Nick Wrenn (CNN International): I can't honestly speak for CNN in the U.S. because I don't live or work in the U.S., so it would be unfair of me to comment on behalf of them. I can comment on behalf of CNN International, and I would refute any suggestions that during the war there was any sort of corporate agenda for CNN. I remember in the lead-up to the Gulf War, we were very particular in logging absolutely everything we did on air for a substantial amount of time. That included which guests we had, what they talked about, what angles we chose for our bulletins, the amount of time we gave people. We had a really thick dossier, because we wanted to be clear among ourselves that we were being as objective as we could.

Susan Ormiston: What were you trying to determine from that log?

Nick Wrenn: We were aware that there was immense pressure on all news providers to get the story right, and in any story like Iraq, you have challenges of access. We had a lot of access with the coalition troops. We had some access from Baghdad, although we were being thrown out and allowed back at various intervals. We just wanted to make sure that we covered the story from every perspective that we could, including the Arab perspective, including the anti-war protesters, who were numerous in Europe and beyond in the lead-up to the war. And also from the side of people who thought the war was in the interests of democracy, and a good thing.

Susan Ormiston: What do you think of the new channels coming on, to challenge your channel, I'm sure - the new Al Jazeera International, for one, looking at some of the same geographical areas that you cover now?

Nick Wrenn: I'm all for viewer choice. I sit at home and flick through my multi-channel TV, and I think it's fantastic that I can access so many different news channels, which all have different audiences to serve, different agendas. I think it's a good thing and very, very healthy.

Hosam El Sokkari (head of Arabic service, BBC World Service): The BBC has different parts to it. As Helen said, the BBC is funded largely by licence-fee payers, and the part of it that is the World Service is funded by a grant-in-aid that is managed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The caution that I would like to add here is that humanity has experimented with different ways of funding information operations in order to safeguard the need of people to have access to information. We have commercial funding, we have funding via advert revenues, and we have state funding. It is not always the case that state funding will end up with control, and it depends on the kind of experience and heritage that the organisation has built.

I, in the BBC World Service, feel more comfortable with state funding that has been managed in a very professional way for almost 70 years than with any commercial funding or advert-revenue-driven funding. In the 67 years we've been funded by public money, we haven't had any attempts at control. Indeed, every single government, including the British government, would like media organisations to carry out the views that they believe are the right views, and they sometimes like it, they sometimes don't like it. But we do not operate within the realm of considering ourselves as mouthpieces for the British or any other government. So it is not always the case that state funding equals control from the state.

Luisa Rangel (INSI Latin America co-ordinator): My question is for Aram: Is state funding, in the case of Telesur or in an underdeveloped country, sustainable?

Aram Aharonian : We are looking in our first year to have a lot of sponsors − not publicity, but sponsors. For survival in the future, we want to have economic and financial independence.

You were talking about competition. We are not competing really. We want to be an alternative to the media hegemony that bombards our countries with single images and messages from the North. For the past 513 years, we have been trained to see ourselves through other people's eyes − the eyes of foreigners − and today we are beginning to see ourselves with our own eyes. Tired, perhaps, of having others explain to us who we are, how we are and what we should do. Now we have our own point of view - a Latin American, Caribbean point of view - about our own realities. We are getting good sponsors - Latin American enterprises are going to give a lot of resources.

Jonathan Munro (ITN): Our contributor from Moscow said, "We're not going to be in conflict with our government or with our opposition." I just wonder whether that needs a bit of refining. Surely all of us as journalists need to be prepared to get into conflict with any part of the establishment in our countries, whether they're in government or in opposition or, in our case, in the royal family, for example. We need to be prepared to go there and if we're not prepared to go there, we're in the wrong job, because we're giving those players a clean slate to do whatever they wish. A state of perpetual conflict may be something we all want to avoid because there's probably no journalistic justification for it. But there are times when we absolutely have to go head on, on something that any of our politicians are trying to do to us.

Margarita Simonyan: We are not a political power and we are not planning to become one. We are a source of information, and what we're going to do is to inform. If the government or the opposition is doing something, we are going to inform our viewers about that. If, because of the information we give, either of the sides thinks that we've done wrong to them and starts to be in a position of conflict with us, that might of course happen. But we don't aim to be in conflict with anyone, we aim to inform.

Susan Ormiston: Does informing include critical analysis?

Margarita Simonyan: Absolutely, it does include analysis. But it also includes doing whatever you can do, to show all sides of the problem, not just one.