From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Recently, the BBC announced a transformation that World Service Director Nigel Chapman called, quote,

the most far-reaching since the BBC began international broadcasting more than 70 years ago.

The Beebe is shutting down 10 foreign language broadcasts and opening an Arabic language television service in the Middle East.

The new service will be available in 2007 and will be free for households with cable or satellite. Jerry Timmins is BBC Chief of Africa and the Middle East, and he joins me now. Jerry, welcome to OTIM.

Thanks very much, Bob.

It's a pleasure to be here.

First, I want to ask about what is being sacrificed,

and that's the radio broadcasts in Eastern Europe.

Why are they deemed no longer necessary?

Well, we're not cutting all of the languages to Eastern Europe,

but a significant proportion of them are going. What we did was we looked cutting all of the languages to Eastern Europe, but a significant proportion of them are going.

What we did was we looked at all of our language services and our English output as well, and where

we identified that there had been sufficient change in a market so that there was more free media

available, and where, because of those changes, we were competing less effectively.

Over the last five years, audiences had declined rather than gone up.

We took the tough decision to stop those particular languages.

Well, let's talk for a moment about the role that these Eastern European stations

played during the Cold War, because clearly they were an important source of information from the West across the Iron Curtain where information was tightly controlled.

And as a consequence, their Western news and information is widely credited for helping propel the fall of communism.

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