Â鶹Éç

Ten thousand complaints and rising. Questions in the House from outraged MPs. Gordon Brown calls it "inappropriate and unacceptable". Â鶹Éç radio boss Tim Davie apologises unreservedly and uses the "unacceptable" word too. Ofcom and the Â鶹Éç Trust circle menacingly. And the woman at the centre of it all, Georgina Baillie, reportedly tells the Sun she wants them sacked.

You'll have your own views about what Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross did during that prank call to actor Andrew Sachs.

But if you thought the British public believe it's an open and shut case against the Radio 2 pair, maybe it's time for a rethink.

Audiences across the Â鶹Éç are responding in very different ways. My colleagues on Radio 4, 5Live, in television and the World Service are reporting, broadly speaking, condemnation. Younger audiences are saying something different in our experience.

The first clue came when we started reporting the story on Monday and we noted an unusually silent response from Radio 1's 10.5 million listeners. As the story grew, splashed on the tabloids and featuring prominently in many of the broadsheets -a response began. But a different one.

"Get over it: a fuss about nothing," was typical. Some listeners texted in to point out that Ross and Brand were there to appeal to younger audiences with edgy humour. Not every gag by alternative comics hits the mark, does it? Errors of judgement are surely not a sacking offence? And anyway it was funny, wasn't it?

So the media storm grows. There's anger: some genuine, some of it synthetic. Some of it comes from the Â鶹Éç's usual critics. For media folk profile and salary-envy and schaedenfreude may play a part in all this. But how many heard the original transmission and how many are responding to the newspapers' quotes or others' arguments? I'm not here to defend or attack anyone - but there is an alternative view we are seeing strongly expressed by our young audience which is certainly worth wider consideration.

The prime minister's intervention amazed some listeners: "The financial markets are wrecked and all he can do is talk about a petty joke." Also: "Everybody needs to calm down"; "Anybody who thinks it's disgusting should get a grip"; "Why should they be punished? This is the normal chit-chat of a man"; "It was funny, a joke. People are so boring"; "Leave Russell alone"; "Russell is hilarious"; "Jonathan Ross is a great presenter"; "Hey, they are comedians - it's their job". And the favourite phrase: "It's been blown out of all proportion."

When we started covering the story on Newsbeat - the audience response was running two-to-one in Ross's and Brand's favour - now it's swelled to six-to-one. David Sillito's excellent piece on the News at Ten on Tuesday illustrated this with a "vox pop" of older and younger audiences to Â鶹Éç shows.

Very different views, as reflected by Radio 1's audience.

Still an open and shut case?

Radio 4's Feedback programme had a discussion about some of the issues surrounding the Â鶹Éç's News blogs. You can listen to the discussion below.

Following on from my blog yesterday on why we weren't going to brand our economy day "The Recession" the Daily Telegraph has got very exercised this morning by our position with a and a . The suggestion in the leader that the word recession won't be found on any Â鶹Éç reporters' lips today is misplaced.

The UK is more than likely heading for a recession - both the prime minister and the governor of the Bank of the England agree - and you'll hear that a lot in every Â鶹Éç report today.

As viewers and listeners know we've been using the "R" word all week and for several months. It's ironic that just a few weeks ago some were criticising the Â鶹Éç for being too pessimistic and "talking the economy down", and some still are.

As we all know in this business it's sometimes possible to get details wrong when you're on deadline, so I take no offence at the Telegraph calling me Hill rather than Hillman.

There's been a lot of interest in a story we've been reporting about the findings of a . Although the research is in its early stages, we thought it was of enough significance to report on its results so far. Here my colleague Branwen Jeffreys explains more about our reasons for covering this piece of medical research.

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By Branwen Jeffreys

"Last night and today the Â鶹Éç is reporting the research on the experimental use of a drug for people in the early years of multiple sclerosis. It could be years before its value is confirmed - and it passes through the many checks and balances needed before a drug is licensed as an accepted treatment. So why report it now, and how do we decide which pieces of medical research make the grade?

It's a tough call, and one we face almost every day in the health team where our e-mail bulges daily with potential stories. Each piece of research runs a gauntlet of checks - is it published in a peer-reviewed journal? That means the publication uses expert panels to check the research methods before accepting results for publication.

This MS research was in the respected New England Journal of Medicine. and his team at the University of Cambridge had co-ordinated the trial in 49 centres in the US and Europe. MS is his specialist field and he has decades of clinical experience with patients.

But this was only a phase II trial - that means the results must be replicated in clinical research using many more patients. The next stage - a phase III trial would be essential before getting a licence to use the drug this way. There had also been some serious side effects, one patient died.

So what swung it for this research? It compared with the standard treatment in patients recently diagnosed. The difference was startling. The results showed reductions of more than 70% in accumulated disability and risk of relapse. Even allowing for a very healthy margin of error it looks like a sliver of hope for some MS patients albeit in the future. The next stage of research might temper the results, but is less likely to completely undermine them.

And that matters - MS affects millions around the world, there is no cure and it gradually causes disability. I huddled into a small studio with radio correspondent Adam Brimelow and Richard Warry, online editor, so we could all speak on the phone to golfer Tony Johnstone. His joy at being on the trial, and having MS held at bay enormously touched us all. We already knew the research was credible. When we put down the phone to Tony we knew it was also a cracking of how medical research has the potential to transform lives.

So with careful caveats about the experimental use of this drug only in patients newly diagnosed and the need for more research we put the story online and on air."

I suspect that never before has the holiday island of Corfu received quite as much attention in the British media as it has in recent weeks. The extraordinary gathering this summer of politicians, media magnates and billionaires has spawned a plethora of stories.

At the centre of most of them, of course, have been two major figures in British politics - Lord Mandelson, the new business secretary and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor. What they said, and to whom, has received massive coverage across newspapers and other news organisations, ironically it appears kicked off by a conversation they had with one another at a now infamous taverna on the Greek isle.

Amidst the storm, questions have been raised about the Â鶹Éç's coverage. Of course those questions are many and varied as always but there has been a particular accusation from some complainants that we did too much on the allegations against George Osborne and not enough on those against Lord Mandelson.

Let's deal with the Osborne story first. Here was a specific allegation of wrongdoing - indeed possible law-breaking - against the man holding the most sensitive post in the shadow cabinet outside of the leader. The claim - vehemently denied - that he solicited a donation to the Conservatives from a Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, and talked about ways to secretly channel that donation to the party, on the face of it could have put him in breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

What's more, that allegation - made in , who understandably led on the story - came from Nat Rothschild, someone who up until that point at least had been a long-term friend of Mr Osborne's, so much so that he was hosting Mr Osborne and his family at his Corfu home, and his mother had been funding the shadow chancellor's private office to the tune of £190,000. The Â鶹Éç also learned that Mr Rothschild was willing to go to court to back up his claim and had another witness who would support his story.

In the light of the seriousness of the allegations - and the seriousness of the person making the claim - many Â鶹Éç News outlets made the decision that this was an important story and chose to lead with it, as did every other major broadcaster and nearly every national newspaper.

But what about Lord Mandelson and his links with Oleg Deripaska? After all, while holding the position of EU trade commissioner he had stayed on Mr Deripaska's yacht in Corfu and indeed had dined with him previously on a number of occasions. This at a time, where he had supported moves to cut EU aluminium tariffs to the enormous benefit of Mr Deripaska, who owns the world's largest aluminium producer.

Well, the first thing to say is that there was no ban on reporting this and other questions, and Â鶹Éç journalists immediately began looking into them. More importantly, when the Â鶹Éç had its first opportunity to do a proper interview with Lord Mandelson following his reappointment to the cabinet, before the Osborne story broke, he was questioned robustly about the allegations (which ).

The reason the coverage so far has not been at the same level as that of George Osborne is that up until now there has been no similar specific allegation that Lord Mandelson has broken any laws. Nor, in Lord Mandelson's case, was there a specific, credible complainant in the same way as there was with Mr Osborne.

Nor does it appear at this stage (though questions are still being asked) that Lord Mandelson breached any EU code of conduct, however questionable his relationship with Mr Deripaska may or may not appear. Crucial to this, is the fact that while the UK ministerial code has rules about a perceived conflict of interest, the code of conduct for EU commissioners does not in the same way. Thus far the European Commission says he has done nothing wrong and has made it clear that the decision to cut aluminium tariffs followed a long debate amongst member states and was supported by them. It was not in his gift.

So, while the story was checked and questions were asked of Lord Mandelson by the Â鶹Éç, the story did not make it on to our main news programmes. However in our coverage of the allegations against Mr Osborne, we have repeatedly made it clear that Lord Mandelson also faces questions about his relationship with Mr Deripaska.

We also spelt out the tangled relationships involved in the story in enough detail to allow audiences to make their own judgment about what role, if any, Lord Mandelson had in promoting the allegations against the shadow chancellor.

So, editorial decisions have been based on the seriousness of the allegations and the strength of the evidence. That will remain paramount in any future coverage of politicians who find themselves in the spotlight, though I suspect next summer there won't be quite such a rush to Corfu.

There's an old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is when your neighbour loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours. A depression is also what I sometimes feel when I read what some newspapers say about the Â鶹Éç's reporting of the financial crisis and the language we choose to use.

Firstly, that the Â鶹Éç has banned any reference to the term "crisis". Er, no, we haven't. It's true that tomorrow we're having a day devoted to taking the temperature of the economy around the UK and how it's affecting people, which we're calling "The Downturn". But that doesn't mean we're losing our financial crisis branding when we cover further bank or financial shocks and indeed we'll be using it even tomorrow on our international coverage.

Secondly, it's suggested we're using Downturn in place of the word "recession". Luckily anyone who has watched any of our output this week will know that one's wrong too. Both the prime minister and the governor of the Bank of England have said it's likely we're heading in to a recession and we're saying that in our reports too. In fact we've been reporting the possibility of a recession for months. So, why don't we label our day tomorrow "The Recession" and be done with it? Simply because we may well be in a recession but we won't get any official confirmation of that for a while yet. A recession is two quarters of negative growth and as soon as we're in one you'll hear it from us.

The criticism we're not being gloomy enough about the economy is well balanced by other criticism we've been getting that we're talking down the economy and being too pessimistic. I suppose we should comfort ourselves that we're getting criticism both ways which must put us in about the right place. What I do know for a fact is that our audiences to our radio, TV and online coverage have all grown significantly during this financial crisis (oops, banned word!) and I'd like to thank so many of you for turning to our coverage at this very unsettling time.

Meanwhile if you have a story to tell us about how the economy is affecting you please e-mail us at: bbc.co.uk/haveyoursay

Â鶹Éç websites have been experiencing some major technical difficulties which have been preventing us from updating our News, Sport and some other pages.

This is due to a serious network failure, which has resulted in a loss of connectivity between our publishing systems and the Â鶹Éç's webservers.

We are doing everything we can to remedy these problems as soon as possible. We apologise for the interruption to our service and we hope to restore it soon.

UPDATE 2351 BST: We are able to publish again and pages are updating. It seems our problems were caused by some damaged fibre optic cables linking our London buildings.

I've just been sent a on the net which accuses me of being "Eurotrash" and of producing a "hit piece" about 9/11.

Almost inevitably I've been enmeshed in the ever growing net of the conspiracy theory. They've added my name to a long list of imagined conspirators - the secret services, police, people who worked in the building, first responders, the fire service, city officials...and also those who they think have deliberately set out to cover up this huge conspiracy - the official investigators, the world's media...

Last month we were in New York to film the seventh anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero for a new programme about the allegation of a conspiracy to deliberately destroy the three skyscrapers at the World Trade Centre. "" is to be broadcast at 9pm on Â鶹Éç Two on Sunday 26th October 2008.

We also filmed self-styled truthers who think 9/11 was an inside job, either carried out or allowed by the US government; and they needed to destroy a third tower at the World Trade Center, Tower 7, which they think contained the plans for the plot.

It is a fact that Tower 7 had some interesting tenants - the CIA, the Secret Service, the Department of Defense and the Office of Emergency Management - the very office which was intended to co-ordinate a response to a disaster or terrorist attack.

When we were filming we were surprised that some of the truthers seemed particularly keen to interview us on camera about the last programme we made about this third tower at 9/11. They think we have deliberately set out to conceal the truth. As one said to me "You already know the truth."

The group who made the video are called "We are change". They claim we misrepresented the chronology involving one important witness who we interviewed in our last programme about 9/11.

The first responder Barry Jennings was trapped inside the building for several hours along with another New York City official. They were crucial witnesses to what was going on inside Tower 7 after everyone had been evacuated shortly after the Twin Towers were hit by the two planes.

As I tried to explain to them at the time, we recorded a long interview with Barry Jennings. We also carefully considered other information and came to our own view based on all of that.

As the two men tried to get out of the skyscraper they were suddenly thrown into darkness. Barry Jennings said he heard explosions. We think it is likely that this was when Tower 1 collapsed, showering debris onto Tower 7.

We have also recently recorded an interview with the other man there, Michael Hess.

Michael Hess was Mayor Rudolf Giuliani's chief lawyer, in charge of 800 New York City lawyers. In his first interview since 9/11 he confirms our timeline. Hess says all the lights went out and he felt the building shake like an earthquake and he adds that he did not hear explosions.

In his mind he thought there might have been an explosion. In the only interview he did on 9/11 he told a reporter he had "walked down to the eighth floor where there was an explosion."

But as our interview with him shows, he is now certain that he did not hear an explosion. He just assumed on the day it could have been an explosion because he had witnessed the lights going out, the staircase filling with smoke and the building shaking vigorously.

We now know, courtesy of the [pdf link] by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, that the official investigators think that two areas of Tower 7 were badly hit when the 1,350 foot Tower 1 collapsed. Seven columns were severed on the southwest corner and they suggest debris also hit the top centre face of Tower 7.

The lead investigator of NIST told me that "it's likely that all of those huge failures and damage really caused noises that were incredibly loud."

If our timeline is wrong then why didn't Barry Jennings and Michael Hess see and hear the moment of impact when Tower 1 fell. It must have been very loud.

The group also criticizes us for not including one sentence from an interview with the owner Larry Silverstein. Apologies now because this gets very complicated. However, some people think hidden in this is a vital clue that can unravel the biggest conspiracy in modern times.

The theory is that the owner Larry Silverstein is meant to have implicated himself in a conspiracy to destroy the buildings he owned and leased at the World Trade Center. And what exactly did he say that supposedly gave it all away?

He said "pull it" which some people interpret as an order to demolish the building.

The interview was conducted the year after 9/11 and Larry Silverstein said:

"I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it."

"We are change" activists think there is something sinister in the fact that we did not include an extra sentence when Larry Silverstein said:

"And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."

I don't have a problem talking about it. And just for the avoidance of any doubt we included it in the Worldwide version and we will include it in the new programme for Â鶹Éç Two.

However, I do not understand how that implicates the owner in any wrongdoing. Interestingly one prominent website, which is highly critical of the official explanation, is not convinced either and thinks it might even be "bait" to discredit the truth movement.

The crucial words seem to be "pull it" and Larry Silverstein's spokesman provides an explanation:

"Mr Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those fire fighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building."

I talked to the man who assumed command of the New York Fire Department that day. Chief Daniel Nigro told me that it was his decision to decide what to do about Tower 7.

In other words there is no way Larry Silverstein could have ordered the fire department to leave the building and wait for it to be demolished. As Chief Nigro told me the fire service was not part of conspiracy, they were doing their job:

"When we are in charge of a building, we are in charge and that decision will be the fire chiefs and his alone...That's why I know there is no conspiracy, because for me to be part of that would be obscene and it disgusts me to even think of it."

For good measure the truthers at Ground Zero added one final criticism, saying that the Â鶹Éç is funded by General Electric. I'm not sure what that's based on, but I can say with absolute, yes absolute certainty, it isn't...nor have I ever been part of a conspiracy to cover up what really went on 9/11.

Almost every time I post to The Editors, no matter what the topic, comments come in along this general line: "Why in the world is the Â鶹Éç using money from the British licence fee payer to fund a programme aimed at Americans?" Those comments deserve an answer, and it's a very simple one: The entire programme budget for Â鶹Éç World News America comes from Â鶹Éç Worldwide, not the licence fee. The programme is made by Â鶹Éç World News on behalf of Worldwide - and the channels which carry us run commercials to help pay our bills.

Of course we benefit tremendously from the global newsgathering apparatus of the Â鶹Éç, and that apparatus is licence fee-funded. But Â鶹Éç World News, one of the commercial channels on which our programme runs, also make a very big payment to Â鶹Éç News each year to support that infrastructure.

And in my short time here, I've been very impressed by how careful the Â鶹Éç is to make sure that the British licence fee payer is not paying for work that doesn't benefit them. For example, if Karen Allen does a story from Kenya for the News at Ten and we want to re-air that story on our programme, fair enough. More people get to see her great work, with no additional cost to anyone. But if we ask Karen to also do a live interview with Matt Frei to accompany and complement that story, we pay any extra costs (satellite time, etc) from our budget.

This is an important subject, and I hope I've been able to clear up any confusion.

We've been hearing the rumours for months - contrary to belief tabloid newspapers rarely splash stories on their front page on a whim and we knew what people were saying in the business. The marriage of the Material Girl and her "Mockney" film director was on the rocks. Madonna is arguably the most famous woman in the world - her record-breaking success in the music industry has made her an instantly recognisable face on every continent. And her personal life has been played out in public. For millions of people the break-up of her marriage is a story of interest and they want to know what's happening.

And a lot of people choose to turn to the Â鶹Éç - is one of the biggest sources of showbiz news in the UK. Yesterday we woke up to a Sun front page exclusive - an announcement of their divorce was imminent. A fantastic showbiz scoop that all my team were envious of. But with just one source - which we sensed was true but couldn't prove - we were in a dilemma.

How do we report someone else's journalism which we haven't backed up ourselves? We can't ignore the story because we know our website audience would be talking about Madonna and would want to know what we had to say about it. Our attributed the story to the Sun and made clear that the Â鶹Éç couldn't at that point verify it. That's not being lily-livered or protecting ourselves if it wasn't true - it was just telling the truth. By 4pm - we had the statement and the story was out.

It's fair to say there's a lot of debate about some entertainment stories, especially when they're about stars' personal lives. But for a good proportion of our audience, these stories are as relevant to their lives as any political intrigue or bank implosion. And as long as we carry on establishing the facts as we know them and telling the truth then we're doing our job.

"It's a dose of realpolitik."

That was the Tory MEP, Charles Tannock's description on The World Tonight on Monday of the European Union's decision to relax sanctions on Belarus and Uzbekistan.

The EU Foreign Ministers said there had been improvements in human rights in both countries and so the EU should respond to encourage further change. This is despite what critics of both countries say are backward steps.

In Belarus's case, the recent election saw no opposition MPs elected and a largely negative report from international election observers. In Uzbekistan's case, a prominent journalist, Solizhon Abdurakhmanov, was jailed just this week on charges which human rights group say are trumped up.

Steve Crawshaw of the lobby group, , told us the EU is trying "to pretend" human rights are improving in Uzbekistan. Mr Tannock, who is the Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Spokesman for the UK Conservatives in the European Parliament, responded by saying sanctions on both countries had not worked:

"It just drove them to cosy up - in the case of Belarus - to Moscow - in the case of Uzbekistan - to China and Russia - so it's felt that provided they move somewhere towards achieving the goals we (the EU) set them in terms of better human rights and more democracy, openness, more engagement and dialogue, then we need to meet them half-way."

One of the reasons human rights organisations are critical of the EU's stance is because of the reasons originally given for imposing sanctions on countries - ie that sanctions should be used to promote respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law and good governance - have not seen substantive change in either Belarus or Uzbekistan.

The EU stands accused of cynicism and in his interview Charles Tannock acknowledged that the relaxation of sanctions on these two countries is partly a response to the conflict between Georgia and Russia and the desire to draw Minsk and Tashkent away from Moscow and towards Brussels, though he denied human rights were less important than improving relations with these countries.

Has the EU sacrificed its commitment to the democratic values it says it stands for to self interest, or is it the victim of the inherent difficulties of an "" [pdf link] - that when your stated values come into conflict with your self interest, the latter will win out.

It's a question that divides our listeners.

For the entire year since our Â鶹Éç World News America program was launched, we've been covering the American Presidential campaign.

The first actual votes were cast just after New Year 2008...I'll never forget our desperate search for propane gas heaters to keep Matt Frei from freezing to death in the sub-zero temperatures as he presented the program from the grounds of the state capitol in Des Moines, Iowa.

Winter gave way to spring and then summer, and as you might have seen in Katty Kay's excellent report from New Hampshire this week, the autumn leaves are now turning. All along the way, we've tried to cover the campaign with accent and attitude, focusing less on the polls and the 'horserace' than on the ever-more-serious issues facing America and its citizens.

The stakes for this election have always seemed incredibly high; both in America and around the world, people have long sensed that this is an historic 'inflection point' for America. But a year ago, many of us thought that the election might turn on the war in Iraq.

Over many months, the condition of the economy steadily crept to the fore, as it almost always does in American elections. But who could have predicted that the final weeks of the campaign would be conducted in the midst of a full-blown global financial crisis?

Both the McCain and Obama campaigns have struggled to keep pace with events, and to formulate serious responses to incredible fiscal and economic challenges. So have the news media...we've done our very best to make sense of confusing and frightening times.

As we count down to 4 November, we'll continue to bring a unique Â鶹Éç perspective to both the political and economic stories in America. After election day, we'll be taking a serious look at the challenges and opportunities facing the winner. And then, on Inauguration Day, 20 January, we'll probably have propane heaters set up again, this time in Washington, to keep Matt from freezing as he tells the story of the 44th American President's procession to the White House.

Interactivity is a two-way street, so we've started a pilot to report more of the stories you're sending us while at the same time making a bigger effort to reach out and join in conversations on the web outside the Â鶹Éç's own editorial space.

For some time now the UGC Hub has been successfully making use of remarkable eyewitness images and accounts sent in by people from all over the world, we've been feeding the views and experiences of the Â鶹Éç's audience into our journalism and occasionally breaking stories - such as the revelation that foreign workers at Heathrow's Terminal 5 , a story which came from an e-mail sent into the Hub.

However it has been obvious for some time that there's a lot of other ideas for stories that have been sent in to us that we haven't really been able to investigate properly. They're stories that matter to people but often aren't part of the conventional news processes and weren't getting the attention they deserved so we've decided to try out a reporter whose beat is simply all the content you've been sending in to us - our first Interactive Reporter.

Siobhan Courtney has been with us for a fortnight now and has already scored two major successes - last week she revealed the extent of the that students at some British universities undergo. We had exclusive UGC footage sent to us that showed students at one university paraded through the streets with plastic bags over their heads lead by a man in a Nazi uniform. Her story prompted a police investigation into the incident.

This week she has spoken to some of the thousands of students who e-mailed us because they have worth up to £30 a week that encourages them to carry on studying for the A-levels.

She's got lots more stories already in the pipeline - all coming out of the e-mails and texts you've sent in to us, but we're keen if you've got a story you think we should be reporting.

At the same time we're very conscious that while we get thousands of e-mails a day sent to us here at the Â鶹Éç, that is only a drop in the ocean of all the conversations that are going on the web all the time. We already use Twitter everyday, alerting people to the debates we are hosting on the Â鶹Éç's HYS pages, but on Tuesday night we experimented by opening up channels on video chatrooms , and to join in conversations wherever they were happening rather than expect people to come to us and host them on the Â鶹Éç's platforms.

We wanted to hear what people thought about the US presidential debates and get their views in video rather than in text. It was the first time we have done something like this - starting a conversation on the web outside the Â鶹Éç - and we tried to approach it in a more informal and open way.

We were really excited by the response - with more than 50 videos posted in around three hours on our Qik channel discussing the VP debate last week. We even edited and used them on the Â鶹Éç News website. We learnt a lot about how to go about this kind of thing and are planning to do a lot more of it - but in the true spirit of interactivity, we'd like to hear what you think.

Along with the praise we've been getting a number of e-mails criticising our business editor Robert Peston's coverage of the financial crisis over the last week, particularly focusing on his blog breaking the news of the £50bn financial package on offer for British banks.

The case for the prosecution seems to be that our reporting is irresponsible, scaremongering and is inflaming the situation by causing volatile share price movements. Additionally some believe Robert's reporting has been inaccurate based on the evidence that several banks denied formally applying to the Bank of England for cash.

Allow me to make the case for the defence. We have one primary responsibility and that is to you, our audience. Our decision to run a story is based on simple criteria. Is it accurate and would it be of significant interest and relevance to our audience? If the answer is yes then our presumption is to be publish unless there is a huge overriding interest not to.

We understand that our journalism does not exist in a vacuum, and that what we say may have consequences but it is not for us to sit in judgement and second guess those.

Of course, there are occasions when we do withold information. We are given some formal financial notifications early for logistical reasons with an agreed embargo time. When covering conflicts we will not give troop locations and movements which would put lives in danger. When we hear news of casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan we will hold the news until the next of kin have been informed.

Those life and death situations are the exception. The financial health of our banks do not fall into that category, indeed there is immense public interest in the free flow of information about them.

On the question of accuracy, I would ask you to read the words that Robert published which do not say the banks made a formal approach for cash. In the light of the I believe there is only one conclusion.

The news of today's by Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown has produced near meltdown in one place - the Â鶹Éç's business and economics unit.

The number of angles on this story from a business and economic perspective are huge and we're scrabbling to try and unscramble what it all means.

It's also triggered a huge inflow of e-mails asking what it means for you? Should you buy/sell/hold bank shares? Should you move money between accounts? Will this mean it's easier to get a mortgage or loan now? What about your pensions?

Your questions are really helping us to focus our coverage and pointing us in some interesting directions. We'll be trying to answer some of your questions in a special edition of on Â鶹Éç2 at 1.30pm today presented by Declan Curry and Naga Munchetty.

If you can't catch it live please do watch it later on the iPlayer or log onto Declan's Working lunch blog. But above all please keep your questions and points coming and we'll do our best to investigate and answer them.

On Wednesday evening, TV viewers in the US began to see something new from ; two bulletins of the best international news from the Â鶹Éç, more tailored to a US audience and free to air through the American PBS network.

It's the start of a new partnership between us and KCET, the Southern California public television station, with a simple aim. To offer American viewers something they can't get anywhere else.

Fronted by Mike Embley in London, the two programmes are a showcase for the Â鶹Éç's unrivalled international newsgathering power.

On day one Richard Galpin reported from Georgia as EU monitors arrived to begin observing a Russian withdrawal. From Brussels, our Europe Editor Mark Mardell explained how pressure on European banks was forcing countries to find new ways of safeguarding depositors' money. In Iraq, Hugh Sykes reported on the rise of the Awakening movement - former insurgents now fighting alongside rather than against US forces. And Jon Leyne in Tehran reported on a US phenomenon taking off in Iran - blogging.

The first day also posed us some challenges. How much should we be focussing on events within the US, given that we've pledged to offer something different to the US media? And how much coverage should there be of live events or breaking news? With the Senate debating the "bail-out Bill" while we went on air, both issues came together.

The answer - well if we're putting together a bulletin of the day's main global stories, then it would be perverse to leave out US stories. However, you can expect us to place them in a different context - so last night's Senate coverage was immediately followed by the story out of Europe, which I doubt was receiving much attention elsewhere in the US media. As for live coverage - given that we're offering PBS viewers a speedy round-up in 25 minutes, we won't devote much time to lengthy live coverage of events, but you can expect to see breaking news reported as fast as any other network.

Will the programme prove as popular as before? The early signs are good. More than 80% of US viewers will have access to Â鶹Éç World News through PBS and we hope the revamped programme will actually deliver a bigger audience to us.

Plus we'll continue to broadcast Matt Frei's programme on Â鶹Éç America, which is the other part of our two-pronged strategy to best serve the US audience.

By coincidence, it marked its first anniversary on air on Wednesday. In its inaugural year, the programme won a prestigious Peabody Award, signed veteran newsman Ted Koppel as Contributing Analyst and had correspondents reporting first-hand from the scene of numerous international breaking news stories, from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the current economic crisis hitting markets across the globe.

In the summer of 2007 I was hired by the Â鶹Éç (after a long career at CBS News) to launch a new nightly news broadcast. The idea was fairly simple, and to my mind, elegant:

1) At the precise moment when Americans needed to know more and more about events and issues beyond their borders, they were less and less likely to find good coverage of the wider world on US television news networks.

2) The Â鶹Éç was the perfect organisation to address that shortage with unparalleled global journalistic reach and an unrivalled reputation for smart, sophisticated, impartial coverage of international news.

Thus was born. Our first broadcast was exactly one year ago, on 1 October 2007, with Â鶹Éç veteran Matt Frei in the anchor seat in Washington DC, correspondent Katty Kay delivering reports from the field, and a crack production team in DC and in London working night in and out to deliver the best of Â鶹Éç journalism from around the globe to audiences watching on Â鶹Éç America here in the US, Â鶹Éç World News internationally, and the News Channel in the UK.

Our primary mission is to deliver strong international coverage to American viewers, and we're proud of how we've accomplished that in our first year, on stories as varied as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the earthquake in China, and the global financial crisis.

We also attempt to offer a fresh and distinctive take on American stories, and we've been fortunate to have a great story to follow in our first 12 months: the US Presidential campaign. Matt and Katty know the election landscape better than most American reporters, and contributing analyst Ted Koppel has given us a fresh take and original insights all along the way.

The unique strengths of this proposition were evident a few days ago in our coverage of the much anticipated first presidential debate. Whereas US networks went straight to the spin room for pre-cooked claims of victory from campaign officials, we had live reaction to the substance of the debate from Â鶹Éç correspondents in Baghdad, Moscow, Beijing and Kabul. These reporters skilfully conveyed just how engaged the rest of the world is in this election. Substance over spin.

We've also featured sharp and smart interviews with top newsmakers and analysts, developed signature franchises like First Person, in which people tell their own stories in their own words, and nurtured vital partnerships with other Â鶹Éç programmes such as Newsnight, with whom we shared a prestigious Peabody award this year, for the wonderful "White Horse Village" films from China.

It has been a very rewarding first year. But it's only the beginning of what we intend to accomplish.