News analysis

The Organ Grinder blog in the Bank Holiday Media Guardian offers a debate between Five Live and TalkSPORT executives on the topic of news content at the BBC station.

All rather odd. The BBC defence of news output comes from Deputy Controller Jonathan Wall - there at the top to provide the sporting balance to Controller (and newsman) Adrian Van Klaveren.  It uses the phrase "sports entertainment" to describe Fighting Talk - that's where Five Live have to hang on to this element of the station's service licence: "Programming should be designed to inform, entertain and involve".

For TalkSPORT, the egregious Moz Dee describes an unlikely journey "Whilst driving across the country the other night my passengers and I scanned the dial for news of what was happening in the Arab world after a heated debate on the subject. Two national radio stations were competing with sports output (one of them being TalkSport ), there was classical music to soothe the soul, specialist music shows, local radio, an interesting documentary, but nowhere could we find a real time national news service".

From my (often faulty) memory, it was Bob Shennan and Moz Dee who finally stripped sports and sports-related output across the Five Live weekday output between 7pm and 10pm.  It made sense; the Jenny Abramsky schedule meant you really never knew what to expect at that time - and the increasing amount of European football made commentary a possibility every night of the week some weeks.  The deal is - you get brought up to date with important news, even in live commentary.  Relax if they're talking about Millwall or Barnsley.

Anyway, the discussion is currently more gentlemanly than the AV debate.  And nowhere near the fun of Kelvin MacKenzie's days at TalkSPORT when, in a row over football rights, he described Bob Shennan as "an amiable cove, but not the sharpest tack in the carpet".