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At midday GMT on Friday 27 January, the BBC’s Arabic radio station closed down with the same words with which it launched its first broadcast 85 years earlier: ‘This is London, the British Broadcasting Corporation’. The closure brought a wave of nostalgia and regret from many throughout the region who had been brought up listening to BBC Arabic and saw it as the only credible source of objective news in a contentious area. One day in the troubled 1980s I was driving towards Sidon in South (.)
In-depth: Founded in 1938 to promote British interests in the Arab world, the BBC's first foreign-language radio station had become a mainstay for generations of Arabic speakers.