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.
