In response to Laura Perrins: Listeners switch off Today (or is it Woman’s Hour?), Robin Horbury wrote:
Radio listening figures are very misleading. The BBC trumpets a 7m audience for Today. But that’s cumulatively over a week of anyone tuning in at all, however briefly. Peak quarter hour numbers are probably no more than 500,000 – 800,000 listening at one time. The real problem of Today is that it is one of the main channels of national political discourse. It is a stale (40 years old) and very tired format. Almost everything is presented in a crude, binary way, with the presenters constantly on the hunt to ramp up the temperature and degree of confrontation. Add to that the constant bias throughout the editorial process against the ‘right’ and the result is an exceedingly toxic brew. With its flagship news and current affairs programme, the BBC is thus failing to meet audience needs, but is also guilty of complacency on a mammoth scale. It spends a billion pounds a year of our money on its journalism – what a waste!
