BBC World Service To Provide Radio For North Korea and Eritrea (bbc.com)

Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 23, 2015 @10:35PM from the under-served-areas dept.

Ewan Palmer writes: The BBC World service has announced it will expand to serve the worst countries for press freedom as part of a plan to reach a global audience of 500 million. The British government announced its "single biggest increase in the World Service budget ever committed" and promised to invest more than $128 million by 2017/18 to the service. Along with improvements in countries such as Thailand, Russia and Somalia, they will launch radio services in North Korea and Eritrea who, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2015 World Press Freedom index, are the two worst performing countries in the world when ranked on a number of criteria including media independence, respect for the safety and freedom of journalists, and infrastructural environment in which the media operate.

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Re:Budget by gsslay · 2015-11-23 23:04 · Score: 3, Informative

Funding was announced by the Government as part of its national Strategic Defence and Security Review. It wasn't announced by the BBC as part of their Christmas schedule along side Celebrity Bake-Off. So I think it safe to assume that this is not being funded out of the BBC's licence money.