Calculating

Professor Tim Luckhurst is not a man saddled with many uncertainties. He KNOWS that the news and current affairs output of Radio 5Live is 48.28%, when it should be 75%. He and three chums from the University of Kent have been paid £25k by News UK to make this calculation; a BBC spokesman described the exercise as "shameless paid-for lobbying". The last time the BBC reported on the News and Current Affairs/Sport split, it was 76% to the serious stuff.

Cue expostulations from Tim.

Share your methodology @bbc5live If you can't, you have no defence.

— Tim Luckhurst (@TCHL) January 29, 2019

The Professor's methodology is long. He has identified 8 elements selected from other academic research that he believes correctly define news and current affairs. The eighth of these is "human interest" - news that might constitute an ‘unfolding drama’ or other ‘opportunities for humorous treatment’; but there's a second hurdle, excluding items where the content and treatment may be entertaining, but have 'no informative basis'.

The poor souls first listened to three days of output (presumably mostly recorded). "We listened in teams of two, regularly swapping partners to avoid shared assumptions and confirmation bias.... Every initial decision was recorded using a code in which ‘N’ stood for ‘News’, ‘A’ for ‘Anomalous’, i.e., not news, and ‘A/N’ for items which began as news but morphed into anomalies during transmission. Items classified A/N were further analysed and allocated to the binary categories in appropriate proportions, e.g., 50%/50%, 60%/40% or 70%/30%."

On their first pass, they found some 20% of 'news' output was 'anomalous'. Perhaps that wasn't an exciting enough figure. In their second pass, they listened to another day of 'news' output, and got their non-news figures up to 38.9%.  Then, in a third pass, they chose to analyse 'news' output on a World Cup Friday - and got the non-news figure up to 56%.

Still with us ?  Now they put together what they've called a "composite day" from the bundle of figures already to hand, and extrapolated that to be the answer to EVERYTHING.

Tim's a charmer. In his introduction, he manages to tell the News and Sport Network off for carrying Brexit speeches by Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn live and in full.  "Such unmediated
transmission of political speeches was abandoned by British newspapers in the late nineteenth century". He lists 13 'top BBC correspondents' who weren't heard at all during the 115 hours and 2 minutes of research, as supporting evidence of something. At least one, Gavin Hewitt, had already left the BBC; Tim elevates Frank Gardner and Jonathan Beale from correspondent to 'Editor'.  I suspect it's quite good that Mrs Luckhurst has edited the intro.