| What has inspired the BBC to launch an
Arabic channel is the scandals broke out in the news broadcast arena
during the Iraq war. Now the new channel will lock horns with the
Arab TV channel Al-Jazeera which was accused by Washington of biased
reporting on Iraq. Now the new channel is formed at the request of
the British Foreign Office.
BBC World Service director Nigel Chapman has attributed the closing
down of the European services to the changing times in Europe. "But
Europe has changed, fundamentally, since the early nineties. Now
the countries to which these languages are broadcast are members
of the EU, or are likely to join soon," he said.
Chapman has been quoted in media reports as saying that broadcasts
in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish,
Slovak, Slovene and Thai will cease by 2006. "Many of the European
services being closed had their roots in the Second World War and
have served their audiences well right through the Cold War years,"
he said.
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