TalkSport has stepped up its attack on BBC Radio 5 Live with the publication of audience research suggesting nearly half of its listeners think the station should focus more on serious news.
The UTV-owned station commissioned the research to coincide with the launch of a review of the station, along with its digital sister station 5 Live Sports Extra, by the BBC Trust.
Announcing the service licence review today, Alison Hastings, lead trustee on the review, said: "Between them, 5 Live and 5 Live Sports Extra reach nearly 8 million people every week. We want to know how well those listeners and others with an interest in the two stations think they're doing, and how well they're performing against their service licences."
The launch of the review comes less than a week after the BBC Trust rejected complaints by TalkSport that Radio 5 Live was failing to broadcast enough news. But the commercial sports station scored a potentially significant victory after the trust ruled that the way the station measures its news output may not be rigorous enough.
The TalkSport-commissioned research by Britain Thinks polled 1,000 Radio 5 Live listeners and found that nearly half (49%) thought it should focus more on serious news.
TalkSport's study found that the BBC station's listeners were more than five times more likely to associate it with sport than news, with listeners estimating that 38% of its airtime was dedicated to news, about half of the station's service licence requirement of 75%.
Only 20% of listeners to the afternoon Richard Bacon programme, one of a series of new shows introduced by Radio 5 Live's controller Adrian Van Klaveren last year, defined it as a "news" programme, although the BBC counted the two-hour show towards its overall 75% news quota.
The UTV Media (GB) managing director, Scott Taunton, said: "This authoritative piece of BritainThinks research provides overwhelming evidence that 5 Live's listeners see it as a sport station rather than the news station described in its service licence.
"It seems that licence fee payers agree with the BBC Trust's ruling last week that there are 'significant and valid questions' about the breadth of 5 Live's 'news' output.
"The opinion poll also shows that listeners see 5 Live's sport output as being dominated by Premier League football, and that there is an appetite to see the station improve its coverage of a wider range of non-mainstream sports."
Elsewhere in the research, listeners were more likely to say the amount of football covered on the station had increased rather than decreased in the past five years, and 51% said it should increase the amount of airtime given to sports less covered by other stations (18% disagreed on this point).
TalkSport previously claimed Radio 5 Live was not broadcasting enough news content and was failing in its commitment to cover minority sports. The station appealed to the trust after it was rejected by BBC management.
The trust rejected the claims, but said the station had raised some "significant and valid questions about what constitutes news on 5 Live" and that a "more nuanced method of monitoring the proportion of news output" would be "desirable".
Programmes such as Bacon's afternoon show, which offer a mixture of news and entertainment and therefore defy easy categorisation, are likely to be at the heart of this analysis.
The BBC Trust's public consultation on its Radio 5 Live service licence review will run until 13 July with the report due to be published in the winter this year.
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