Susan Ormiston: M. Dassier, were you acting for the state? And what kind of diversity do you have on your staff?

Jean-Claude Dassier: Let me answer the second question first. LCI was the first channel in France to hire a number of staff members - around 10 - who are immigrants or of foreign origin. Perhaps this is not enough. Perhaps the image that LCI projects is not yet entirely a reflection of French society today. We must continue our efforts in this direction, you are perfectly right on that.

Now, as to the way we presented the events: Is it being complicit with the French government or the French authorities? I don't believe that this is the case. I don't consider that my mission or my mandate is to be complicit with the government. What I consider important is acting responsibly.

Faced with these events, the centre of gravity of the French political world is going to move to the right, and I would be remiss if I helped the extreme right wing of the French political world gain ground. It would be irresponsible if I showed, permanently, pictures of cars on fire. There have been 25,000 cars set on fire in France. It has become a national sport. What happened in the French suburbs is perhaps a step further. But let me underscore that there were violent events without political or religious foundation, and the problem is that we have to restore order.

Of course, there is frustration in society, but don't you think these events are less serious than they were in May 1968 in France? We have a local problem; we have to deal with this local problem. But, once again, I do not apologise for having tried to give a balanced view of the events in France.

Chris Cramer: This is not an issue just concerning France, and I think we're giving M. Dassier a bit of a hard time here. This is a dilemma that has faced most people in this room when it comes to covering something on their own turf. There's not wanting to whip up arguably copycat violence, to be balanced against how significant it is. Unless I've been reading the wrong newspapers and looking at the wrong channels, I think this was the worst civil disturbance in half a century in France, and I think that's pretty damn significant internationally. I don't know if there was politics involved, but there was certainly huge social involvement here.

But it's not just a French issue. We're not the gatekeepers any more. There are websites, there are blogsters. And, respectfully, if we think we're the gatekeepers, we're really missing the point here. If we fail to cover serious urban violence, there are other newsgatherers out there who will cover it for us, and then our consumers will think that we're censoring. And that's bad for our businesses.

Susan Ormiston: Fair point. And M. Dassier did raise the point that the fabric, the context of 24-hour news does mean that we repeat, we repeat, we repeat. So does the effect of all that repetition elevate a story - perhaps not this one - beyond what it deserves?

Chris Cramer: I think if you have 55 seconds of video, and only 55 seconds of video, there comes a point in the control room where you have to decide to stop running that and get on to something else, because there is a repetitive effect. And if you force correspondents into a position where they are asked to speculate, by definition you get into an area of journalism that we should not be comfortable with. It's the strong control-room supervisor who has the experience to move away from that story and go on to something else. And also for us to be completely transparent with the audience, and say, “This is what we know and this is what we don't know.” This profession is not good at telling the audience, or telling its readers and viewers, what we don't know.

Frank Maher (MediaChannel): Is this a story about burning cars or this a story about disrespect toward personal property, on the one part, and on the other part, disrespect toward immigrants in France as shown by the government and the police? That's the story that should be reported.

Susan Ormiston: We did get context eventually, but it was down the road.

Unidentified Individual: Our French colleague seemed to think that because there wasn't an organised political movement it wasn't worthy of being covered. He contrasted it with what happened in May '68. Would he have covered May '68 when that started happening? Is that a question we could pose ourselves? Would we be fanning the fire or would we simply be covering something that's happening? What happened in a relatively disorganised way in France may be the tip of an iceberg, may be simply some youths burning cars. The point is, I think it's our job to explain that, and so we should have covered that. As for the short attention span: We're constantly accused of having a short attention span. It's ironic that now we're being accused of insisting on a story.

Patrick Lecocq (editor in chief, France 2): I would like to answer the question about whether Jean-Claude Dassier would have covered the events of May '68. He did cover those events. He and I were journalists working for the same newsroom at the time, and we spent the entire month of May in a small area where the events were happening, from the top to the bottom of Boulevard St Michel, and from Boulevard St Michel to the French national parliament. That was the perimeter within which the events of May '68 happened. But these events had an incredible impact on French society and on the evolution of political developments in France - which doesn't mean that for a revolution to be important, it has to happen on a wide territory.

The question that was asked earlier is an important one, and all journalists should be aware of this question. It is one that we've been posing to ourselves since the events in Paris began. In fact, these suburbs are rather far away from Paris. There are more journalists from Paris who went to Iraq or who went to cover the tsunami than who went to the suburbs to cover the events beyond the Périphérique . It's terra incognita for us, we must admit.

But we're faced with a major problem when we send out a team of journalists: Do we send out a team because there are cars burning or are cars burning because we've sent out a team of journalists? The answer to that is very often that cars burn because lenses are focused on them. I don't know if this question has arisen in other contexts in other countries.

We shouldn't talk about riots, when it's kids who are 10 or 15 years old. You can talk about demonstrations - but these are kids, and it's an uprising of children who are under 15. If there's a curfew for these children, nothing happens because the parents keep the children at home, so it's amazing. We don't have an answer to these questions, but we covered the events. Let me remind you that in two weeks there were two deaths, and I think it was an accident. In Birmingham in one night there were more deaths than that.

Susan Ormiston: I want to pick up on Chris Cramer's point about speculation and accuracy, because it's another area that we all deal with all the time. A personal anecdote from last year during the Beslan siege: I was anchoring that morning, and information was very difficult to get, and it was one of those times when I was eminently grateful that we had a correspondent on the ground, because as I delivered the news that I read from that wires that in the Beslan siege two terrorists had escaped and gone into a suburb in the area, as I spoke that out live, my correspondent on the ground said: “Actually, Susan, that's not true.” And I said: “Great, so glad you're there. So what is the truth?” Because, so often in the anchor chair, we are faced with incomplete information.

My question is: Are we doing very well on incomplete information, and should we be taking a step back, perhaps a pause before we give information that we can't verify? I wonder often if the audience believes me when I say: “It's early days or it's early hours yet, but here's what we know” - when really, often, it's: “Here's what we think we might know now.”

Helen Boaden (director of news, BBC News): I agree with Chris's point. When stories are unfolding, the real trick is to share what you do and don't know with your audience. The audiences are incredibly sophisticated these days. We've just done a great big chunk of audience research across the whole of news, and one of the things that has emerged for us is that in our big bulletins on BBC1, the audience expects a spectacularly high level of accuracy, and they're quite right to want that. And they're very unforgiving when we get things wrong in those bulletins.

When it comes to News 24, they are more sophisticated about the nature of breaking news than perhaps we've given them credit for. They're very well aware that stories unfold and information changes. The challenge for us, as for all 24-hour news services, is to make sure we don't go on rumour and speculation, because certainly the BBC viewers don't like that from us - but we are actually sharing what we do and don't know, and as it changes, we share that. It's the unfolding truth, the unfolding story. And they're happy with that. Quite a lot of the focus-group work said: As long as you try as hard as humanly possible to get it right, in often very difficult and changing circumstances.