The BBC World Service is the world's largest international broadcaster, broadcasting news, speech and discussions in 27 languages to many parts of the world on analogue and digital shortwave platforms, internet streaming, podcasting, satellite, FM and MW relays. The World Service was reported to have reached 188 million people a week on average in June 2009. It aims to be politically independent, as specifically expressed in the BBC Charter agreement, it is non-profit, and does not carry advertising. The English language service broadcasts 24 hours a day.
The World Service is currently funded by grant-in-aid through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government, however from 2014, it will be funded by the compulsory television licence fee levied on every household in the United Kingdom using a television to watch broadcast programmes.
BBC World Service is a patron of The Radio Academy. The Director of the World Service is currently Peter Horrocks.
Read more about BBC World Service: History, Operation, Programming, Presentation, Magazine Publishing
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“The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)
“And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”
—Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)