The Media Column: BBC News 24 vs Murdoch: it's a question of trust

I know that shouting a hurrah for the BBC is the quickest way to be drummed out of the media commentators' union. One might as well remark what a nice chap that Richard Desmond is. But last week I rather felt for the corporation. The Government told it to sharpen up its rolling news channel, News 24, in the light of a report it had commissioned from Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times. His report found that News 24 was too similar to its rival, Sky News

So, let me be sure I've got this right. The BBC, which has provided a news service to the world for well over half a century, is being pulled up by the Government because its rolling news service is deemed to be too similar to Rupert Murdoch's. I might pinch myself to see if it really is a Labour government that is so eager to protect Mr Murdoch's financial interests. But I'm already covered with pinches from reading the Communications Bill, in which the same Labour Government opened the door for Mr Murdoch to own a commercial terrestrial TV channel.

My first reaction to the Government's ultimatum to the BBC to change the nature of its news delivery was that news channels do tend to be similar. There's a devilishly awkward reason for this. They are rather constrained by having to report the news. One could throw in a repeat of Top of the Pops or a football match to be different, but somehow that isn't really the job of a news channel. Actually, the ITV News Channel does throw in a regular Champions League football match to be different, and that slightly eccentric approach to public service broadcasting doesn't seem to have bothered the Government. But then Mr Murdoch has not complained about ITV.

Anyway, Mr Lambert has a neat solution to end the similarity between Sky News and News 24. The latter, he says, should concentrate much more on international affairs, business news and regional news. That should be its specialist niche. This is the same Mr Lambert who noted with disapproval that News 24 cost £50m and only had a 0.1 per cent audience share last year. I can think of few better ways for that audience share to get even lower than to concentrate on regional, international and business news while Sky breaks the big national domestic stories.

Mr Lambert suggests that where Sky News is the Daily Mail of rolling news channels, News 24 should be a broadsheet. Mercifully, he doesn't insist it should be a 24-hour Financial Times. Quite what he does want is unclear: a cross between the International Herald Tribune and the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, it seems. Certainly, with its wealth of foreign correspondents, News 24 should ensure a first-class foreign service, and even a cursory look shows that foreign news receives pretty good coverage. Regional stories, I believe, should be subject to the same news values as national and international stories. Are they interesting; are they important? Mileage from Marble Arch should not be a factor.

The Lambert report also wants News 24 to break more stories. Sky certainly does, prolifically. I can think of a few stories Sky broke. It was first to announce the fall of several cities in the Afghan conflict: great scoops, except that the cities hadn't actually fallen. Another scoopette was the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, indicted as a war criminal; except he hadn't been arrested. The BBC is a slower, more cumbersome animal, but it has an old-fashioned regard for checking its facts before flashing up the "breaking news" logo.

One story I can't recall Sky bringing out the breaking news logo for was the decision by its boss, Rupert Murdoch, to stop another of his companies, HarperCollins, publishing Chris Patten's book on Hong Kong, as it might have offended the Chinese at a time when Mr Murdoch needed to expand his commercial interests in the Far East. And that's why I will continue to watch BBC News 24, and why I think the Government should leave it alone. I trust it. I trust it to be impartial. I trust it not to curry favour. I trust it to tell the truth rather than speculate. And I need a news service I can trust round the clock, not just at one, six and 10.

d.lister@independent.co.uk

David Aaronovitch is on holiday