Britain and its Western allies must counter ‘bad actors’ who are ‘flooding’ global airwaves and online spaces with ‘misinformation and disinformation’, the outgoing head of the BBC warned Thursday.
Tim Davie — who will quit as BBC director general when a replacement is found after the scandal over a misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech — urged increased funding for its World Service arm.
Arguing ‘the stakes in my lifetime have never been higher’, Davie said the West faces ‘a battle for who owns the narrative’ against adversaries like China and Russia, with misinformation and disinformation now ‘utterly rife’.
‘We have bad actors deliberately trying to affect the mind-set of populations domestically and internationally,’ he told a watchdog panel of UK lawmakers.
‘They’re predatory and they’re active and they’re investing and they’re playing a very long-term game.
‘They are playing over decades to reshape the way people think about the West, the UK,’ Davie added, calling the World Service ‘an asset’ essential in that fight.
‘I absolutely think we should be investing aggressively in it, because otherwise we are going to lose a position of strength that is essential not only to the UK but also to global democracy.’
The World Service — the BBC’s international broadcasting arm which provides news and other programming for foreign audiences — currently operates in dozens of languages.
It had a weekly global audience of 313 million, and employs more than 1,650 people, according to its latest figures, with its Persian and Arabic services among its best-known.
Updating MPs on a five-year £52 million ($70 million) cost-cutting drive that has reduced output and cut nearly 500 jobs, Davie insisted the Service had made ‘good decisions under extremely tough circumstances’.
It reached 47 million fewer people or households in the first two years of its savings programme, but the BBC’s interim head of news Jonathan Munro noted it was reaching 50 per cent more than nearly a decade ago.
Munro also detailed BBC research showing the Service’s so-called trust score among global audiences had remained at a world-leading 78 per cent.
But he noted the scores for Russia’s RT broadcaster and China’s CGTN channel — both accused by Western capitals of pumping out propaganda — had grown since 2021, ‘because of their presence in the world’.
Trust in CGTN had risen by eight points to 70 per cent in 2021-2025, while trust in RT had leapt 12 points over the same period.
World Service director Fiona Crack revealed some funding goes on circumventing autocratic governments’ actions, with a fifth of its foreign language output facing ‘some kind of hostile interference’.
‘It might be jamming of satellites for television, it might be blocking websites, it might be taking down social [media] accounts,’ she added.
