god, no one trusts us anymore. It’s all because of muh Russians and disinformation 😠”
The BBC is a malignant tumour of an organisation. Outdated, corrupt, twisted and evil. No one needs it anymore. It still exists only because the population are extorted with an annual licence fee under the threat of police violence.
Of course RT is ‘taking over’- it reports honestly and accurately, without media bias or politically-correct dialogue.
Al Jazeera also had some degree of credibility (especially Marwan Bishara. who reports the truth about the J3w$ and the genocidal Israeli Government…) when they were reporting without restriction, but when the Arab Zionist closed the trade routes to Qatar and Doha at the urging of the Global Elite and israel for several months, Al Jazeera had to then change their ‘style of reporting’ to not criticise Israel just as the other bribed, paid-for Zionist Arab Nations have done!
If you don’t think that Arab Sates are not Zionist, look at the fact that NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE COME TO THE AID MILITARILY OF PALESTINE, LEBANON, AND NOW SYRIA!
Watch for Jordan to disappear into ‘Greater Israel’ and Saudi Arabia to cede the majority of it’s northwest region to…ISRAEL!
I give it two years!
https://jewtruth.com/video/wewillimposenoahidelawsonallcountriesrabbiyisraelariel/#6
AND- Just in time for Christmas…J3wi$h hypocrisy in it’s finest form-
https://www.infowars.com/posts/israeli-rabbi-to-christians-you-shouldnt-be-worshipping-one-jew-you-should-be-worshipping-all-of-us/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6DQt2aGI0
…nasty little Zio-Nazi J3w…!!!
https://www.unz.com/article/the-jewish-stranglehold/
No amount of ‘fixing’ will alter the trajectory of the State broadcasters who are nothing more than the manufactured psy-op of ‘government’ nudge units.
Their days are numbered together with their dwindling grasp on critical analysis and truth.
Paid to peddle sanctioned dystopian narratives and ideologies like Greenism, the Rainbow swastika, CCP collectivism, or rank Corporate tyranny, their treacherous embrace of globalist misdirection, disinformation and misinformation are the perfect antithesis of ‘safe and effective’. They are addled by the hubris the myopia of their own reflection.
It makes me wonder what the late TVNZ reporter Greg Boyed really discovered / uncovered before his untimely passing in Switzerland…