Susan Ormiston: Even though we have much more time to fill with 24-hour news now, so there is much more time for speculation, you're sure that the audiences are fine with that - even though they're dipping in and out, and they may get the wrong information and then leave.

Helen Boaden: That's always been the nature of these kinds of services. But if you share what you do and don't know, if you're not pretending that it's a rock-solid, doubly confirmed fact, if they dip in and get that information, and come back half an hour later and it's changed, they won't mistrust you. But if you pretend what you don't actually know is fact, is fact, I think there is a growing concern among our audiences that in some way we're hoodwinking them, that it's all a bit of a show. The other thing about having a lot of time is that, sure, it's a lot of time to speculate, but it's also a lot of time to go into things in more depth. If you're doing bulletins with one-minute-40 packages, it's hard to get into any kind of depth of context.

Going to the incredibly interesting discussion about Paris, of course, at the beginning you focus on the actual events in the rioting - and it certainly was rioting, whatever the age of the participants - because that's what hard news is and that's what you're doing But on a rolling-news service you can step back, because you've got the time to do it, and bring in a range of voices. What was fascinating in that story was a tendency in the beginning when we started the analysis was to see things through the purported lens of the young people and the people in the suburbs who were disenfranchised. What then became apparent was that most of the French agreed with [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy that these were rabble and vermin, and actually it was important that we represented all of that.

John Ryley: Helen made a really good point there, that 24-hour news channels are perceived by some as rather flimsy, narrow organisations that just skim the surface of stories, As Helen says, we have 24 hours a day to really drill down into stories and find out what's going on. You don't need to become obsessed about rolling a particular image the whole time. You can talk to people, test their opinions, and have debate and argument. I get slightly upset that people see 24-hour news as a kind of flimsy set-up. It's so much more than just one half-hour news bulletin. You can explore what people think, and you can test and scrutinise their opinions. And in democracies, that's really important.

Susan Ormison: Indeed, and that's the model. But we have a few critics now who have a little more to say about 24-hour news and whether it's broad enough, deep enough and deals with more than one subject at a time.

[Videotape]

Susan Moeller: 24/7 does give a much larger news hole, but it doesn't mean the news is any broader. What it has meant, at least in the United States for the most part, is we just see the same thing over and over again. You flip channels among the cable-news networks or back to the network stations, and they're all competing on the same story, on the same angle, and it all looks alike.

Ken Wiwa: There are so many pictures, so much news, and not enough analysis accompanying it. So if you watch a breaking story, for instance, the pictures are out there, and then you have the talking heads in the studio, and they're really not saying anything. You can watch the news for 24 hours and the pictures are familiar, but you're not really ahead. The analysis is lacking. There isn't accompanying depth of analysis to go with the quantity of the news coverage.

Stephen Lewis: The talk is too shallow. The talk is always a mirror of the images, and the images are an expression of the immediate event, not an expression of the evolution of the event, not an expression of the history of the event, not an expression of the context. I am enough of a junkie to have watched a lot and I see the analysis as being almost obligatory. We've got to throw the analysis in or we're filling time. But the event never has the depth and the substance, which I think would inform life and inform knowledge more fully.

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Hosam El Sokkari (head of Arabic service, BBC World Service): I agree with the notion that with 24-hour news operations, we have more time for analysis. However, the reality is that the challenge there, and the competition, forces people to start early speculation. To give two examples of that, I have heard so many clichés about Al Qaeda, and we have tried to understand what it means when it is said that “this explosion carries the fingerprints of Al Qaeda” - just because it's like other explosions that Al Qaeda has carried out, then that probably is Al Qaeda.

Another example is the very easy attribution to certain organisations simply because a statement has been published on the Internet. And when you go to these sites, in the beginning it says it's a website for one particular organisation - you go to the site and it's not really from that organisation, and it's difficult to find a site that is really clearly set up by a well-known terrorist organisation. You realise at the end of the day that these are no more than chat rooms, where anybody can publish any statement. But it's easily taken up by the news agencies, widely circulated and it becomes comfortable for everybody to say: “Al Qaeda has said this and that.” And the need to be first with the news, the analysis and the in-depth look into the events, brings us to this problem of accuracy and speculation.

Susan Ormiston: We had an example this morning from Amman. There was a lot of early analysis on who's responsible for that bombing.

Wahad Khanfar (Al Jazeera): When it comes to the issue of accuracy, first of all it boils down to what extent we have trained journalists, trained correspondents, people who have some professional detachment from the reality, which I agree with. Besides that, you have to have your journalists trained to understand the mentality and the psyche of the people in the environment they are working in, and therefore may be able to differentiate, may be able to understand that they shouldn't speculate. They should narrate the story as it is, the factual part of the story. But with it, also, there is something that trained journalists could understand - they would be able to analyse and put things in context.

You have TV stations now, located in various parts of the world, be it in the Arab world, Latin America or Asia, where they are now making the news. Yesterday I was watching the reporting of the Amman bombing, and you could see that most of the international news agencies are carrying images from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya and Jordanian TV and so on. Because of this kind of globalised environment that we find ourselves in, these networks are playing a major role. It's not only a question of carrying the immediate scene that you are seeing in front of you, but also of carrying perspective, context, deeper analysis of the reality.

This is why, when it comes to Al Qaeda, for example, yes, I might agree there are certain standards everyone should follow about whether this statement has been made by Al Qaeda or not. But if you come to certain networks - Al Jazeera, for example - we have journalists who have been dealing with the story for years, and can understand, by reading the statement itself or by understanding the context of the event, that this could be a forged story, if this website has been carrying for the past two years forged stories, or not.

Susan Ormiston : So, you're better placed to test the veracity, because of the experience?

Wahad Khanfar: Experience is part of it, and it's important. But now we have to deal with a reality: When it comes to issues related to Al Qaeda, you don't expect any spokesperson for Al Qaeda to appear in front of APTN or Reuters to deliver a speech and give you statements about exactly what has happened. Therefore, there are certain websites, that if there are statements posted on them, for example, about Al Qaeda and Jordan yesterday, you can understand that it is most likely correct. But Al Jazeera, amongst other networks, always says that we could not make sure that this statement was correct or not. But most of these statements have not been proven until now very often to be false.

Susan Ormiston: So it's okay to report things that we're not sure are accurate or not, but we're putting it out there?

Wahad Khanfar: We cannot report something that we are not sure about. The category of “not sure,” of course, is refused by everyone. This is the dilemma that we find ourselves in. How are you going to understand if Al Qaeda has a link or not? There are certain websites and most of the news that has been written on that website has proven to be correct so far.