With the help of modern technology and a gulf war that whetted Americans' appetite for foreign news, the voice of the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation is becoming an increasingly familiar sound on the FM dial.

In Boston, for example, WBUR went from using no BBC at all to broadcasting up to five or six hours a day during the war. Listener response was so overwhelmingly favorable, says general manager Jane Christo, that the station continues to air three hours a day of BBC news programming.

In Orlando, the war prompted WMFE to insert an hour of BBC news into its classical music programming each night. When the station asked listeners in March whether they liked the change, letters and calls ran more than four-to-one in favor of keeping the BBC in the schedule.

The American Public Radio network, which distributes BBC radio news programs in the U.S., reports that the number of its affiliates broadcasting BBC rose from 82 before the war to 108 after. Only two stations that came aboard during the war have since dropped out.

BBC correspondents have been heard on National Public Radio's Morning Edition and All Things Considered for years, but it was not until 1986, when NPR's rival, American Public Radio, negotiated an agreement with the British network, that BBC programs such as Newsdesk or 24 Hours could be heard here in their entirety. The launching of a special satellite and the completion of a fiber optic transatlantic cable in 1989, meanwhile, made high-quality reception available to APR's more than 400 affiliates. APR had previously relied on a telephone connection that provided uneven sound quality at best.

Bruce Theriault, APR's senior vicepresident for network operations, attributes the BBC's recent success in part to Americans' increasing appetite for "multiple editorial voices." But it was the war that gave many listeners and programmers their first extensive exposure to the British network. At WUKY in Lexington, Kentucky, general manager Roger Chesser says he found the BBC's war reporting "more thoughtful and balanced" than that generally provided by the American media.

While NPR remains the major source of news for most public radio stations, says Christo of Boston's WBUR, BBC programs fill gaps in worldwide coverage. "If something happens in Albania, the BBC already has three correspondents in the region so they can get the story right away," she says. "And in Africa or India, the BBC has a depth of coverage that NPR just doesn't have."

Bob Jobbins, editor of BBC World Service News, the network's radio and television news operation, describes the BBC style as the "exact opposite of CNN's stream-of-consciousness approach. We try to offer a sense of proportion by relating immediate events to the overall picture."

The jab at CNN is no accident. Radio aside, BBC officials are preparing to challenge Cable News Network as the preeminent global television news service. In April, the BBC took the first step toward competing directly with CNN by developing a TV version of its World Service News and broadcasting it to Europe, along with entertainment, via its satellite subscription channel, World Service Television. The BBC plans to develop more such news and information programs and to distribute the channel to every continent by 1993.

Though they have no immediate plan to bring the channel to America, BBC officials are currently negotiating to sell their daily half-hour news and fifteen-minute business shows to U.S. cable stations. If all goes well, within the next year BBC "news presenters" Jack Thompson and Christabel King will become familiar faces on American television.

Piers Brendon, a British journalist and author of The Life and Death of the Press Barons, warns Americans not to become too enthralled with BBC's high-minded image: "The BBC may sound like the voice of objectivity, but it's not." Britain has no equivalent of America's First Amendment or Freedom of Information Act, and because of the BBC's quasi-official status -- its budget is government controlled -- the network is vulnerable to political pressure, Brendon says.

But Duncan Campbell, a British investigative journalist who has often been critical of the BBC, says the network's World Service has generally been free of the kinds of pressures facing its domestic-news counterpart. He notes that when the government tried to force the World Service to "act as a source of external propaganda" during the Falklands crisis, "they refused and the government was forced to set up its own separate channel."

Campbell attributes BBC World Service's recent push into television as a "direct result of Thatcherism." The former prime minister he says, put the squeeze on the BBC, in an attempt to force the network to become "a market creature of the government's liking." Ironically, he observes, such economic independence may help assure its editorial freedom.

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