THE BBC has admitted that audiences for its news bulletins across radio and television are falling after the Today programme lost 451,000 listeners over the past year.

Today has 5.87 million listeners each week, a fall of a quarter of a million listeners in three months alone, according to figures released by the Rajar audience research bureau.

The BBC suggested that the problem was a lack of news. Jo Hamilton, BBC Radio’s head of research, said: “The 2005 election kept audiences up but we are seeing audience losses in our news slots, including PM and Today.

“The last quarter has been slow for news. We have also recorded a falling audience trend for BBC television news before the World Cup.”

But John Kampfner, a former Today reporter and now Editor of the New Statesman, said that after the Hutton report — whose publication in 2004 led to the departure of the BBC’s Chairman and Director-General — the programme had “deliberately avoided giving offence to the Government”. Andrew Gilligan, the Today reporter whose work was a key issue in the Hutton crisis, complained that the number of reporters employed for the programme had been cut from 17 to 9.

Ceri Thomas, the Today Editor, dismissed the charges, vowing that the programme would continue to have “independent-minded presenters”, and backed John Humphrys’s robust interviewing. Today would also make more use of senior BBC journalists such as Jeremy Bowen.

Radio 4 had the biggest loss of audience of the BBC’s national analogue stations over the year. The station has 9.19 million listeners, compared with 10 million in 2003.

Jonathan Ross, said to earn £530,000 for his Saturday Radio 2 show, lost 160,000 listeners over the past quarter. He now has 3.35 million listeners.

Chris Moyles’s Radio 1 breakfast show audience rose to 6.79 million listeners, up 530,000 on the previous year. They are the highest figures for Moyles, who is said to be paid £630,000, since he took over the morning slot in 2004. The station said that ratings had been boosted when he broadcast from Germany during the World Cup. Radio 1’s audience rose overall by 700,000 over the past quarter to 10.4 million.

Terry Wogan’s ratings rose by 310,000 in the last quarter to 8.08 million. But Radio 2’s biggest success was Ken Bruce, who achieved a record audience of 6.64 million for his show, up 250,000 in three months.

The first published figures for podcasting showed that nearly two million people use portable MP3 players to download radio broadcasts, the Moyles show being the most popular. Rajar found that 12.8 million adults own an MP3 player and 2.8 million listen to music or speech every day on their devices.

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